New in Paperback: How to Read the Bible
How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now
By James L. Kugel
Free Press, 2007
It’s a rare thing when any new book is actually worth the $20 (at least) the all now routinely cost, but a happy exception can be found in the newly-published paperback edition of James Kugel’s commentary on the Hebrew Bible, simply if grandiosely titled How to Read the Bible.
Kugel has been writing about the Hebrew Bible and explicating it for many years and many books (his The Bible as It Was is every bit as entertaining as this present volume, though not nearly as comprehensive) , but as he himself points out, the questions posed by scripture admit a lifetime of answers. In How to Read the Bible
, he consults the sacred texts, their ancient commentators, and many of their modern writers as well – a wide and disputatious company united by one common need:
When God first appeared to Abraham or Jacob, He was, by the Bible’s own testimony, the God of Old: He stepped through the curtain that divides ordinary from extraordinary reality, spoke for a minute or two, and then disappeared. Such encounters are consistently represented in the Bible as frightening; the normal human reaction to his appearance was that of the Israelites at Sinai, “When the people saw, they trembled and stood at a distance” (Exod. 20:18). And yet, along with fear, there was, at least for some, the desire – or perhaps more correctly, the perceived need – to meet the deity, to somehow maintain the vital, if dangerous, connection with Him.
The book is solidly printed and bound, rounded off with copious endnotes and generous maps, and best of all is Kugel himself, intelligent, good-humored, sometimes exasperated, always discerning. Through the labyrinth of exegetical details and sub-details, he leads his readers as the perfect guide, giving them for the price of a middling meal a feast to last a lifetime.
–Steve Donoghue
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