For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a project, and we are just about ready to release our first major offering!

The project is a company called Parchment & Clay.

It is small right now, but I have big dreams for it.

I want Parchment & Clay to be a source for compelling and academically sound educational resources on the ancient Middle East and the Hebrew Bible, geared toward curious and interested people who would love to learn but can’t spare the time or expense to enroll in an entire postgraduate degree.

 

Parchment & Clay will offer online courses about the literature, religions, histories, and cultures of the ancient Middle East—the great empires of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt and the smaller kingdoms, settlements, and nomadic wanderers who filled the gaps in-between.

As part of that, we’ll offer courses on the Hebrew Bible as an anthology of texts that originated as and among other ancient Middle Eastern texts, but lived on to have a particularly distinguished afterlife in the millennia that have followed.

And that gets us to our current launch!

The Bible Against Kings is a ten-session online course that unearths a battle over political ideals and power in ancient Israelite society.

The Bible is commonly portrayed as a pro-monarchy book, filled as it is with famous kings like David and Solomon, but the Bible is an anthology written by many people, and not all of them shared the same love of kings or authoritarian governance.

A surprising number of biblical texts come out strongly against monarchies, against kings, and against the kinds of people who chase power.

This course explores those texts and their points of view in detail, showing that biblical thought on kingship was diverse and that anti-monarchic sentiment was strong..

 

You can learn more about it—and even enroll at a steep pre-sale discount—on the course page.

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Beyond The Bible Against Kings, there are a few other ways to explore Parchment & Clay right now.

1. Poke around our new website, where you can:

• Sign up for our email list. As a bonus for signing up, you’ll get access to a ten-minute lesson from me that answers the question “What is the Hebrew Bible and how is it different from the Tanakh and the Old Testament?”
• Read more about our founding course, “The Bible Against Kings,” and even register with a huge pre-sale discount.
• Use the contact form to send me a note, or a poem, or a really good recipe.

2. You can also explore (and subscribe to) the Parchment & Clay YouTube channel, where I’ve been sharing 4000-year-old proverbs in our “Ancient Sayings” series. We’ll continue that series and share many other things there in the future.