The Ladder of Jacob: Ancient Interpretations of the Biblical Story of Jacob and His Children - Softcover

Kugel, James L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691141231 ISBN 13: 9780691141237

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Rife with incest, adultery, rape, and murder, the biblical story of Jacob and his children must have troubled ancient readers. By any standard, this was a family with problems. Jacob's oldest son Reuben is said to have slept with his father's concubine Bilhah. The next two sons, Simeon and Levi, tricked the men of a nearby city into undergoing circumcision, and then murdered all of them as revenge for the rape of their sister. Judah, the fourth son, had sexual relations with his own daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, jealous of their younger sibling Joseph, the brothers conspired to kill him; they later relented and merely sold him into slavery. These stories presented a particular challenge for ancient biblical interpreters. After all, Jacob's sons were the founders of the nation of Israel and ought to have been models of virtue.

In The Ladder of Jacob, renowned biblical scholar James Kugel retraces the steps of ancient biblical interpreters as they struggled with such problems. Kugel reveals how they often fixed on a little detail in the Bible's wording to "deduce" something not openly stated in the narrative. They concluded that Simeon and Levi were justified in killing all the men in a town to avenge the rape of their sister, and that Judah, who slept with his daughter-in-law, was the unfortunate victim of alcoholism.

These are among the earliest examples of ancient biblical interpretation (midrash). They are found in retellings of biblical stories that appeared in the closing centuries BCE--in the Book of Jubilees, the Aramaic Levi Document, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and other noncanonical works. Through careful analysis of these retellings, Kugel is able to reconstruct how ancient interpreters worked. The Ladder of Jacob is an artful, compelling account of the very beginnings of biblical interpretation.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"James Kugel is the expert in the history of biblical interpretation, and he offers a great introduction to and explanation of ancient exegesis of these parts of Genesis."--James VanderKam, University of Notre Dame

"A wonderful book. The chapters follow their subjects detail by detail with a kind of masterfully unpredictable logic, almost like a detective story."--David Stern, University of Pennsylvania

"James Kugel fuses immense learning with a poignant (yet wary) nostalgia for what he has called 'the God of old'. The Ladder of Jacob could be read side-by-side with Thomas Mann's Joseph tetralogy. Kugel, like Mann, belongs to authentic cultures now vanished or vanishing. Both novelist and scholar temper their ironies with wisdom and a sense of justice."--Harold Bloom, author of Jesus and Yahweh and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

About the Author

James L. Kugel, formerly Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, is Director of the Institute for the History of the Jewish Bible at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where he also serves as Professor of Bible. Kugel is the author of ten books, including The God of Old: Great Poems of the Bible and The Bible as It Was (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and the winner of the Grawemeyer Prize in Religion in 2001). He lives in Jerusalem.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0691141231
• ISBN 13: 9780691141237
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 280