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What our customer's say!

"A terrific tool for reading the Bible.", "How to Read the Bible..." is a terrific tool in helping an individual understand what he/she is reading in the Bible.

"How to Read the Bible", This is a truly excellent reference book for anyone interested in the history of Biblical interpretation. Indeed, the book might more accurately be called "How the Bible has been Read," since for any given section, it gives an overview of traditional readings, both Christian and Jewish, followed by recent scholarship and biblical studies. The latter includes advances in linguistic and archeological scholarship. Kugel writes in a clear conversational style, the product, no doubt of years of university teaching.

"A Catholic Priest View", Though I have only read about a hundred and fifty pages, I have found Kugel's scholarship outstanding and his writing clear and easy. As a catholic priest it has been a wonderful exposure to good Jewish thought and scholarship. I have found the contrast between the ancient inperpreters and modern scholars extremely helpful. I would be more conversant with modern scholars and not so clear on the more traditional. It is a great help to interpret sections of the Hebrew Bible.

Rev. Joseph Madden

"An assesible guide to the meaning of the bible", This book attempts to integrate both traditional and modern views of the bible. It does this well. It creates layers of meaning that transcend the theological and is well worth reading for those not immersed in a particular theological approach to the meaning of this complex book

""How to Read the Bible"", Well researched and written book. Understandable by layman as well as biblical scholar. Most enlightening and informative.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"religious skeptic", As professor of biblical studies and theology I want to express my gratitude to James Kugel, the author of "How to Read the Bible." This is a work that is easy to read and to digest, both for lay people and scholars. The book's scholarship is impeccable and presented without excessive professional jargon so typical of other similar works. It is truly amazing to hear an orthodox Jewish writer backing modern scholarship and openly disdaining fundamentalism. As so many of us who began with a literal understanding of the Bible and have since then graduated to appreciate the work of literary critics and archaeologists who have brought us to a more realistic understanding of scriptures, I cannot help but hear filtering through the author's work a certain amount of nostalgia for having had to give up the image of the God of his youth whom he worshiped and in whom he trusted. Kugel, while disdaining fundamentalism tries to hold on to that old God of pre-critical biblical scholarship. It is in this domain that he is not very successful. His is an attempt at holding on to minimal inspiration the Bible can be credited with, but in the end he really is not able to cogently show where to find it. He suggests that despite the Bible's adopted and adapted Near Eastern myths and partially plagiarized law codes, etc., there is holiness shining through its pages. This holiness still inspires many people and leads them to love their neighbor and their "imagined" God. Unfortunately one cannot have it both ways. And so where Kugel admiringly succeeds in elucidating the Bible to its readers in a modern scientific manner, he fails, in my opinion, to make the old God's importance live on into the 21st century.

"Remarkably accessible account of modern scholarship about the Hebrew Bible", James L. Kugel is a retired Harvard professor of Hebrew. He is an Orthodox Jew who now lives in Jerusalem.

In this remarkably accessible book, Kugel provides a detailed survey of modern biblical scholarship about the Hebrew Bible. In abundance of detail and thoroughness, Kugel's book far surpasses Richard Elliott Friedman's book _Who Wrote the Bible_.

However, Kugel sees modern biblical scholarship about the Hebrew Bible as irreconcilable with the ancient interpreters of biblical texts. He sets forth and explains four key assumptions that the ancient interpreters made about biblical texts. He claims that modern biblical scholarship about the Hebrew Bible seriously undercuts those four assumptions. Kugel concludes that modern biblical scholarship has "reduc[ed] Scripture to the level of any ordinary, human composition" (sic, page 667). Kugel's conclusion strikes me as being basically accurate as far as it goes. But Kugel does not celebrate the supposed victory of modern biblical scholarship in "reducing Scripture to the level of any ordinary, human composition," as I would. On the contrary, he holds out for celebrating the four key assumptions of the ancient interpreters instead.

