Western Marxist approaches to studying the Bible are becoming more and more popular. This lecture outlines some of the key ideas of that approach, based upon the revision of my book, Marxist Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Those ideas include: the indirect relationship of a text to its historical and social context, the role of contradiction and dialectics in the study of biblical texts, the connections between class, gender and ethnicity, and the possibility of locating alternative voices in the text. The lecture will draw on the approaches of Fredric JAMESON, Antonio NEGRI, and Terry EAGLETON, among others.