The Bible As It Was
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- $38.99
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- $38.99
Publisher Description
This is a guide to the Hebrew Bible unlike any other. Leading us chapter by chapter through its most important stories--from the Creation and the Tree of Knowledge through the Exodus from Egypt and the journey to the Promised Land--James Kugel shows how a group of anonymous, ancient interpreters radically transformed the Bible and made it into the book that has come down to us today.
Was the snake in the Garden of Eden the devil, or the Garden itself “paradise"? Did Abraham discover monotheism, and was his son Isaac a willing martyr? Not until the ancient interpreters set to work. Poring over every little detail in the Bible’s stories, prophecies, and laws, they let their own theological and imaginative inclinations radically transform the Bible’s very nature. Their sometimes surprising interpretations soon became the generally accepted meaning. These interpretations, and not the mere words of the text, became the Bible in the time of Jesus and Paul or the rabbis of the Talmud.
Drawing on such sources as the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jewish apocrypha, Hellenistic writings, long-lost retellings of Bible stories, and prayers and sermons of the early church and synagogue, Kugel reconstructs the theory and methods of interpretation at the time when the Bible was becoming the bedrock of Judaism and Christianity. Here, for the first time, we can witness all the major transformations of the text and recreate the development of the Bible “As It Was” at the start of the Common era--the Bible as we know it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this engaging study, Kugel, who teaches Hebrew literature at Harvard and at Bar Ilan University in Israel, focuses on the art of biblical interpretation in the years between 200 B.C.E. and 100 C.E. Kugel contends that the interpretations of Torah that emerged during these years provided the fundamental meanings of these books that later Jewish and Christian scholars have transmitted through history. In an introductory section, Kugel argue that biblical interpreters during this 200-year period made four assumptions about interpretation: the Bible was a "fundamentally cryptic document"; "Scripture constitutes one great Book of Instruction, and is a fundamentally relevant text"; the Bible's various parts are in harmony with one another; "all of Scripture is somehow divinely sanctioned." Kugel then selects several excerpts from the Torah, from the Genesis account of Creation to the story of Balaam's ass in the book of Numbers, and demonstrates how a variety of interpreters used these principles to establish the meaning of particular texts. For example, in his discussion of the Garden of Eden story, Kugel lists examples from a variety of ancient texts to show that early interpretations of the story read the serpent as Satan, a meaning that has been transmitted to the modern world. Well-written and informed, Kugel's book is a fascinating account of the ways in which the power of interpretation determines literary meaning.
