Early Judaism Video Lectures

Five years ago, the college where I teach responded to the Covid pandemic by radically altering our regular semester schedule. To ensure flexibility in case an outbreak meant we had to switch everything online, our fourteen-week semester was divided into two more intensive seven-week terms, with daily classes but shorter class times to satisfy our Province’s restrictions on in-person meetings. (Chairs also had to be six feet apart, which meant that those of us with larger classes had to teach multiple sections.) Thankfully, we were still able to meet in person, students were obviously glad to be there, and the smaller class sizes and more intensive format helped contribute to the learning experience.

The big challenge for those of us who teach content-heavy courses was making up for lost lecture time. To solve this problem we were encouraged to “flip” our class format by pre-recording lectures and saving face-to-face class time for discussion. I have to say I hated this. The videos took an enormous amount of work, and the quality of what I produced was, I thought, very poor. 

In subsequent years, however, I have found myself returning to the videos I produced for my 300-level introduction to early Judaism course (“Jewish Backgrounds to Early Christianity”), sometimes to remind myself what I said in class and sometimes to require my students to watch specific videos as assigned “readings” when we get behind or to leave more room for discussion in class. 

The first few videos are indeed a wash. I won’t be posting them anywhere! But the quality does improve, the content is, I think, pretty good, and, if you speed up the video to at least 1.5x speed, you can get beyond my stilted delivery. It occurred to me that there might be some value in posting some of them to my YouTube channel and linking to them on this blog. 

I intend to keep this post updated as an index page as I upload more videos:

• Purity and Impurity in Second Temple Judaism - The first video, from about two-thirds of the way through the course, is on the ancient Jewish purity system. As it happens, I originally created a blog post about the video back in 2020. That post has been updated with a link to the YouTube version of the video. As I mention there, anyone interested in the topic should now subscribe to Logan Williams’ and Paul Sloan’s excellent “Jesus and Jewish Law” podcast.