How to read the Bible A guide to scripture, then and now

Review by New York Times Review

DEPENDING on who's reading Genesis and why, Abraham's not-quite sacrifice of Isaac is a true historical event that establishes the Jewish claim to Jerusalem, or an inspirational lesson in how God tests the faith of ordinary men, or a tribute to the Bible's first willing martyr, or a foreshadowing of the crucifixion. Or maybe it's merely a just-so story, a made-up tale stuck into the Bible by ancient Israelites to explain why they didn't practice child sacrifice, even though neighboring tribes did. All these interpretations for the binding of Isaac - and still others - can be found in James L. Kugel's "How to Read the Bible," an awesome, thrilling and deeply strange book. Kugel, an emeritus professor of Hebrew literature at Harvard and, mark this, an Orthodox Jew, aims to prove that you can read the Bible rationally without losing God. He sets himself the monumental task of guiding readers all the way through the Jewish scriptures (the Old Testament, more or less, if you're a Christian) and reclaiming the Bible from both the literalists and the skeptics. So, how to read the Bible? Kugel proposes two different ways. First, he shows us the Bible as it was read by the "ancient interpreters," writers who lived in the period a couple of hundred years before and after the birth of Jesus, even as the Bible itself was being codified. Their way of reading the Bible - their assumption of its inerrancy, their belief that scripture teaches moral lessons, and their faith in divine authorship - is the way many of us still read it today. Second, Kugel leads us through the Bible as it's understood by modern scholars, who for the past 150 years have used archaeology, linguistics, history, anthropology and all the other tools of science to excavate the truth about the Good Book. Kugel seems to have begun "How to Read the Bible" with the notion of giving equal weight to his two methods, but he soon sidelines the ancient interpreters and focuses on the exceedingly provocative modern scholarship. Though Kugel surely did not intend this, in its own way, his book proves as devastating to the godly cause as any of the pro-atheism books that have been dominating the best-seller lists in recent months. It's not news to anyone - at least anyone who reads the Bible even a wee bit skeptically - that the book is chock-full of contradictions and impossible events. Instead of carping snidely about this, in the style of a college bull session, Kugel gives us a magisterial, erudite, yet remarkably witty tour through the research. If reading the Bible demands a suspension of disbelief - Moses turned the Nile to blood? Joshua stopped the sun at noon? Samson killed 1,000 men with the jawbone of an ass? - then "How to Read the Bible" will prompt a suspension of belief. Some of the territory Kugel covers will be familiar to lay Bible doubters already. He reviews the "documentary hypothesis," which demonstrates pretty conclusively that the first five books of the Bible were not written by a single person (Moses, according to tradition), but actually cobbled together from four, or maybe five, different writers. Kugel points out the Bible's plagiarism from earlier, non-Israelite sources: laws nicked from Hammurabi; chunks of the Noah flood story lifted from the Epic of Gilgamesh; prophecies of Ezekiel inspired by Middle Eastern temples. He even implicates the Ten Commandments, which were apparently derived in part from ancient Hittite treaties. Modern scholars have also unmoored many of the most beloved stories in Genesis and Exodus. These tales are now viewed as etiological - that is, they were invented to explain how the world got to be the way it is. In this reading, the conflict between Jacob and Esau isn't a true story of sibling rivalry but an account of why, at the time the story was written down, the Israelites had such hot and cold relations with the Edomites, a nearby tribe identified with Esau. Similarly, the "mark of Cain" that God places on Cain after he murders Abel, promising sevenfold vengeance for anyone who harms him, was probably a tale designed to highlight the brutality of the Kenites, Israel's notoriously fierce neighbors. Most unsettling to religious Jews and Christians may be Kugel's chapters about the origins of God and his chosen people. Kugel says that there is essentially no evidence - archaeological, historical, cultural - for the events in the Torah. No sign of an exodus from Egypt; no proof that Israelites ever invaded, much less conquered, Canaan; no indication that Jericho was ever sacked. In fact, quite the contrary: current evidence suggests that the Israelites were probably Canaanites themselves, semi-nomadic highlanders or fleeing city dwellers who gradually separated from their mother culture, established a distinct identity and invented a mythical past. God himself has an equally murky personal history. At the start of the Bible, God is often viewed as just one of many gods. Only later in the book does he become the sole deity. More confusingly, he doesn't even seem to be the same god throughout the book. Mostly, God is called YHWH, but sometimes, especially in the earlier books, he's known as El. According to Kugel, these are probably two different deities fused into one: El may have been a god in the Canaanite pantheon, while YHWH may have been a Midianite god imported, via nomads, to the early Israelites, who made him their only god. One purpose of "How to Read the Bible" is to recapture the Bible from literalists, and Kugel certainly succeeds. His tour through the scholarship demonstrates why it makes no sense to believe that every word of the Bible is true history. Piling on, he also contends that modern Bible literalism, that brand of six-day-creationism favored