Teaching Top Down Analysis
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon May 1 12:59:05 EDT 2000
At 9:45 AM -0700 5/1/00, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
>on 05/01/00 6:06 AM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>> What is it, Clay, that you were taught about "top down analysis" in English
>> Bible classes; if I knew that, I might have some better conception of what
>> it is that you are suggesting as something desirable to institute in
>> teaching ancient/Biblical Greek at the elementary level.
>
>Carl,
>
>It is has been 25 years but I will do my best to remember.
>
>I had an English bible class on the Pentateuch where I remember being taught
>that the book of Genesis had a macro structure that could be organized
>around some verbal expression, I think it was something like "This is the
>book of the generations. . ."
>
>The class on Pentateuch really opened my eyes since it had never occurred to
>me before that an historical book was anything more than just a collection
>of narratives glued together in sequence.
>
>To understand the Hebrew word "toledoth" (generations) in Genesis 5:1 one
>needs to go beyond the notion of a dictionary definition and look at the
>macro structure of Genesis to see that this word has a function for breaking
>large blocks of text. This concept was completely new to me and worked a
>sort of revolution of sorts in my approach to biblical literature.
>
>This was my first exposure to the idea of a discourse boundary.
Well, this is a little bit different from what I recall: that the phrase
ELEH ha TOLEDOTH ... was the identifying mark of the Priestly Codex (P as
opposed to J, E, and D) according to the Graf-Wellhausen Documentary
Hypothesis.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
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