Hebrew Bible's Fall from Grace

In the beginning, God said, Let there be General Education, and there was General Education. And God saw that the General Education was good. And God said, Let there appear a shining gem in the midst of the my.harvard Crimson Cart. And God drafted the syllabus and called it Culture and Belief 39: “The Hebrew Bible,” and that was that. And the LORD constructed a lecture hall of olivewood and acacia eastward in Emerson where The Hebrew Bible would be taught, and the LORD called upon the children of Harvard, saying, great class. gem. take it. professor is fantastic… it’s BroBible.

God saw that there was nobody to tend to the Hall of Emerson. God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: And let them have dominion over every creeping thing that creepeth on campus, searching for just about the easiest possible way to fulfill their Culture and Belief requirement in Harvard’s suite of approximately eight thousand five hundred fifty-three courses. So God created man in His own image and named him Shaye J. D. Cohen and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And God took the man and put him into the Hall of Emerson to profess the ways of The Hebrew Bible.

And it came to pass, when debaucherous men and women began to multiply in the Stacks, that God saw that the wickedness of man was great, and that the only thought of his heart was a less-than-three-hour weekly workload rating of 71 percent on the Q Guide in the Fall Term of the year two thousand and thirteen. And the LORD said, I will destroy the General Education I have created and the covetous section kids who seek to raise their sad GPAs from the dust of the earth.

But Shaye found grace in the eyes of the LORD. Shaye was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Shaye walked with God. God said unto Shaye, The end of General Education is come before me; for The Hebrew Bible is ridden with impishness and rampant grade inflation and over-enrollment. Make thee a 1636’er shuttle of gopher wood and ash. The length of the 1636’er shall be thirty cubits, the breadth of it ten cubits, and the height of it eight cubits. And, behold, I, even I, do bring plague upon Harvard, to destroy General Education and The Hebrew Bible. But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the 1636’er, thou, and thy TFs, and thy TFs’ preceptors with thee to keep them shielded from my wrath.

Thus did good Shaye, according to all that God commanded him.

And Shaye stretched forth his hand over Harvard, and the LORD touched His own righteous hand upon the waters of the River Charles, and the fragrant, medium-roast House Blend in the d-halls were turned to Fogbuster. And all the children of God digged round the river for palatable coffee to drink; for they could not bear to drink of the quasi-decaffeinated, earwax-flavored nectar that plagued them so. And the heart of the student body was hardened.

And in the selfsame day entered Shaye and the Hebrew Bible course staff into the 1636’er. It came to pass at the end of forty days and forty nights that Shaye opened the doors of the 1636’er and sent forth a TF to see if the plague was abated from the face of the shuttle route. And the TF came flapping and fluttering to Shaye in the evening; and, lo, in her gentle beak was a sprig of HUDS Power Vegetable Salad Mix pluck’t from the d-hall. So upright Shaye knew that the faithful shuttle would make it to his 9 a.m. office hours right on time.

And God spake unto Shaye, saying, Go forth of the 1636’er, thou, and thy TF’s, and thy TFs’ preceptors with thee. The LORD said in His heart, I will not again curse the grounds of Harvard any more for the sake of student-kind; for the hearts of those scouring the earth for Q scores only above 3.9 are evil and impure from their youth.

And the LORD said, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; I do set my great Q Guide rating scale in the cloud, and after it rains, when you behold its magnificent single shade of blue and incrementally darker shades of green to indicate increasing levels of satisfaction, you will remember my covenant with Harvard: The Hebrew Bible may remain, so long as it no longer counts as a gen-ed as of the fall semester of the year two-thousand and eighteen.

And Shaye went up from the sprawling plains of Tercentenary Theater unto the bell tower of Lowell to the rocky summit of William James Hall. Shaye, the virtuous servant of the LORD, was seven-hundred and sixty-two semesters old: His eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated. And the LORD shewed him all the land of Harvard.

And the children of the prospective class of the year two-thousand and twenty-two mourned the outlook of their unofficial FAS transcripts for thirty days and thirty nights, crying out to the heavens, Blessed art thou, Shaye J. D. Cohen, sovereign of CULTBLF 39, who hallows us with good deed, commanding us to take only exams that comprise mostly of passage identifications and random Bible quotes we already learned in Sunday school eleven years ago.

And there arose not since a prophet like Shaye in Harvard, whom the LORD knew face to face.

— Magazine writer Benjamin D. Senzer can be reached at benjamin.senzer@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @bensenzer.