Sigmund Freud writes in Civilization and its Discontents that “the
first requisite of civilization … is that of justice—that is, the
assurance that … no one [is left] … at the mercy of brute force.”
While every society arguably strives toward a civilization that will
promote fairness, equity and peace, it has rarely—if ever—been
achieved, because unjust suffering always enters into human
experience.  The question then becomes how a society ought to manage
and mitigate suffering in order to allow its citizens to live as
happily as they possibly can. This course will look to the Hebrew
Bible as a model text which grapples with this precise problem of
creating justice in human society, examining how ancient Israelites
set up their ancient societies and noting how their solutions to the
problem of unjust suffering often continue to be influential in
Western society today.  We will look at how the Hebrew Bible
constructs justice within three different spheres: law, religious
ritual, and thought/belief.  While law is the primary and intuitive
medium for the formation of a just society, the other elements, as
we shall see, are necessary as well, as law has a limited capacity
to regulate human experience.  Readings will be selected from the
Hebrew Bible (in translation), and alongside these primary texts we
will look at how more modern thinkers—legal theorists,
psychoanalysts, anthropologists, biblical scholars—understand the
problem of justice and its biblical heritage.