Luke Ford

David Plotz writes Sept. 16, 2007 in the New York Times:

All these interpretations for the binding of Isaac — and still others — can be found in James L. Kugel’s “How to Read the Bible,” an awesome, thrilling and deeply strange book. Kugel, an emeritus professor of Hebrew literature at Harvard and, mark this, an Orthodox Jew, aims to prove that you can read the Bible rationally without losing God. He sets himself the monumental task of guiding readers all the way through the Jewish scriptures (the Old Testament, more or less, if you’re a Christian) and reclaiming the Bible from both the literalists and the skeptics.

So, how to read the Bible? Kugel proposes two different ways. First, he shows us the Bible as it was read by the “ancient interpreters,” writers who lived in the period a couple of hundred years before and after the birth of Jesus, even as the Bible itself was being codified. Their way of reading the Bible — their assumption of its inerrancy, their belief that scripture teaches moral lessons, and their faith in divine authorship — is the way many of us still read it today. Second, Kugel leads us through the Bible as it’s understood by modern scholars, who for the past 150 years have used archaeology, linguistics, history, anthropology and all the other tools of science to excavate the truth about the Good Book. Kugel seems to have begun “How to Read the Bible” with the notion of giving equal weight to his two methods, but he soon sidelines the ancient interpreters and focuses on the exceedingly provocative modern scholarship. Though Kugel surely did not intend this, in its own way, his book proves as devastating to the godly cause as any of the pro-atheism books that have been dominating the best-seller lists in recent months.

It’s not news to anyone — at least anyone who reads the Bible even a wee bit skeptically — that the book is chock-full of contradictions and impossible events. Instead of carping snidely about this, in the style of a college bull session, Kugel gives us a magisterial, erudite, yet remarkably witty tour through the research. If reading the Bible demands a suspension of disbelief — Moses turned the Nile to blood? Joshua stopped the sun at noon? Samson killed 1,000 men with the jawbone of an ass? — then “How to Read the Bible” will prompt a suspension of belief. Some of the territory Kugel covers will be familiar to lay Bible doubters already. He reviews the “documentary hypothesis,” which demonstrates pretty conclusively that the first five books of the Bible were not written by a single person (Moses, according to tradition), but actually cobbled together from four, or maybe five, different writers. Kugel points out the Bible’s plagiarism from earlier, non-Israelite sources: laws nicked from Hammurabi; chunks of the Noah flood story lifted from the Epic of Gilgamesh; prophecies of Ezekiel inspired by Middle Eastern temples. He even implicates the Ten Commandments, which were apparently derived in part from ancient Hittite treaties.

Orthodox Rabbi Gil Student posts:

…While Prof. Kugel is somewhat vague about his own beliefs, and they are not particularly relevant anyway, the strong even if unintended implication given by himself (p. 45) and the NY Times (link) in calling Prof. Kugel an Orthodox Jew is that his suggested reconciliations of tradition and modern scholarship are acceptable to Orthodox Jews. I have no interest in being the Orthodoxy Police or interrogating people about the details of their beliefs. However, as is clear from both the review and the book itself, these approaches contradict one of the fundamental principles of Judaism. Even if one observes Jewish ritual according to Orthodox standards, one cannot be accurately called Orthodox if one does not accept certain basic beliefs, Torah from Sinai being one of them. Kugel’s suggested approaches go beyond the Conservative belief of Torah from Heaven but not Sinai and simply relegate the Bible to a collection of unoriginal and politically motivated human stories that were later interpreted as having a Divine message. That isn’t Orthodox by any stretch of the imagination. Even Marc Shapiro, whose book on the fundamental principles of Judaism argues for a broad definition of Orthodoxy, would agree–in the unlikely event that he would agree to publicly comment on this matter–that there is no way to fit Prof. Kugel’s suggested approaches into Orthodoxy. I’m not saying that there should be any practical repercussion to Prof. Kugel or that people should start picketing his home or banning his book. I’m just suggesting that, in the interest of honest reporting, he should write a letter to the NY Times and explain that the beliefs about the Bible suggested in his book are distinctly non-Orthodox. And in the future, he can refer to himself as an observant Jew, like Sen. Joseph Lieberman does, so as not to even accidentally mislead people about Orthodox Judaism.

One thing I found throughout the book is the confidence in the methodologies of literary scholarship. Perhaps I am biased because of my background in math, but I find that the liberal arts are taken way too seriously by their adherents. They are full of assumptions and guesses, and in the end cannot actually prove anything. Folks, this isn’t science. Stop pretending that it is.

On another subject, I found the appendix to his book, which is titled "Apologetics and ‘Biblical Criticism Lite’" and is published only on his website, to be quite a comment on his mindset on these matters. In this appendix, he basically says that anyone who disagrees with him on these issues is an apologist. He says it nicely and relatively respectfully, but in such a way that it is impossible to argue with him. Anyone who says anything to the contrary is understandably influenced by outside factors, such as his emotions, and unable to think clearly about these issues. This is a technique used frequently by skeptical bloggers as well. Not very impressive and, frankly, not very respectful either. Just say that you disagree and don’t try to read minds. Maybe, just maybe, you have some hidden biases as well. (Here is a link to his appendix but be forewarned that the views there are quite non-Orthodox: link.)

And on another subject, I found it interesting that Prof. Kugel seems to accept the arguments of James Hoffmeier et al against the Biblical Minimalists that there was an historical exodus from Egypt, albeit smaller than the one described in the Bible (pp. 207-208).