How Jews and Christians Read the Bible

Jews and Christians consider the Scripture to be more or less the same book – the Tanakh or the Old Testament – yet they interpret many of its stories in fundamentally different ways. Jews read it through rabbinic literature, while Christians read it through the New Testament, the second part of the Christian Bible. As a result, the very same words, stories, and prayers take on fundamentally different meanings. 

Without claiming that one of these approaches is right and the other is wrong, this series will focus on how each tradition understands four biblical units; it will also explore how and why these religious traditions interpret the same text so differently. 

Prof. Marc Zvi Brettler - Duke University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem