The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible - Hardcover

Kugel, James L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743235843 ISBN 13: 9780743235846

Publisher: Free Press, 2003

Synopsis

The God of the modern world -- all-powerful, all-knowing, invisible, and omnipresent -- has been a staple of Western civilization. Yet in this remarkable book, James Kugel shows that this God is not the same as the God of most of the Hebrew Bible, the God who appeared to Abraham, Moses, and other biblical heroes. That God, the "God of Old," was actually perceived in a very different way -- a way that has much to teach modern believers. James Kugel is renowned for his investigations into the history of the biblical era, a time beginning more than three thousand years ago, when the Bible's earliest parts first took shape. Now he goes even deeper, attempting to enter the spiritual world of ancient Israelites and see through their eyes God as they encountered him. The God of Old appeared to people unexpectedly; He was not sought out. Often He was not even recognized, at first mistaken for an ordinary human being. The realm of the divine was not as it is today -- a spiritual dimension set off from the material world. The spiritual and the material overlapped, and the realm of the dead was a real domain just beyond the world of the living. Ordinary reality was in constant danger of sliding into something else, something stark but oddly familiar. God was always standing just behind the curtain of the everyday world. Kugel suggests that this alternative spirituality is not simply an archaic relic, replaced by a "better" understanding. Kugel's picture of the God of Old has much to tell us about God's very nature, and about the encounter between Him and human beings in today's world. This is a book to treasure side by side with the Bible, and for years to come.

About this title

About the Authors

James L. Kugel is Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, and Professor of Bible Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He is the author of a number of books of biblical scholarship, including The Great Poems of the Bible (1999) and The Bible As It Was (1997). In 2001, Kugel was awarded the prestigious Gawemeyer Prize in Religion. He lives in Jerusalem, Israel, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

James L. Kugel is Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University and Visiting Professor of Bible Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

Reviews

Kugel (The Bible As It Was) again exerts his considerable command over a wide array of biblical texts and topics to provide a masterful survey of the way ancient Israelites understood God. Biblical texts written around the time of late Judaism, he says, tend to portray God as a universal, omnipresent, but remote deity. Not so with the earliest biblical texts; the Genesis stories about angels or the Exodus commandments against the worship of false gods depict God as a deity who is close to this world and to humanity. Far from being remote, this God hears the cries of the victims of oppression and responds in physical ways by sending the divine presence. So close is the God of old to the people of Israel that this God breaks through the thin veil dividing the spiritual and material world to reveal itself. Thus, this God, according to Kugel, gets close enough to Moses that Moses hears God proclaim the name of the Lord. The prohibition against idols indicates that this God is a different kind of God than those in surrounding cultures, one who appears in a privileged moment and space not confined to a statue. In glimmering prose, Kugel leads us on a mesmerizing tour of the differences between early and modern conceptions of God.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kugel, a professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard, delves into the Bible to find the answer to this question: Why is the God of the ancient texts, who walked and talked with the patriarch, so different from the more distant God of today? When did the change take place and why? Kugel suggests that there was a time when Israelites perceived God as near and dear, but that, during the Babylonian exile, he took on a more omniscient role. Named angels such as Gabriel and Michael then came to the fore, preserving a holy personification. Less clear is Kugel's effort to explain his passion for understanding the ancient worship of God in terms of something he calls "the Project," which he defines as a commitment to getting to the bottom of a particular experience, "to see how far it goes." Unlike many biblical scholars, Kugel has an engaging writing style, and although he tends to meander a bit through the centuries, his enthusiasm and insight will attract anyone interested in Old Testament studies. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: The Project

My field is the study of ancient texts. I have spent the better part of my life working on them, mostly texts from the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other writings of the ancient Near East, but also Hebrew texts from the middle ages. One thing I have learned through my years of studying is that authors, although they are writing on some specific topic and for some definite purpose, often end up telling more than they set out to. Especially if a text is of any length or substance, it can open a window onto the inner world of the person who wrote it, revealing something crucial about how that person saw and understood things in general. Such information is often far more valuable than whatever it was the author had consciously set out to write about. The reason is that the author himself, and all the things he thought were obvious or took for granted, are by now long gone. The text is the only thing we have that will allow us to enter that lost world and, with some effort, restore its way of understanding, of seeing. The trick, of course, is to know how to allow a text to tell everything it knows about its author and his world.

This afternoon, I was in the library studying a poem written by a Hebrew poet of the middle ages. It is a poem about the soul, and reading it, I thought again of the Project. People in medieval times had such a vivid sense of their own souls! We often accuse ourselves nowadays of self-absorption, self-obsession, and there is more than a little truth to this. But in medieval times, even though the self in which they were absorbed was quite different, people were as aware as we are today, perhaps even more so, of what was going on deep inside themselves. They sometimes said that they felt their soul was "sick" and needed tender caring. They said they felt it, felt it, crying out in distress. Like a lovesick maiden (though, one might add, with the intensity of a dog chained to a stake), it was sobbing and moaning in its frantic desire to be reunited with its Creator. Some of this may have been literary convention, poetic boilerplate, but behind that must have been a certain reality in their world that has disappeared from our own. I thought of the dusty treatises I had once consulted, with their prescriptions for the soul's care and betterment, a diet of devotion and medicinal herbs, proper readings, and a path of penitence to bring the soul back to its native strength.

Outside the library, one comes to one's senses: the traffic, the brightly lit stores. But still, always lurking, is the Project. What is the Project? It is not mine in particular; many people have worked at it. Perhaps it began for me at the time of the Vietnam War, or perhaps even before that. Events conspire to put you on the spot, to cause you to make some fateful decision. And just then, facing life's ugly, jagged teeth, you suddenly feel a certain calm and a sense of the realness of things that isn't there most of the time, the realness of yourself as one distinct person, and certain ideas go through your head. A few years pass, perhaps. Then, on a day that you have set aside, sitting alone on a park bench above some municipal lake, you try to smooth things out in your mind, until the surface of the lake subtly starts to seem like an image of your mind, and once again you have a different sense of things. It is then that the Project can present itself most forcefully, reemerging from wherever it may have been waiting. The Project is: to get to the bottom of this, to see how far it goes; not to deceive oneself, not to be sentimental or weak, but to see how far one can go.

It can take you very far, even fill up a lifetime. Oddly, for me, it led eventually to (among other places) a most unlikely setting, the library. The reason is implied in what I have already said. I did not invent the idea of the soul, or of God, I was not the first to write about Him. Those who were, and those who followed them, lived long ago, and now all that remains of their world is those texts that they left behind. At first they seem so dry and dead, but if they are read in the right way -- with sympathy and imagination, no condescension, only a relentless desire to enter -- they can indeed come back to life, and their world, their way of seeing, can let us in to take the measure of things that are strange.

Copyright © 2003 by James Kugel

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743235843
• ISBN 13: 9780743235846
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288