Reading the Bible, without Apologies

By BEZALEL STERN

HOW TO READ THE BIBLE
A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now
By James Kugel
848 pages. Free Press. $35.

In the traditional Jewish world, I have found, the vast majority of rabbis, scholars, and layman take one of two approaches to modern biblical scholarship. The first, and by far more prevalent approach to the problems and inconsistencies lacing the Bible, is to simply ignore them. (One acquaintance put this approach to me succinctly recently, when he said, “Biblical critics may have science, archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics on their side, but I have religion on mine.”)

The second approach, more laudable, perhaps, but arguably just as flawed as the first, is to say that biblical scholarship can, in fact, be consistent with the claims it strives to debunk. There are many biblical apologists within the ranks of traditional Judaism, especially among its more liberal members. The major problem with biblical apology, however, is that at its core it is all too often just that: apologetics. Trying to fit square pegs into round holes may be an intellectually pleasing exercise, but in this case, at least, trying to fit the ideas of modern biblical scholarship into the mold of traditional Judaism (and, indeed, Christianity) belies the very nature of what the former is striving to achieve.

There seems to be little wiggle room for those would-be traditionalist Jews who refuse to blind themselves to some of the relatively indisputable proofs of the modern biblical critic. Enter James Kugel. In How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, his epic overview of the Hebrew Bible, Kugel, an observant Jew as well as a former professor of Classical Hebrew Literature at Harvard (he now teaches at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where he moved in 2003) strives to create meaning in a Bible stripped of its divine mantel.

Kugel’s lengthy but highly readable book traces a parallel path of the Bible from the first words of Genesis to the final stories of the Prophets. The first, what he calls the interpretations of the “ancient interpreters,” are, in many cases, the more familiar ones to us. These interpretations, Kugel explains, written and expounded from around 200 B.C.E., have colored the next two millennia’s reading and understanding of the Bible. The ancient interpreters came to the text, Kugel asserts, with preconceived notions about both its relevance and its infallibility. Therefore, if there were apparent contradictions within the Bible (for example, one must, depending on which book of the Torah one turns to, both burn and boil the Paschal lamb), those contradictions are meant to give one a deeper understanding of both the text itself and the divinity behind that text (thus, in this case, a later source, explaining that the Paschal lamb is to be "boiled" in fire).

The second strain of Biblical understanding, in Kugel’s view, is that of the modern Biblical scholars, those thinkers who, beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries looked for the Bible "as it was," or, in other words, before the ancient interpreters could get their hands on it. These scholars systematically rejected the a priori divinity and infallibility of the text, saw contradictions for what they were and, most famously, were unafraid to propose multiple-authorship of the text.

Kugel addresses the ancient interpreters' positions on a good many sections of the Bible and then explains, in many instances, what caused them to (mis)interpret the text in the way that they did. Then, Kugel analyzes the modern biblical scholars' approach to the same passages.

The results are both astounding and predictable. Kugel’s readings of the Bible uniformly side with the modern Biblical scholar. Passages of the Bible are seen to be misplaced. Biblical texts are often immoral, Biblical characters—seen in Jewish and Christian tradition as veritable saints—are often nefarious villains and rogues. Kugel, throughout the book, sides squarely with the most tenacious of the modern Biblical scholars, Orthodox credentials be damned.

Kugel does so both consciously and conspicuously, and, for both, he should be lauded.

At one point in his tome, he explains that “the quandary in which modern scholars (and those who know their work) find themselves derives precisely from their straddling two positions at once. On the one hand, they feel they have to do away with all of ancient biblical interpretation… These no longer seem axiomatically true, and besides, for reasons of simple intellectual honesty, such people are unwilling to hide from everything we now know about the historical circumstances of the Bible’s composition and the true meaning of its words. On the other hand, they still wish to preserve the idea of the Bible and the traditional role it has played in their religion. The result is always an elaborate, and often quite elegant, apologetic—but an apologetic nonetheless.” And an apologetic is just what Kugel seeks to avoid.

The book, then, turns into what amounts to an essential primer in modern biblical scholarship. Well, 35 of its chapters do. Ironically, it is the 36th chapter, entitled “After Such Knowledge,” which explores the questions of keeping faith in Judeo-Christian religion with the knowledge that its founding document is both man-made and error-ridden, that becomes the most controversial. One well-known (if not entirely well-admired) critic, writing in a prominent newspaper, exclaimed that, after 35 chapters of hard-ridden biblical scholarship, no apologetics can bring that ole’ time religion back. Kugel, on the other hand, seems to believe that he will be misrepresented as an ole’ time apologetic, writing that "I have some premonition that" reviews "will appear somewhere… conveniently skipping over the first thirty-five chapters of this book in order to concentrate on (and misrepresent) the thirty-sixth."

Kugel may be right, but if a reviewer does decide to ignore either the first breadth of the book or its final 30 pages, he will be doing both himself and his readers a great disservice. For, after all is said and done, modern Biblical criticism has been sketched out before. It is true that Kugel does a superb job at explaining how the Bible came to be the way it was, and why it has been interpreted in various ways over the millennia. But it is only in his denouement, where Kugel’s religious philosophy, his take on how to find spirituality and religion in a man-made Bible, that the truly radical idea of this book takes hold.

Kugel conjectures, in his book’s conclusion, that in Judaism, at least, “Scripture is ultimately valued not as history, nor as theology, nor even as the great, self-sufficient corpus of divine utterances” but instead the “basic divine commandment” of loving and serving God. “With such a purpose foremost, the Bible’s original component texts easily lent themselves to flexible reinterpretation.”

In other words, Kugel is arguing here for a Bible created by man, a Text that should be viewed as Divine simply because it has divine aspirations. To be sure, his argument is radical, and it may even be flawed. But, in making it, Kugel courageously refuses to bow to the pressure of either apologetics or ignorance, and at the same time allows himself to admit that the Bible, because of the generations of readers who continually molded and reinterpreted it, has a power and significance that is far greater than the sum of its parts.