A lightning storm over Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael
Turns out James Kugel wrote an eight hundred page book (seven hundred pages of tightly printed text plus the notes) How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. What’s it all about?
The Structure
Behind the yawn inducing title and the forgettable graphics is the study comparable in scope to the work of the great Maimonides. Kugel covers the entire Tanach by looking at each event from the two divergent points of the view, the traditional interpretation and the contemporary reading by the biblical scholars. Each chapter in the book opens with a two-three sentence description of a biblical event. Then there is a paragraph or two where Kugel narrates the event in his own words. The key verses are quoted directly. You wouldn’t find a rashi or any late commentators in the “traditional” portion (except Kugel sometimes quotes Augustine). The author is only interested in how the text was understood or translated in the antiquity. Kugel selectively compares the text with the various apocrypha – Josephus, Philo, Pseudo-Philo (a Latin manuscript translation from the Greek that might have had a Hebrew origin and was at some point attributed to Philo), the Christian Gospels, the Arameic translations of Targum Onqelos, Targum Neophyti (never heard of this one), Targum Yonason, and finally the Medrash and the Talmud, etc.
Then Kugel looks at the text through the eyes of the last two centuries of the biblical criticism. This is a Rambam-like synthesis where Kugel tosses together different scholars and adds a distinct flavor with his own poetic and playful readings.
The Style
The monumental, momentous work is still an amazingly easy read. Kugel’s prose is sparse and clear. But the book upends the traditional images so radically that there is no way to zoom over the pages. Most people [Jews] have a visceral connection to these stories and characters. Suddenly you find in the attic a diary that opens your eyes to the members of own family. The experience is dramatic and traumatic. There is a review from a Catholic Priest on the Amazon to thank Kugel for helping in “understanding of the bible”. This reaction is only possible if you really don’t take the “Old Testament” too close to heart.
But savor the beauty and the logic. The unnerving view of the old family portraits from the perspective you never imagined. A door is opened to the entire new world. The intellectual elegance, the geshmak is real! But then you need to go outside, try to breathe, digest what you just heard about your own history and identity, walk around the block, day-dream the storm away.
The Chapter 7 – “God of Old”
I imagine this chapter is a condensed version of the book by the same name previously written by James Kugel. One of the most maddeningly fascinating parts of the How to Read the Bible are the changing “models” of the biblical God. The God of the Author P who wrote most of the Leviticus is different from the God of the Author D who wrote most of the Deuteronomy and yet not the same as the God of the Author J responsible for he better parts of the Genesis. But broadly there are two distinct Gods according to Kugel, the familiar, philosophically compliant, omnipresent God. This God didn’t fully “take shape” till the 6th century BCE at the end of the biblical period. And then there was the “God of Old” found in the Genesis. The Genesis God had a body, moved around and would appear to people as a regular stranger before they realized it was an angel or the God himself.
There is not a whiff of the Jewish esoteric tradition in the book. Not a single word about Kaballah or Chassdism although there are many humorous references to the American pop culture. I couldn’t help but think that the “God of Old” came for an encore during the Chassidic revolution (not to mention the Christianity or the Islam). This is also the old world model that Zalman Alpert describes as “Du, Tate!” Same “God of Old” makes an appearance in the greatest Jewish literary work by Der Nister in the eternal character of Sruli Gol. You want some holy “fog” Dr. Kugel? Der Nister got plenty of that!
The Impact
Someone asked Solzhenitsyn in the 70s what would happen if they publish The Gulag Archipelago in the Soviet Union? “The country will no longer exist” – answered Solzhenitsyn. Sadly the millenia of sacrifice comes tumbling down under the modest weight of James Kugel’s volume. All the challenges from the science, the mighty dinosaurs, the generations of skeptics and the blogs are simply not a match for the hypothesis of using the book itself, its internal logic to demolish the mythology from within. All the “criticism” pales in comparison to this approach. And Kugel does a devastating job with it.
After all what does it matter if the Chassidic revolution was imperfect or the challenge by Shmuel Munkes to the Alter Rebbe was incomplete? The colossal edifice has an irreparable flaw at the very core of the foundation. I recently heard Rebecca Goldstein that the protagonist in her last novel raises the tragic possibility of a talent sacrificed to a common ideology. But what if the real tragedy is the reversed, the entire nation sacrificed to several authors?