However, as careful as Kugel is, he does not seem to allow for the possibility of studying Scripture as the phenomenological record written by humans about the human experience of "extraordinary reality" (page 683). As Kugel notes, "Such encounters are consistently represented in the Bible as frightening" (page 683). The human authors represented the apprehension of extraordinary reality in such encounters as encounters with the divine and personified the divine as the deity. Today Jungians would characterize such encounters with extraordinary reality as encounters with the Self (capitalized to differentiate it from the ordinary ego-consciousness, the "self" in lowercase letters). The Self (capitalized) is part of the human psyche, as is ego-consciousness or the self (lowercase). So people who set out to become the familiar servants of the divine, to use Kugel's apt characterization, can be understood as establishing an ego-Self axis within their psyches, or as at least attempting to establish an ego-Self axis. It is worthwhile and important to establish an ego-Self axis in our psyches.

Now, Eric Voegelin writes about the transcendent ground of being, so we should note that the transcendent ground of being is not the Self, nor is the Self the transcendent ground of being.

--Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)

"Not for dummies", At first glance, a book titled "How to Read the Bible" would seem like one of those "for Dummies" books that offers simple explanations to an often mysterious tome. It is quickly apparent that James Kugel's book does not actually fit into this category: instead, it is a much more in-depth and insightful look into the Bible (which is to say the Jewish Bible, or to Christians, the Old Testament).

The overall premise of this book is that through the course of history, there have been two general methods of reading the Bible, and that these two methods are often in conflict. First, there is the method of the ancient interpreters, which despite its name, was the dominant methods until relatively recently. For these interpreters, Biblical reading was based on four general assumptions: (1) the Bible is cryptic; that is, what it seems to say may be different from it actually means; (2) the Bible is a book of lessons for readers in their own day; it is not merely a historical text; (3) the Bible is perfect and without contradiction; any seeming error can be explained (assumption #1 is helpful with this); (4) the Bible is the divine word of God.

Modern interpretation, which really began in the nineteenth century, does not adhere to the ancient assumptions. In particular, the modern interpreter views the Bible as a text written by men, with all the flaws that are associated with mortals. This interpreter views the Bible in the larger context of the ancient world to determine how it was constructed.

Take, for example, the story of Jacob and Esau. An ancient interpreter would view the stories of this brotherly conflict as leading to the general hostility between Israel and Edom, the two nations that the siblings were the founders of. A modern interpreter would view things in the opposite direction: to give historical justification to the Israel/Edom conflict, the Jacob/Esau legend was composed.

Obviously, the modern interpretation of the Bible can cause problems for certain devout people, and the ancient method has been far from retired, particularly among fundamentalists. Kugel himself is an orthodox Jew who has his issues with the modern method, but overall, he presents a balance view, showing the flaws in both sides.

Think about how much trouble we Americans have with deciding what the First or Second Amendments of the Constitution mean. Depending on political bent, we derive our own meaning from these passages. And these amendments were written in English, only two centuries ago. Furthermore, we have plenty of supporting documentary material from the era it was written. Yet, even now, we can't reach a consensus on what the right to bear arms or have a church-state separation means. If we can't even agree on that, how much more difficult is it to definitively interpret a text that was written more than two millennia back in another language that didn't even have punctuation or vowels.

It is inarguable that the Bible is the most important book in history, with an influence that extends over thousands of years and, at this point, all over the world. Whatever your faith - Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Wiccan or other - or even if you're a Deist, agnostic or atheist, it is worth your while to know the Bible (even if you don't believe in it). Kugel's book is not a fast read (it is too packed with information to read at a quick pace), but it is a fascinating one and a great way to learn a lot about the Bible.


