School Notes: Yale Divinity School
September/October 2015

Strategic plan positions YDS for future

YDS has created a slate of new directions and initiatives for strengthening the school’s leadership position to meet the shifting challenges of the twenty-first century. More than a year in the making, the YDS strategic plan asserts five “pivot points” for carrying out the school’s Christian mission in an era of spiritual pluralism, ideological conflict, ecological threat, and dissatisfaction with established forms of faith.

The five points are: 1) Financial aid: YDS will raise enough money to go tuition-free for all students in need, ensuring that all students can concentrate on their studies and vocation without the burden of debt. 2) Leadership and entrepreneurial ministry: YDS will enhance opportunities for Christian leadership and entrepreneurial ministry. 3) Diversity: YDS will increase ethnic diversity in the faculty, student body, and curricula. 4) Multi-faith engagement: YDS will become more adept at engaging today’s multi-faith environment and fulfilling the potential of religious faith as a global force for peace. 5) “Green Village” residential complex: YDS will construct a pioneering residential “Green Village” complex to provide affordable housing to students, promote an ecological stewardship, and build community. Comprehensive fundraising efforts will raise money for the five goals and enact them by 2022, YDS’s 200th anniversary. 

YDS scholar finds clue to Hebrew text

For more than a century, scholars of the Wisdom of Ben Sira have been staring at—and missing—a clue about the long-lost opening chapters of a historically crucial Hebrew version of this ancient text, which was first written in the second century BCE and has influenced Christian and Jewish teaching ever since. In a newly published article in the scholarly journal Revue de Qumran, Eric Reymond, lector in Hebrew at YDS, has resolved some of the mystery around the missing chapters of the medieval Hebrew manuscript of Ben Sira, which was discovered in 1896 at a Cairo synagogue. Reymond made a connection between the lost first page of the manuscript and the strange ghosts of backwards letters that appear on the first of the surviving pages, positing that the backwards letters are offsets or impressions of the missing text transmitted from the opposite, and long-missing, first folio page of this ancient manuscript. The finding, Reymond says, “could give us an enhanced understanding of this foundational Hebrew text.”