Here’s an interesting article by Mike Zimmerman at American Thinker about the Hebrew Bible and the West:
When I was an undergraduate student at MIT quite a while ago, I took a four-semester humanities program called Foundations of Western Civilization. It absorbed and fascinated me. However, I noticed that the course material jumped from ancient Greek and a few Roman writers to St. Augustine and other relatively early Christian writers and then on to thinkers of the Middle Ages. I wondered what happened to the wonderful narratives of the books of the Hebrew Bible, what Jews call the Tanach and Christians refer to as the Old Testament.
Being inquisitive, I asked my quite excellent class teacher why we had not covered some biblical counterparts to the Greek stories and narratives. After all, was it not the interaction of those two cultures first, and subsequently Roman, Christian, and European cultures that provided the foundations of Western civilization?
He responded, somewhat sheepishly I thought at the time, that the faculty assumed we students already knew the narratives and stories of the Bible. But did we? First of all, I was not exactly sure which Bible he was talking about — the older or the newer, or both. Secondly, I knew some, but not much about biblical narratives and thinking, and did not think most students did, raised in contemporary generally secular environs.
Being a student at the time, and having no agenda, I kept my doubts to myself, until recently, when I encountered the writings and thinking of Professor Kalman Kaplan (a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago) and his colleague Dr. Paul Cantz (of Adler University) who seem to completely challenge the assumptions of the designers of my long-ago liberal arts course. These scholars point out that there was a distinct Hebrew-Jewish tradition at the same time and in opposition to the Greek thinkers of roughly the two centuries before the Common Era.
And it is this argument that Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Paul Cantz make in their new book titled Biblical Psychotherapy: Reclaiming Scriptural Narratives for Positive Psychology and Suicide Prevention.
Read more: American Thinker
