I just finished reading James Kugel's 2007 book, How to Read the Bible, which received the Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award by by the Jewish Book Council. He argues that modern scholars read the Bible one way, and traditional religionists ("the interpreters") another. Anyone who is honest, he argues, would see that the modern scholars have the facts on their side. After you get a handle on that, you can still find some religious meaning in the "interpreted" Bible. See page 45: " ... I am a believer in the divine inspiration of Scripture and an inheritor of many of the traditions of ancient interpreters cited in this book ...."
Kugel writes: "What the modern biblical scholars say about the Bible is often not sublime or uplifting. Indeed, if they are right and what the Bible is really about is different authors with their particular interests and programs, if it has to do only with contradictory details and hunter-gatherer societies and folkloristic motifs, then why bother with it at all?" P. 57 (italics in original). He proceeds with detailed discussions of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the great flood, the tower of Babel, the call of Abraham, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Moses, the Psalms and the prophets, 773 pages in all, from this scholar, but written for the general reader. In each case, Kugel shows the wisdom of the approach taken by the modern scholar, by pointing out the bible authors' true concerns and contradictory details, and the defects of the traditional approaches to each story taken by the "interpreters."
I understand the idea of looking at each text with fresh eyes and listen to the evidence of the "plain sense" of the meaning of each text. And it is helpful to point out things from that evidence, such as the fact that when we get to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12 as a person in that culture he likely believed there were many gods. Kugel, at p. 91 (citing Josh. 24:2-3). With that in mind, it's not credible to say, as some of the "interpreters" say, that Abraham was the founder of monotheism. P. 103. That's not a point that should shake any believer's faith, that Yahweh called Abraham in a culture where people worshiped other gods (Josh. 24:2-3) and that in doing so Abraham may have retained certain ideas from the old religions. From a reading of the texts we can't be sure of what was in the mind of Abraham after he was called by Yahweh. (Catholics may refer to the Lord as Yahweh, and I realize that such naming is an issue for Jewish believers, and I mean no disrespect here. The OT naming of God is a large subject.) We do know that Abraham called on the name of Yahweh, and that he lived among the Canaanites, and I have posted on that. But Kugel missed the issue in his discussion of the call of Abraham. God is the central character in that narrative. Our Lord God is the central character of almost all of the books of the OT.
But I had a hard time finding the Lord in How to Read the Bible. Only in the last chapter do we hear of Kugel's support for his spiritual take on the message of the Bible, where he says, "...I really do not believe it is my business to try to second-guess the text's divine inspiration." P. 689. But the general reader gets the impression that this kind of second-guessing is a main theme of the book. Kugel would like us to grow up, deal with the evidence and stop living in the dream world of uncritical belief in the sublimity of biblical texts.
Kugel's view of scripture is too low for me. I found this review by William Kolbrener helpful:
Kugel’s hypothetical “unInterpreted Bible” is also a fantasy – the fantasy of modern biblical scholars. Not just from a post-modernist sensibility (which Kugel rightfully dismisses), but, from a perspective which ranges from Aristotle to Kuhn, from Milton to Wittgenstein, that understands that perceptions are never innocent of assumptions, and traditions of interpretation are always the vehicles for encountering texts. The mostly etiological (that is causal) interpretations of Kugel’s modern scholars may be elegant, clever and ordered, but such interpretations leave the Bible as simplistic, even simpleminded. Kugel claims that the ancient interpreters ignore the “plain sense” of Scripture and supply the “final and definitive interpretation,” but it’s really the explanations he advocates that provide final and definitive interpretations of the biblical text. In Kugel’s reading, it is predictably the heroic modern biblical scholar, from his (ostensibly) Archimedean vantage point, who provides the causal link that renders everything coherent and final.
Wiliam Kolbrener, "James Kugel and Me on How to Read the Bible," online blog post at . http://openmindedtorah.blogspot.com/2010/03/james-kugel-and-me-on-how-to-read-bible.html
March 13, 2010.
For me as an amateur the teaching of the Catholic church, in Dei Verbum and other church documents, has been a helpful source for guidance on how to strike a balance, learning from modern scholarship, but doing so with the idea that the scripture is the word of God written by human authors. Jesus quotes from Moses and Isaiah with boldness and confidence. The words of Jesus and the teaching of Dei Verbum give me confidence that after learning what we can from modern scholarship, the old interpretive study of the OT is a worthy endeavor.
In the next post, I will highlight a few things from Dei Verbum which have been helpful to me.
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