The History and Archaeology of the Bible

Please don't let these lectures make you doubt your prior knowledge. When I heard lecturer Jean-Pierre Isbouts mispronounce "Sodom" and other words with an air of expertise, I was so impressed, I wasted time checking if I had it wrong.That might be excusable. But there's a lot more ignorance on display.One of many glaring examples so bad, you might laugh when you hear him: With great unearned confidence, he brutalizes the original, Hebrew version of the name known in English as Isaac. In Hebrew it is Yitzhak, which he pronounces as "Yis-chuck" (as in woodchuck). He does this even when it's spelled out next to him as Yishak (no "c"). He does so with the enunciated accent of someone making clear you don't the language as well as he does.There are so many Jews and Jewish leaders with this name that slipups like this boggle the mind. For example, perhaps the most memorialized Jew in recent decades is the late Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin. If you know how to pronounce Chanukkah (even as "Hanukkah" with an English "H" at the beginning) then you know more about the Hebrew Bible than the good professor. There is no "Charlie" ch sound in Hebrew. So someone with basic acquaintance with Hebrew-related culture would have a clue.There's more, but fear not. I won't write a dissertation on all the stuff he needed to correct. After all, neither did the lecturer. Jean-Pierre Isbouts is not a scholar of the Bible or archaeology; his own Ph.D. thesis, according to Wikipedia, focused on an NYC architecture firm. (All that time studying late 19th/early 20th Century NYC culture...How did he never come across a "Yitzhak"?)But I think you get the point that there's a lot to question here. Some Great Courses live up to the name. Not this one.

I was very excited to start this book. A lot of the histories I have been reading lately have had moments in which they shed light on biblical events and I really looked forward to having someone take me through the bible, adding historical context to major stories, but while Isbouts did do that, it never felt like it was his primary purpose as I listened to this audiobook.Isbouts really just tells the biblical story. For the first six lectures (25% of the course) he does little more than make reference to other ancient stories with similar themes as he walks the listener through Genesis and Exodus. I would recommend simply skipping these first six lectures.After that, matters improved somewhat, especially when Isbouts gets into discussion of the northern and southern Jewish kingdoms, their origins, and to what extent they were truly united under Saul, David, and Solomon. I also found his section on Pontius Pilate and King Herod and the extent of their various authorities quite fascinating. But overall, I felt like the lectures were heavy on the story and light on the historical context.