by fundamentalists, is wildly out of step with traditional Christian interpretation. Such monomaniacal focus on the Bible's literal truth is a relatively new phenomenon. It's not so much that readers of yore didn't believe the Bible's truth; they just didn't waste a lot of time trying to prove impossible events like the Flood. But vanquishing the literalists is only half of Kugel's project. He also seeks a safe haven for rationalist believers. In other words, having broken all the windows, trashed the bedroom, stripped the wires for copper, sold the plumbing for scrap, and jackhammered into the foundation, Kugel proposes to move back into his Bible house. Kugel spends the final chapter trying to salvage the Bible for rational believers like himself. And give him credit: he refuses to take an easy way out. He won't say - as many Reform Jews and Christians do - that the Bible is just a series of excellent moral lessons. (After all, Kugel asks, what then are we supposed to make of all the ugly, morally repellent laws and stories?) He also won't say that Jewish observance is enough, that following God's laws - independent of accepting their truth - is satisfactory. Instead, Kugel tries to separate scholarship and belief. At bottom, Kugel seems to conclude that, scholarship be damned, there is some seed of divine inspiration in the Bible, even if he can't say exactly where it is. The fact that we can't prove any particular passage isn't important, and the fact that it's a pastiche of myths and plagiarized law codes doesn't extinguish the holiness that's in it, and doesn't diminish how it still inspires us to love and serve God. That's a humane and humble conclusion, but it won't reduce the delight of Bible skeptics, cackling with glee about Chapters 1 through 35. A scholar wants to reclaim the Good Book from both the literalists and the skeptics. David Plotz is working on a book based on his "Blogging the Bible" series for Slate, where he is the deputy editor.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

Kugel intends his book as a tour through the Hebrew Bible based on an introductory course he taught at Harvard University for more than 20 years. His first aim is to acquaint readers with the contents of the Bible itself, and he points out that by the end of his introductory course, readers will have met all the major biblical figures: Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Miriam, Aaron, and Solomon, to name just a few. The book also covers all the major events, from the story of Adam and Eve to the Exodus from Egypt, the Babylonian exile, and Israel's eventual return to its homeland. The book not only focuses on what the text says but on the larger question of what a modern reader is to make of it. Geared to both the specialist and the general reader, this is an indispensable guide to a complex subject.--Cohen, George Copyright 2007 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Kugel's tour de force of biblical scholarship juxtaposes two different ways of reading the Bible: the ancient biblical interpretations, ranging from the Book of Jubilees to Augustine, that he explored in The Bible as It Was, and the modern historical approach that challenges the historical veracity of scripture and seeks instead to find its writers' original sources and purposes. It can be a jarring journey for those schooled in traditional views, but what emerges is a fresh, even strange, and very rich view of everything from the Garden of Eden to Isaiah's dream vision of God. Refreshingly undogmatic and often witty, Kugel brings an intimate knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to illuminate small points as well as large. He discusses who the ancient Israelites were; the resemblances between YHWH and Canaanite gods; the unique role of the prophet in Ancient Near Eastern religions; the nature of ancient wisdom literature; and what the Bible means when it calls Solomon the wisest of men. The result is a stunning narrative of the evolution of ancient Israel, of its God and of the entire Hebrew Bible, contrasted with ancient interpretations that aimed to uncover hidden meanings and moral lessons. So, for example, for the ancients, the story of Cain and Abel is a tale of good versus evil. For the moderns, it was originally a story of origin, about the relation between ancient Israelites and the fierce Kenites to their south. While Kugel is a traditional Jew, he sees the modern approach as compelling, so the dilemma is whether a person of faith can read scripture in both the old way and the new. Drawing on Judaism's nonfundamentalist approach, Kugel's proposed answer is that the original purpose of the texts and their lack of historical accuracy matters less than their underlying message: to serve God. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Kugel (Bible studies, Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel; The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible) identifies himself as a legally observant Orthodox Jew who nevertheless teaches modern biblical scholarship and feels within himself the secular Jewish approach. Here he outlines traditional and modern interpretations of the many sacred stories of the Hebrew Bible and contrasts their foci, the traditional interpretations concentrating on what God says through the cryptic text and the modern interpretations violating the holiness of God's word in its focus on the historic reality beneath the text rather than on the text itself. To Kugel, fundamentalism has more in common with the ancients than does modern biblical scholarship, but fundamentalism finds meaning literal, while the ancients found meaning cryptically imbedded in the text. Kugel looks to ancient interpreters of the Bible and finds that they, not the biblical text itself, made the Bible "a divine guidebook full of instruction and wisdom, yea, the Word of God." In the final chapter, he offers his personal conclusions about finding God in Torah. Recommended for seminary, large public, and academic libraries.