The scope of my address is at the same time both absurdly ambitious and simple to state. It is an examination of what we are doing--or think we are doing-with our students, in the academic study of the Bible at every level, from the beginning undergraduate to the most advanced researcher. It is a questioning of the rationales and the processes of learning, teaching, and research. And it is motivated by an anxiety that in all our great technical and methodological advances in our knowledge and understanding of the Bible we may have forgotten to keep these questions of our underlying purpose alive. Almost everyone in this room is a teacher of the Bible--for some, the teaching of students is more or less the whole of their daily task; for others it may be a necessary duty and distraction from what they regard as their real work. And yet, when we come together in our congresses of biblical scholars, many of us seem to feel we are on holiday and manage to slough off the teaching business altogether (apart from a couple of sessions). The truth is actually more ugly than that: there is in some quarters an underlying belief that teaching is an activity that is inferior to research. Those who can, research; those who can't, teach. No presidential addresses, delivered by scholars who have made their name in research, have ever been devoted to teaching, as far as I know. I am aiming to set teaching on the research agenda of every biblical scholar, to make sure it is firmly embedded in the program of the Society of Biblical Literature, and to signal to our students that they form part of our core business.
