The Best Books We Read in 2007
in THE ONIONby
Donna Bowman, Noel Murray, Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson December 27, 2007
Who should we believe about the Bible—our Sunday-school teachers, or our university professors? Jewish scholar James Kugel cuts through this dilemma with a breathtaking new look at the world's most popular book. Scripture was composed and compiled over the course of a millennium for reasons that historians, academics, and literary detectives have illuminated in the last century and a half. But it became the Bible through the work of ...
Interpreting the Interpreters
in Haaretzby
Jeremy A. Dauber November, 2007
At a rough estimate, James Kugel's class on the Bible and its interpreters enrolled about 15 percent of the undergraduate student body of Harvard College at any one time. One of the enrolled, some time in the early to mid-nineties, was my Roman Catholic roommate; no stranger to reading the Bible (either testament) himself, he spent most of the semester in a constant state of, one should excuse the expression, revelation.
Kugel's encyclopedic knowledge of how early Jewish and Christian thinkers transformed the Biblical texts into the "interpreted Bible" we all know today - the one in which Eve is holding an apple, in which David wrote the Psalms, where Isaiah's mention of a young woman's pregnancy becomes a proof of virgin birth - showed his students how the Bible has been read for the better part of two millennia. But beyond that - as I learned myself when, under the influence of Chris' raves, I took a seminar with Kugel - by focusing on the logical discrepancies, grammatical curiosities and ostensible extraneities that served as grist for the ancient interpreters' exegetical mill, he (masterfully) taught his students nothing less than how to read the Bible itself. With attentive, loving, but critical care.
I mention all this not only to get the mandatory full disclosure out of the way, but to point up the tension at the heart of Kugel's latest (and, perhaps, greatest) book on the Bible intended for a popular audience. True, those traditional interpreters' "four assumptions," as Kugel puts it - of the Bible's fundamentally cryptic nature, its eternal relevance, its internal harmony, and its divine nature, have been the working standard for centuries of how to read the arguably central text in Western history.
The Bible According to Kugel
in Publishers Weeklyby
Sarah F. Gold September 7, 2007
It's hard to imagine the Bible as a hot intellectual commodity among Harvard undergrads. But for years, more than 900 students flocked to James Kugel's introductory Bible course—a close second to Economics 10. “The fellow who taught that and I had a kind of rivalry,” Kugel says.
Recently retired as the Starr professor of Hebrew literature, Kugel finally outdrew his competitor, and the Crimson trumpeted the news: “God Beats Mammon.”
Kugel's editor at the Free Press, Bruce Nichols, kept encouraging him to write a book based on his popular course, and the result is How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now, which will publish in September. It's an attempt to address what Kugel calls “the crisis that confronts a lot of Bible readers today.” Is the Hebrew Bible the word of God, as its ancient interpreters—and many traditional Jews and Christians today—believe? Or is it, as many modern scholars posit, a mélange of texts by several human authors with different political and religious motives.
Irreconcilable Differences in Bible’s Interpretations
in New York Timesby
PETER STEINFELS September 15, 2007
“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.
