Tod Linafelt

Professor of Biblical Literature
Age: 49
Hometown: Beaver, Pa.
Education: B.A. Eckerd College; M.Div. Columbia Theological Seminary; M.St. Oxford University, Jewish Studies; Ph.D. Emory University, Hebrew Bible
Area of research: the Hebrew Bible
Time at Georgetown: 18 years
Coures: “Biblical Literature,” “Poetry of the Bible,” “The Book of Genesis,” “The Bible and Horror,” “The Bible and Popular Culture”

What’s one course that you’d like to teach but you’ve never been able to teach here?
I’d like to do a course on the Bible and epic. In relation to the genre of epic, so Homer and “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” and “Beowulf,” those stories have great, epic heroes. The Bible doesn’t really have that sort of literature, so it might be interesting to read a lot of that, and then read the Bible, and think about the relationship between the two. Sounds boring to you, I know, but to me, it sounds interesting. Otherwise, I can pretty much teach anything when it comes to my electives, I can come up with any elective that I want to do. There are virtually no strictures, as long as I’ve done the upper-level and intro-level courses that I need to do. 

What would you say the greatest challenge in your field would be?
The greatest challenge, I think, and this would include teaching, is sort of correcting people about what they think they know about the Bible. They assume certain things about the Bible, and I think it’s hard to get people out of those presuppositions.

How did you narrow your focus to what you study today?
The relatively short answer is that I just happened to have a good professor in my master’s program, and I was only marginally interested in the Bible, but I had a really good professor, Walter Brigham, who made the Bible interesting, who also took me aside and told me, you know, you could do this for a living if you want, and here’s what you need to do to prepare.

What would you say one of the most memorable encounters that you’ve had with a student would be?
They’re all so memorable. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come up with something good; probably after you leave, I will. Well this isn’t all that memorable, but the one that my daughter Eleanor loves the story of is that — and it’s also a recent one — we have a crazy dog named Moonpie (I may have told this story in class) and she’s done a lot of crazy things over the years. Now, she’s 10, and she just recently has gotten on this jag of eating paper, and one night, I left a stack of papers to grade on the coffee table, and I came back: There were little scraps of paper on the ground and I could tell it was one of the student’s papers, and there was barely anything left of it. I could piece it together enough to realize which student’s paper it was, so I had to send him an email, and the subject line – which Eleanor loves – is “My dog ate your homework.” So he had to give me another copy.

What’s something that you wish more students would take away from your courses?
An appreciation for the diversity of perspectives in the Bible. The diversity of both genres, the types of literature, but also that it’s a great complicated conversation: it doesn’t just offer a single perspective on the big questions.

Do you have a favorite Biblical passage?
Leviticus 3:16. “All the fat is the Lord’s.”

Interview by David Chardack