-Carolyn M. Craft, formerly with Longwood Univ., Farmville, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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PRELIMINARIES This book is intended as a guide to, and a tour through, the Hebrew Bible. In it, I've tried to write down most of what I know about the Bible, its past as well as its present. That makes it a little different from other books on the subject. Its first aim is to acquaint readers with the contents of the Bible itself. By the end of this book readers will have met all the major figures of the Hebrew Bible -- Abraham and Sarah; Moses, Miriam, and Aaron; Deborah, Samson, David, Solomon, and so forth. The book will also cover all the major events, from the story of Adam and Eve to the exodus from Egypt, and on to the conquest of the land, the rise of the United Monarchy, the fall of Jerusalem, the Babylonian exile, and Israel's eventual return to its homeland. Along with people and events, the Bible's major passages will themselves be examined -- all the most important prophecies and psalms, laws, songs, and sayings. In going through the Bible, however, this book will focus not only on what the text says but on the larger question of what a modern reader is to make of it, how it is to be read. This will mean examining two quite different ways of understanding the Bible, those of modern biblical scholars and of ancient interpreters. By modern biblical scholars is meant a rather specific group of people (and not all modern people who study the Bible). Starting around 150 years ago, a major effort was launched in universities and divinity schools in different countries -- principally in Germany and Scandinavia, Holland, England, and the United States -- to understand the Bible afresh, reading it "scientifically" and without any presuppositions. A great deal of new information had just then begun to emerge that might shed light on the world of the Bible's creation. The fledgling science of archaeology had started to probe the distant past, first uncovering individual artifacts and treasures from ancient times, later whole towns and cities. Sometimes what the archaeologists found included bits of writing -- inscriptions from here and there, indeed, whole libraries of documents written by ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and other neighboring civilizations of biblical Israel. These texts were deciphered and translated. Using this new information, biblical scholars found themselves able to trace with new accuracy the whole history of the region and fill in many of the blanks left by the Bible itself. They also began to reflect on the nature of Israelite society and its institutions in the light of these neighboring civilizations. Most of all, they set themselves to analyzing the Bible itself in a new way, trying to fit its words to the emerging historical picture and to understand when and how and for what purpose different parts of it were written. This effort to reinterpret the Bible has been carried on with increasing intensity ever since, and it has produced spectacular results. We are now able to piece together answers to some of the most basic questions about the Bible: Where did the people of Israel come from? How did they come to believe in the existence of only one God? How did they worship Him? What do we know about specific historical events -- for example, when did Moses live, and who was the wicked pharaoh that would not let the Israelites leave Egypt? Moreover, what about the Bible itself -- when were its various books written, and by whom? All these questions, and their answers, belong under the heading "modern biblical scholarship." As this book proceeds through the different parts of the Bible, it will survey most of what modern scholars have discovered about the meaning of the text and its historical background. But that is only part of the material to be studied. Along with modern biblical scholars, this book will examine another set of interpreters, who lived long before the archaeologists, historians, and linguists came along. These are the ancient interpreters, a largely anonymous group of scholars who flourished from around 300 bce to 200 ce or so. By the time the ancient interpreters came along, most of the texts that make up our Bible had been around for quite a while -- many for hundreds and hundreds of years, in fact. But this was still a very important moment in the Bible's development, and these ancient interpreters played a significant role. It was a time when, as never before, the Bible had become the central focus of Israel's religion. Reading Scripture, and doing what it said, was now the very essence of Judaism -- and in its wake, Christianity. But what did Scripture mean, and what was it telling people to do? For various reasons, ordinary readers did not feel capable of deciding such things. It was up to the experts -- the ancient interpreters -- to explain the Bible to them. As a result, the work of these ancient interpreters proved to be tremendously significant. As will be seen, they had a rather idiosyncratic, even quirky, way of interpreting the Bible. For example, they believed that the Bible did not always say openly what it meant; it was full of cryptic hints, and when these were carefully studied, all manner of hidden meanings could be revealed. In reading this way, ancient interpreters sometimes deduced the existence of whole incidents or teachings that the Bible had never mentioned -- indeed, they often "found" here and there doctrines or ideas that came into existence only centuries after the biblical text in