Old Testament
Old Testament
Proverbs
At the request of one of the folks in Athens Christian Church’s adult Sunday school class, I taught Proverbs as a 6-week series in 2013. The controlling metaphor of the series was a museum: the artifacts are all together, but there’s no authorial or narrative unity tying them together, some coming from Solomon and others from Lemuel; and some laying out wisdom as how to operate in an intelligible and predictable world and others exploring the paradoxes of wisdom itself. Overall the series went well.
- Proverbs week 1 (Introduction)
- Proverbs week 2 (Wisdom and Creation)
- Proverbs week 3 (Proverbs of Solomon)
- Proverbs week 4 (Proverbs Collected by Hezekiah’s Men)
- Proverbs week 5 (Proverbs of Agur)
- Proverbs week 6 (Proverbs of Lemuel)
Daniel
Because it split up nicely into six lessons before Christmas and four after, I taught Daniel at the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013. My focus, for the six narrative chapters, was on the connections between literary character and theological reality. For the six final apocalyptic chapters, my focus was on the ways that Daniel’s visions present a very different vision of politics from what other, contemporary texts offer.
- Daniel Week 1
- Daniel Week 2
- Daniel Week 3
- Daniel Week 4
- Daniel Week 5
- Daniel Week 6
- Daniel Week 7
- Daniel Week 8
- Daniel Week 9
- Daniel Week 10
Amos
On September 28, 2008, I began a five-week study of the conventions of biblical prophets and on the text of Amos. Beyond the obvious (and commonly articulated) warning that prophets are not always and never only prognosticators, I also wanted to explore some of the traditional/epistemological/political difficulties with prophecy, starting with Deuteronomy’s warnings to test prophets against the Torah and eventually working around to modern iterations of “Biblical prophecy” and their relationships with actual eschatological passages in the Bible. At any rate, as I write these lessons, they’ll appear here.
- Amos Part One (Chapters 1-2)
- Amos Part Two (Chapters 3-4)
- Amos Part Three (Chapter 5)
- Amos Part Four (Chapters 6-7)
- Amos Part Five (Chapters 8-9)
Jonah: A Comedy Among Prophets
The two handouts here come from a two-week stint as substitute Sunday school teacher. I always wondered whether I could actually teach the comedic elements of Jonah and make it work in Sunday school, so here’s my best try. I will teach these on July 20 and 27. If you land on this looking for children’s Sunday school lessons on Jonah, I apologize: you might just have stumbled onto one of the few teachers fool enough to try to teach Jonah to adults.