rebecca newberger goldstein

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