question had been written. Their interpretations soon became what the Bible meant. Their explanations of different stories and laws and prophecies were passed on for centuries afterward. Institutionalized by church and synagogue, preached and sung about, depicted in floor mosaics, stained-glass windows, paintings, and statues, endlessly talked about in monasteries and on village greens, echoed in poetry and philosophy and learned discourse of all kinds, this interpreted Bible (that is, the Bible as explained by the ancient interpreters) was the Bible all throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and to a large extent, even up to today. One might well ask: now that modern biblical scholars have come to understand what biblical texts really meant when they were first written down, why should anyone bother with what a group of ancient interpreters thought the Bible meant centuries later, especially if their interpretations were sometimes a bit stretched? Part of the answer has already been given. For most of our history, what the Bible meant was what the ancient interpreters had said it meant. Even if what they said does not match the findings of modern scholars, this does not mean that their interpretations have not been, or are not still, significant. As a matter of fact, anyone who wants to understand European painting or sculpture, or the history of Western thought, or Dante or Milton or Shakespeare or almost any writer up to the present day, must know something about the Bible as it was understood by these ancient interpreters -- since that was the Bible. But there is an even more important reason for studying both ancient interpreters and modern biblical scholars. In a way that will be made clear throughout this book, the ancient interpreters are still with us. Despite the rise of archaeology and other sciences, the ancient interpreters' way of reading is directly tied to some of the most basic things we still think today about the Bible -- its very standing as the Word of God, and its role as a guide to daily life -- as well as to our understanding of some of its most important parts, from the Garden of Eden to the prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel. Modern readers of the Bible are thus caught between two opposite ways of reading. On the one hand, the ancient interpreters' way is crucial for what most people still wish to believe about the Bible and its message. On the other hand, the way of modern scholars, which seems to make good, scientific sense, has undermined a great deal of what those ancient interpreters said. So what are we to do? If we adopt the modern scholars' way of reading, in a very real sense the whole Bible will be undone -- much of its ethical instruction, its basic commandments, prophetic visions, and heartfelt prayers will turn out to be something other than what they have always seemed; indeed, the divine inspiration of all of Scripture will be seen to be undermined. But surely we cannot simply hide our heads in the sand and pretend that modern scholarship does not exist. And so an enormous question now poses itself to both Jews and Christians: How to read the Bible? That is the subject of this book. WARNING: This book is intended for both the specialist and the general reader, those who already have great familiarity with the Bible and those who have never read a page of it. It is my hope that any reader will be able to learn a great deal from it. But there is one group of readers who must be cautioned about its contents. Precisely because this book deals with modern biblical scholarship, many of the things it discusses contradict the accepted teachings of Judaism and Christianity and may thus be disturbing to people of traditional faith. I should say that I count myself in this group, and some of the things I will relate have indeed been disturbing to me over the years. I hesitated for a long time before deciding to pursue modern biblical scholarship as my field of study, and I hesitated even longer before deciding to commit my thoughts on it to writing. If I nonetheless went ahead, it was because I felt that it was dishonest, and ultimately would prove impossible, to hide from the central question addressed by this book. Others, of course, may feel differently. It is up to them to decide whether or not to continue. A word about the book's format: This book comes with two sets of notes. The first contain points of information intended for the general reader. These are marked with an asterisk (*) in the text and appear at the bottom of the page. The second set of notes -- marked with numbers -- is intended for specialists in the field; these notes consist mostly of references to scholarly articles or books, or are discussions of technical matters not intended for the general reader. They are found at the back of this book. A few further items are of such length that it was decided not to include them in the volume itself (since their inclusion would have added considerably to its cost), but instead to post them on a Web site where interested readers may consult them. These are: (1) an appendix to this volume, "Apologetics and Biblical Criticism Lite"; (2) a bibliography of the books and articles cited in the notes; and (3) an index of the writings of ancient biblical interpreters cited in the book, briefly describing their contents and date of composition. All these may be found on the Web site jameskugel.com. The same Web site contains links to other sites and will, I hope, eventually include questions and reactions from readers as well as some further words from me. Copyright (c) 2007 by James Kugel Excerpted from How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James L. Kugel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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