How To Read the Bible: A Guide to the Scripture, Then and Now.

Kugel, James L.

ISBN 10: 074323586X / ISBN 13: 9780743235860

Published by Free Press, New York, 2007

About this Item

Octavo in dust jacket, xxiv, 819 pp., maps, b/w photos, notes, indexes "In How to Read the Bible, Harvard professor James Kugel leads the reader chapter by chapter through the "quiet revolution" of recent biblical scholarship, showing time and again how radically the interpretations of today's researchers differ from what people have always thought. The story of Adam and Eve, it turns out, was not originally about the "Fall of Man," but about the move from a primitive, hunter-gatherer society to a settled, agricultural one. As for the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah, and Jacob and Esau, these narratives were not, at their origin, about individual people at all but, rather, explanations of some feature of Israelite society as it existed centuries after these figures were said to have lived. Dinah was never raped -- her story was created by an editor to solve a certain problem in Genesis. In the earliest version of the Exodus story, Moses probably did not divide the Red Sea in half; instead, the Egyptians perished in a storm at sea. Whatever the original Ten Commandments might have been, scholars are quite sure they were different from the ones we have today. What's more, the people long supposed to have written various books of the Bible were not, in the current consensus, their real authors: David did not write the Psalms, Solomon did not write Proverbs or Ecclesiastes; indeed, there is scarcely a book in the Bible that is not the product of different, anonymous authors and editors working in different periods.Such findings pose a serious problem for adherents of traditional, Bible-based faiths. Hiding from the discoveries of modern scholars seems dishonest, but accepting them means undermining much of the Bible's reliability and authority as the word of God. What to do? In his search for a solution, Kugel leads the reader back to a group of ancient biblical interpreters who flourished at the end of the biblical period. Far from naïve, these interpreters consciously set out to depart from the original meaning of the Bible's various stories, laws, and prophecies -- and they, Kugel argues, hold the key to solving the dilemma of reading the Bible today. " from flap copy.

Seller Inventory # 103780

Bibliographic Details

• Title: How To Read the Bible: A Guide to the Scripture, Then and Now.
• Publisher: Free Press, New York
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 074323586X
• ISBN 13: 9780743235860
• Binding: Hardbound
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

A reader's companion to the Bible draws on classic interpretations as well as modern scholarship to explain how the Bible may also be a metaphorical reflection of anthropological history, in a guide that covers such topics as the fates of Israelites who remained behind in Canaan and the correlation between the commandments and the Code of Hammurabi. 30,000 first printing.

About the Author

James L. Kugel, Starr Professor of Hebrew at Harvard from 1982 to 2003, now lives in Jerusalem. A specialist in the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation, he is the author of The God of Old and The Great Poems of the Bible. His course on the Bible was regularly one of the two most popular at Harvard, enrolling more than nine hundred students.