Rhetoric is a powerful, architechtonic art that often gets maligned in colloquial English by its association with “bullshit” or empty speech. Yet the tenets of rhetorical theory have allowed for both the analysis and production of powerful symbolic texts for thousands of years. In this course we will investigate the history of rhetoric in Ancient Greece and Israel to explore the productive space between Greco-Roman and Jewish rhetorical traditions. We will also learn about contemporary debates in rhetorical historiography as well as contrastive and comparative approaches to studies in rhetorical history and theory.