Reading the Bible with James Kugel
by Sarah Gold, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 8/8/2007
In James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now (Free Press, Sept.), the former Harvard professor looks at the Hebrew Bible through the lenses of both ancient interpreters and modern scientific analysis.
RBL: What sources did you have for the earliest biblical interpreters you draw on, such as the Book of Jubilees?
Kugel: Jews decided midrash was midrash, and they didn’t want any of these earlier sources from before the Current Era. It became even forbidden to copy them and publicly study them. But fortunately there was a group of Jews—the first Christians—who didn’t hold by that, so they translated these books into various languages. After a few generations, many Christians couldn’t read Hebrew, so they translated them into Greek, and from Greek into Ethiopic, Coptic and other languages.
RBL: At the beginning of the book, you warn some readers away because they might be troubled by its modern approach.
Kugel: I mean it seriously and rather sympathetically. I know what it’s like to grow up with certain ideas about the Bible, then you hear these other things and it can be very disturbing.
RBL: You accept that the Bible is a blend of various texts. Were they humanly written?
Kugel: The question of divine versus human authorship is something that I never make any pretense at solving, simply because it seems to me that a divinely inspired, dictated text would in any case involve human words. There’s no kind of litmus test to say, Oh, this word came from God, and that word was just an ordinary word.
The ancient interpreters very consciously, at least at first, sought to change the meaning of these texts, to resolve all the obvious contradictions between one part or another. And their way of reading very quickly came to prevail. Then an equally admirable school of interpreters arose starting in the 17th and 18th centuries that undid all of that work. Their slogan was “scripture alone” will decide what we have to do. And suddenly understanding the original meaning of the words became crucial. It’s out of that that modern biblical scholarship arose.
RBL: As an Orthodox Jew who also finds the seemingly contradictory modern view compelling, what is the conclusion you reach in How to Read the Bible?
Kugel: I try to show is that it’s a kind of disturbing notion that, as a modern literary scholar might say, meaning is not inherent in the words of the text, that there’s a kind of interaction between readers and writers, and that it’s through that interaction that meaning is generated. So it seems to me there is no one answer to the question of how to read the Bible. It depends on who’s asking.
