What Is to Become of the Bible?

By PERETZ RODMAN

Professor James L. Kugel is one of a half dozen or more Israeli Bible scholars over the past four decades, professors in Israel’s universities, who were born and educated in the United States. He was Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University from 1982 to 2003, and since 1991 has taught at Bar Ilan University, which is now his full-time academic base.

His new book, How to Read the Bible, is, he writes, in part about the problem of what is to become of the Bible after it can no longer be regarded as it was before two centuries of critical scholarly inquiry. JBooks interviewed James Kugel in his spacious, light-filled Jerusalem living room on a recent crisp winter afternoon.


You have written a book about the Hebrew Bible for a general reader. Is there still a general reader who is interested in the Bible?

I have been quite amazed at the reaction this book has had. In the early stages, the publisher suggested that I start a website. I get somewhere between five and ten emails a day. They’re from all over. It’s really quite amazing. Most are from Jews; plenty are from people who aren’t Jewish. Some people are disturbed by the book, but surprisingly few. Mostly people say they like it. A lot head their notes “Thank you,” and people say [things like] “I’ve never understood this before.” So there does seem to be a general readership for the Bible.

Was that your experience at Harvard as well? [Kugel taught a survey course on the Hebrew Bible there that was immensely popular year after year.]

At Harvard, I operated on the assumption that students wouldn’t know anything about the Bible, and usually that assumption turned out to be correct. A lot of undergraduates at Harvard grew up in homes that were Buddhist, for example—

…and they were unfamiliar even with such names as Adam and Eve—

…and even the ones that are familiar—the students often had only a sort of vague familiarity with them.


Biblical Theology: Closed Off—or Enriched?


The question you ask in this book, and answer in depth at the end, is: what has the scientific study of the Bible done to our ability to appreciate the Bible as a religious document? You portray the effect of that scholarship as destructive to a religious view of the Bible. I’d like to ask about a counter-thesis to that. Can the documentary hypothesis free us, or even enrich us, as Jews pursuing a workable theology, by giving us multiple models of how to perceive God’s presence or God’s actions in the world? Is this a way of opening up the Bible to many more interpretations and much more use rather than closing it off?

It depends on who’s asking the question. It’s an altogether typically Jewish question to phrase it in terms of the documentary hypothesis. For Bible scholars, that’s really only a small part of the whole thing. Modern Biblical scholarship is really about a whole attitude towards the text and then trying to read that text in the light of absolutely everything we know today about the ancient Near East, about other Semitic languages, and so forth.

Part of what modern scholarship has done is fragmented the text for us. I don’t think any of us can adopt an approach like that of Franz Rosenzweig, who said that for him the “R” of Redactor [i.e., editor of the biblical text] stands for Rabbenu [i.e., Moses the Lawgiver]. That’s very nice, but it doesn’t work in practice—

Right.

But maybe as a book of theological instruction, now that we can discern in the Bible the views of the “J” and “E” and “P” and “H” and “D” sources, the Bible gives me many different views of God to work with. Does that necessarily close off biblical theology?

Some people, including quite respected biblical scholars, have said what you say. I guess what I was trying to get at in my book is a different, perhaps more historical point: why do we have a Bible at all? I mean, it’s kind of an odd idea to center a whole religion on a book or a series of books. In the ancient near East, I don’t know of that happening before.

The answer I tried to unfold in the book, its basic idea, is that there was this big change in the middle of the biblical period. If you go back far enough, the whole way of representing God was completely different from everything we think today. In what we think are the earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible, God is certainly not omnipresent and omniscient and perhaps not even all-powerful. He is powerful, and presented in quite anthropomorphic terms. But then comes this change, and all of a sudden, God becomes a God who is served in a particular and rather peculiar way. It used to be that the way you serve a god is by offering animal sacrifices. That had been around the ancient Near East forever. Nobody could even imagine that it would ever be replaced. But somewhere around then came this new idea that is so eloquently stated in the Book of Deuteronomy: that the way of serving God is not just to offer sacrifices but to serve Him by keeping all these commandments. And by then there are a lot of commandments. There are all the commandments listed in Deuteronomy and the ones that precede it. That is a radically new idea.

I guess I didn’t quite state this outright in the book, but in a funny way it’s a way of keeping God at arm’s length. He’s not quite as scary as He was back in the days of Abraham, when He would just appear out of nowhere—

So now he has just left directions on the kitchen table, and we have to do them, but He’s not actually there, looking over your shoulder—

Right. He’s in heaven, and if you do this stuff you’ll be making a connection to heaven. But it’s at your initiative, and it’s a whole lot safer.