James Kugel work can be compared to Josephus, two thousand years later people still read Josephus. This is my prediction.
The Genius
Somehow Kugel’s orthodoxy looms large, naturally. But I feel differently about a genius. When there is a genuine breakthrough all to often the vehicle is just a screen, they are somehow separate. These are the strangers found in the Genesis ( Kugel’s “God of Old”) that go from a man to the God without lingering much at the angelic stopover. And this is deeper than the cold Anglo-Saxon “professionalism” that separates the inner life from the output (“his preferences is his own business” kind). I am talking about the raging creativity and curiosity that rides above and in spite of a human being, in other words it’s about the Rider.
The Personal
There are some conclusions in the book that took me years of the intense spiritual struggles. At least in two or three places I even noticed a language identical to my own. How did I manage to overlap with James Kugel for a decade in Boston and never meet or hear about him? The book of this magnitude was written somewhere within the three miles from here. But the reading made me feel optimistic, indeed it is worthy to live to witnesses the eruption.
The Postscriptum Rant
High on the irksome list of the Internet irritations are the indolent inscriptions about books, films or events, the inscriber never read, watched or attended. The opinions expressed based on comments to the blog posts about the fourth party mainstreamed reviews. To the same list belongs the Internet black hat magic moved by the linking mice, the quoting, the mash-up aggregation, the confusion between a content creation and the lucrative aftermath of the attention deficit disorder epidemic. The reaction to James Kugel’s book is the prime example that an absence of information never stopped anyone from having an opinion.
The next inevitable impasse is “why are people interested in James Kugel”? It seems axiomatic to say that people in general attenuate a person not the content, who is talking not what is being said. This tendency is culturally amplified, especially by the orthodox. The orthodoxy is a quotation culture that looks at ideas and innovation with suspicion and hostility and values above all a clever regurgitation of the narrowest slices in the autistic spectrum. In this cultural climate the emphasis is never on the content, none is expected really, but on the delivery. To be interested means to be transfixed by an inbred degenerate who is a great-grandson of some feudal overlord from a remote Carpathian village, a double in an off-off-beyond-the-pale production. So the real reason for the interest in James Kugel must be because he was seen wearing a tallis kotton with a crimson thread (a reference to Harvard not the blood of Jesus) or because a Jew has a visceral reaction to a certain type of the exasperatingly pun inducing soul food.
Enter the comparison brigade that wants to document why James Kugel’s hypothesis is different. I know nothing about the biblical criticism but if someone is aware of a book with a parallel breadth and depth please let me know ASAP, I will drop everything to dive in, or yet better, will go up the mountain to face it.
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Photo via flickr/cherdevall
- Further Reading:
- Post Passover Lectures by James Kugel
- James Kugel on Post Torah Judaism
- The Dating of Kohelet
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I am aware of a book of comparable breath and depth…actually two large books:
The Jewish Publication Society 5 volume commentary on chumash and the Anchor Bible commentary on almost all of tanach. (In the case of the Anchor Bible,the volumes published more recently are the best.)
These books are not hidden in a vault. For around a $1000 dollars,the ins and outs, twists and turns of modern bible criticism can be yours. You know these ideas have been around for a long, long time. What is shocking in the Modern Orthodox world,is not at all shocking to the world at large.
PS…Please take a look at my comment to your David Brooks post. One constant theme of your blog is this grappling with the question how can so many people be so wrong for so long. It comes up in in this post. I am suprised that you don’t raise similar questions about science….how did Ptolemy last for a millenium? In the philosophy of science,Kuhn, Quine and others talk about not replacing one paradigm until there is a new and more appealing theory. It is happening before your eyes in MO, Kugel being the vehicle for such a paradigm change.
EJ, but according to Kuhn the adoption of the newer theory is not an expression of some higher truth claim, but rather a pragmatic decision of the practitioners of the particular discipline. The data could also have been explained by the previous paradigm. Do I have it right?
