James L. Kugel: Exploring Irreconcilable Differences in Bible's Interpretations
“How to Read the Bible” is a most unusual how-to book. For one thing, it is more than 800 pages long and has 971 endnotes. It is true that all the familiar figures and events of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament are here: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets.
But the book, written by James L. Kugel and just published by the Free Press, also propounds a stark and challenging thesis, namely that contemporary Bible readers are confronted with two radically different ways of approaching Scripture and that both approaches are impressive and admirable — and fundamentally incompatible.
Professor Kugel, it should be noted, is a rare master of both approaches. Now teaching in Israel, he was for years one of the most popular teachers at Harvard. When attendance at his introductory Bible course (often running more than 900 students) finally edged ahead of a similarly popular course in economics, The Harvard Crimson headlined “God Beats Mammon.”
A decade ago, he published “The Bible as It Was,” a provocative and much-lauded study of early biblical interpretation.
Professor Kugel is also an Orthodox Jew who found himself “hooked” on modern biblical studies despite the fact, as he said in a recent lecture in Manhattan, that much about those studies seemed calculated “to destroy the whole fabric of traditional Jewish piety.”
“How to Read the Bible” incorporates the fruits of his university teaching, his research and his years of personal reflection on his faith and scholarship.
The book highlights not only the familiar dramatis personae of the Bible, but also two groups who have struggled mightily with biblical texts. He calls them the “ancient interpreters” and the “modern scholars.”
Over the last 150 years, modern biblical scholars have revealed the Bible as an amalgam of often conflicting texts composed from different sources by different authors and with different agendas often far from the spiritual and moral concerns of traditional Judaism and Christianity or of today’s believers....
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But the book, written by James L. Kugel and just published by the Free Press, also propounds a stark and challenging thesis, namely that contemporary Bible readers are confronted with two radically different ways of approaching Scripture and that both approaches are impressive and admirable — and fundamentally incompatible.
Professor Kugel, it should be noted, is a rare master of both approaches. Now teaching in Israel, he was for years one of the most popular teachers at Harvard. When attendance at his introductory Bible course (often running more than 900 students) finally edged ahead of a similarly popular course in economics, The Harvard Crimson headlined “God Beats Mammon.”
A decade ago, he published “The Bible as It Was,” a provocative and much-lauded study of early biblical interpretation.
Professor Kugel is also an Orthodox Jew who found himself “hooked” on modern biblical studies despite the fact, as he said in a recent lecture in Manhattan, that much about those studies seemed calculated “to destroy the whole fabric of traditional Jewish piety.”
“How to Read the Bible” incorporates the fruits of his university teaching, his research and his years of personal reflection on his faith and scholarship.
The book highlights not only the familiar dramatis personae of the Bible, but also two groups who have struggled mightily with biblical texts. He calls them the “ancient interpreters” and the “modern scholars.”
Over the last 150 years, modern biblical scholars have revealed the Bible as an amalgam of often conflicting texts composed from different sources by different authors and with different agendas often far from the spiritual and moral concerns of traditional Judaism and Christianity or of today’s believers....