It’s out of that primal change that the whole idea of a Bible came about. You need to know what the instructions are. At first they’re the laws, but later it’s everything. Even these stories are meant to tell you how to be good:  Be like Abraham! Don’t be like Esau! And that, of course, required a lot of fast interpretation, because Abraham is not always such a role model, nor is Jacob. On the other hand, Esau isn’t always as bad as all that.

That’s a process that begins within the Bible itself.

Yes, but it comes into full flower at the end of the Biblical period.

—when you begin to see Torah as a body of instructions.

The fact that we use the word “Torah,” or nomos in Greek, to refer to this variegated book is in itself very instructive, because although Torah means more than “law,” this whole book, even these stories, become Torah: they are meant to tell you how to behave. The legal nuance of the word never disappeared [after that].


Bible as Literature? The Professor of Literature is Not So Sure


This book relies a lot on historical, philological, and archaeological scholarship. There’s a lot less literary scholarship than one would expect from someone who is a literary scholar. We don’t see chiasms and envelope structures, resumptive repetitions and leitwörter [repeating “guide words” in the Bible, an approach suggested by Martin Buber]. Is that because of the nature of what you wanted to accomplish with this book?

The truth is: I think a lot of that literary approach to biblical texts is not altogether correct. It depends on things that we know from later literatures and which we assume ought to be there in the Bible. Everybody likes to find symmetry in the Bible, but what strikes me about the Bible is the lack of symmetry. There are all kinds of things that you would expect any self-respecting literature to have [that are missing from the Bible.]

For example, everybody knows what a stanza is, and they all ought to have, say, four lines or six lines. We don’t see anything like that in biblical poetry. You have Psalms that have a repeated line that functions as a sort of refrain, but if you look at where the “stanza breaks” come, as indicated by the “refrain,” the first stanza has 4 lines, then the next one has 7, then the next one has 10, then it’s 3—it’s almost as if they’re thumbing their nose at the whole idea.

Why is it that the first time in Psalm 24 [the “refrain line”] contains the verb hinase’u [“be lifted up!”], and then in the repetition of the verse a little bit later the verb is se’u [“lift up!”]? And why in the first instance does the verse ask “Mi zeh melekh ha-kavod?” [“Who is the glorious king?”], but in the second instance “Mi hu zeh melekh ha-kavod?” [“Who is it who is the glorious king?”]? Was it just a scribal error? I don’t think so. There’s a wonderful little booklet by the late Aharon Mirsky about how you end a symmetrical list in the Bible and also in rabbinic literature. It’s always the same pattern: you break the symmetry. Why didn’t you follow the pattern? Because I don’t like to follow the pattern. I don’t like symmetry.

When it comes to things like leitwörter, I’m an agnostic.


Bible for Israelis


These days, you’re teaching in a place where students have had Bible imposed on them in high school. The Israeli context is really different. Has it affected your views of what the Bible is?

Not really.

Do you have to adjust what you do to meet the needs of this very different audience?

At Harvard, I used to pass for some kind of genius, because I could quote pesukim [biblical verses] by heart. At Bar Ilan, that doesn’t impress anybody, and in fact, sometimes they correct you. On the other hand, Harvard undergraduates do tend to have a much broader general education than Israeli undergraduates.

The challenges are very different. At Bar Ilan, a lot of students come not only with a very good background in the texts themselves, but also they have a lot of ideas about what the Bible means and what studying it means. Those are the things they bring from high school, but of course, the approach of a university is bound to be different from the approach of a high school, so you have to disabuse them of a certain way of reading the text and start to teach them another.

Having seen how Israelis perceive the Bible, is there a message you would like to bring to this audience that may turn into a book?

One thing that I did before writing this book [see two earlier books, The Bible As It Was and Traditions of the Bible] that I think is of great interest to Israelis—they don’t know much about this—is the quantity of biblical interpretation that is actually written down before we get to the rabbinic period. When I first got here, there wasn’t even a Hebrew term for “early biblical interpretation.” I started to talk about it as “ha-parshanut ha-kedumah.” That has become the accepted term. Today people are teaching courses in it at other universities, but when I got here, nobody did it.


What’s Next


In addition to this book you have published a book exploring biblical theology (The God of Old), you have worked on strictly literary issues in your book on parallelism (The Idea of Biblical Poetry), you have done books on early biblical interpretation, and you have done a monograph following the retellings of one story as a case study (Potiphar’s Wife). What can we look forward to next?

I hope I’ll be able to keep on writing. One thing that interests me is to write more generally about the religious mindset. I put it that way because, as you know, in America these days there are books debunking the whole idea of religion. You know, that this God idea was the result of some brain malformation or something. Neuropsychologists write about it, and philosophers. I thought that if I get the chance, I might want to put in my two cents as well.

Real divinity-school stuff.

I never really want to leave the Bible, but at Harvard the Divinity School was separated from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures by a big parking lot. I want to park someplace there.