This course focuses on presenting and exercising the basic tools used by scholars in the department’s various fields. The basic skills developed in this course are dictionary searching; searching modern bibliography, and classical Hebrew culture and Hebrew language texts. The students will become acquainted with print and electronic concordances; general and specific dictionaries of Hebrew and Aramaic; various editions of early Hebrew exegetic literature; the Talmud; medieval Jewish exegesis; and major encyclopedias and lexicons in the fields of Hebrew culture. A secondary goal of this course is to practice the critical reading of texts, and to learn to locate and identify the main arguments in academic articles.
Bibliography: all the bibliography – dictionaries, concordances, exegetic literature, modern texts etc. – discussed in class.