Daas Yachid…”The data could also have been explained by the previous paradigm.” True, but only with more convoluted complications, as was the case with Ptolemaic astronomy. Simplicity is considered a huge virtue, and forms a big part of the arguments for biblical criticism and perhaps even for the DH. I do not know whether simplicity is best described as a pragmatic consideration.(Is consistency with observations a pragmatic consideration?) More recerntly, post-Kuhn, the story how theories are adopted has come up against detailed investigations in the history of science. And the plot has thickened. That’s all I know.
Ben Atlas…Far be it from me to interest you in what might be an inherently boring topic. But here are the cliff notes on the state of play as seen from the internet. The charedim generally refuse to even consider the material. Nor do they accept evolution/Slifkin. Right wing MO champion evolution but reject the more challenging aspects of modern criticism. Left wing MO, which is called Orthopraxy and now Post Modern Orthodoxy, accepts the basic ideas of multiple authorship. For this latter group the issue is how to proceed being Orthodox when at least one dogma is false.
Orthopraxy has been discussed more times than anyone chooses to remember on the series of blogs written by the blogger XGH. The main battle for the soul of RWMO is being fought ever so slowly on R. Gil Student’s blog. He is like someone who says “Remember now, don’t think of the color purple.” He has initiated these intense discussions on the Kugel book, and in effect brought these issues to a front and center place within Orthodoxy, while maintaining that these modern ideas are inconclusive. .
I am not the guy to talk about the book, and I don’t understand the fuss. The problem of the relation of the original meaning to subsequent readings and misreadings somehow doesn’t trouble me. I take the talmudic reading as central for the mesorah, and that holds for me even if it was a misreading of the original intent as understood by bible critics, and even if the sentence was written by God at Mt. Sinai. Being religious is a commitment to this central mesorah, not necessarily to its veracity as measured by some standard of meaning.
For me as a student what’s important is the best for me way to understand a sentence in some book of the bible. The words are difficult and the Ugarithic linguists frequently are at an advantage. And that’s around it. It is also important to know what Rashi, says but not because his reading is always the best, but simply because he is Rashi. There are Jewish theologies, many. But contra to Alan Brill and Ben Summers I do not know apriori that there must be an acceptable (to us) biblical theology.
ej, as you can see i deleted two or three comments. I must say that I always admired your ability to stay positive and speak positively about each human being. For me it’s sometimes a challenge but I must stay on topic as they say. So indeed as your comment implies about my deleted question I would rather speak about the book. Now let me really read your response.
ej, I now reread your response. I have to admit this approach seems bizarre to me but may be if I was born into an observant family I would have been able to pull off something like that.
And I don’t really understand the “theology” aspect of this converastion, Summers and Brill approach. I wish someone would explain this.
P.S. I think your view is crazy, really. And I gather you didn’t really read the book.
This is my reward for writing, having a diversionary conversations about science with someone who didn’t read the book and even if he read one doesn’t care anyway. Great!
If you are so upset, feel free to delete any or all of my comments including this one. .
I did read the book, at least much of it, and I yawned. I didn’t REALLY read the book. So what… I talk, you talk. I try, I fail to appreciate what you think is important. You get upset.
I truly hope your blog takes off in a big way, with many comments, at which point I am just one more voice in a larger community. If every time I or anyone makes a comment that you find disappointing, you become hysterical, even faux hysterical, then each and every comment becomes fraught with danger. You can’t sell Pepsi Cola if every third bottle explodes.
First of all I am not selling Pepsi Cola, I am selling 1787 Chateau Lafite, I am not certain if three of these left in the entire world. And although I can explode once in while, not in this thread. I just deleted the comment where I spoke badly about other people and although I would probably repeat what I said without hesitation, I felt it had nothing to do with this topic. At lease not what I want to talk about.
But let me ask you, ej. Do you ever have an expectation that people would agree with you, at least in small part. I often do, but perhaps it’s unrealistic.
I don’t expect people will agree with me, though they do often enough. Even when others disagree, since I only write occasional comments, not a blog, my presence is not especially significant. Because of my age I frequently get a free pass, like some daft uncle at a holiday meal.
It could go a long way if you stop posting anonymously.