What Makes Baby Girls Different?

Hebrew Bible expert Alan Cooper will speak on “What Makes Baby Girls Different: Leviticus 12 and “Original Sin” 4 p.m. Nov. 1 in Hieronymus Lounge as part of the annual Westmont-UCSB Lecture on the Hebrew Bible.

The event, sponsored by the religious studies departments at Westmont and UCSB and the Westmont provost’s office, is free and open to the public.

Cooper is a professor of the Bible at both The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and at the neighboring Union Theological Seminary, a non-denominational Christian seminary.

“There is a widespread popular misconception that Judaism and Christianity have radically different anthropologies,” Cooper said. This is “primarily because Jews supposedly do not believe in ‘original sin.’  The fact is that Judaism developed its own versions of that belief which are products of both internal development and Christian influence.”

Cooper maintains that the history of Jewish interpretation of Leviticus 12 (the laws pertaining to childbirth) offers a fascinating case study. One peculiarity of those laws is the way they differentiate between male and female babies. Since the 1300’s several Jewish interpreters have attributed the difference between boys and girls to “original sin” – a line of interpretation that was mostly unprecedented in earlier Jewish sources. The lecture describes and attempts to explain this divergence in the history of interpretation.

Cooper received his bachelor’s degree in religious studies from Columbia University. While a student at Columbia, he became one of the original members of the rock-and-roll group Sha-Na-Na. He earned a master of philosophy degree and doctorate in religious studies at Yale University. Cooper’s doctoral dissertation was on the linguistic structure of biblical poetry.

His publications include a monograph on Canaanite divine names that appear in the Hebrew Bible and many articles on biblical poetics and the history of interpretation. In 2002, he published “The Message of Lamentations” in The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, and “Biblical Studies and Jewish Studies” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies.

Cooper is working on a series of studies on the literary history of the Pentateuch, a collection of essays on biblical wisdom literature, and a monograph on traditional interpretation of Leviticus 12. For the work on Leviticus, he was awarded a Lilly Endowment Faculty Fellowship in 2003–04.

For more information, contact the public affairs office at (805) 565-7057 or e-mail pubaffairs@westmont.edu. For directions to campus, visit the college Web site at www.westmont.edu.