"Superb Study of Old Testament Scholarship. Buy it Now!", `How to Read the Bible' by the former Starr Professor of Hebrew at Harvard University is about as different from the similarly titled `How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth' by New Testament professor, Gordon D. Fee and Old Testament professor, Douglas Stuart, and still be a superb read for anyone, especially lay readers, who are interested in understanding the Hebrew scriptures.
Yes, this book deals exclusively with Professor Kugel's specialty, the Old Testament, while the Fee / Stuart book deals with both Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
Another huge difference is that Professor Kugel not only advises us on how to read the scriptures today, he outlines how they have been read since they were first gathered together, sometime around the return from the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE. The big surprise to us lay readers is that these scriptures were not taken as the perfect inspiration from God, with every statement literally, or at least figuratively true, given the right amount of interpretation. Professor Kugel does not make this comparison, but I suspect that the attitude toward much of the scriptures was very similar to the Achaeans' (early Greeks) attitude toward Homer's `Iliad' and `Odyssey', as national epic poems. Even without modern archeology, it would not have been difficult to detect anachronisms and downright errors when, for example, a Psalm attributed to King David describes events which happened 500 years after his death.
The attitude of `high reverence' for the scriptures developed shortly after the last book, `Daniel', was added to the canon, the era of the last prophet Ezra, and the Maccabean revolt. This fits remarkably into the picture we have of the state of Judaism at the time of Jesus, and Jesus criticisms of the priests and Pharisees for their excessive dedication to a strict reading of the scriptures and the intense interpretation to which the scriptures, especially the law of the Torah was put.
The overall plan of the book is based on instructing us on how to read the scriptures `by example'. Of the 36 chapters, all but the first and the last deal with books, such as Psalms, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel and individual episodes from books, such as chapters on the episodes of Cain and Able, Noah and the flood, and the tower of Babel from Genesis.
The first chapter introduces us, in a novel fashion, to the rise of modern Bible criticism over the last 200 years, by recounting the trial of Professor Charles Augustus Briggs by the ruling body of the American Presbyterian church, for making strongly positive comments about the type of scholarship he saw in Germany, where the strong tradition of Luther fueled critical studies of both old and new Testaments.
The last chapter summarizes all the points detailed in the individual studies throughout the rest of the book.
It is easy for those whose Christian beliefs run to the more conservative to dismiss this book and its findings out of hand. For those, I may point out that Professor Kugel is a devout Orthodox! Jew, now living in Jerusalem, who has no problem maintaining his faith and his analytical approach to his subject.
For the lay reader, Kugel's text is eminently readable, as almost all the scholarly impedimenta are relegated to endnotes and the usual index to the scriptures in an appendix. For the Christian reader, there is much here to enlighten. Even Luther had deep interest in much of the Old Testament, especially Genesis and Psalms. It would be really interesting to read Luther's commentary on Genesis in the light of Kugel's information.
If there is anything in this book which reaffirms my own inclinations to Bible study, it is the attention to external archeological information. This is most famously represented by the discovery, in the early 19th century, of the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, which has a flood episode which predates the writing of Genesis by almost a thousand years. And, many passages in Genesis' account of the flood seem to almost be copied idea for idea, from the Gilgamesh. This `borrowing' is made more plausible by the fact that while the sub-desert heights of Judea received very little rainfall, the delta of the Tigris - Euphrates probably floods quite often, albeit not as often as the dependable Nile.
Anyone with any interest at all in understanding the Old Testament really needs to read this book to have the advantage of the broadest possible perspective on issues regarding the origins and interpretation of these scriptures.




"Faith and Opinions", This is a fascinating book, especially for those of us who were forced to study the Bible in our youth, but given only one interpretation. I was raised in the Church of Christ, a conservative Protestant sect that does not consider itself a sect, but the one true church. We were taught the Bible from one point of view, and not allowed to deviate from that point of view by even one degree, or question its truth. There was no Biblical scholarship offered then, so it was with great pleasure that I read this book, for me an introduction to that discipline. I have no basis on which to criticize Mr. Kugel's scholarship, though I suspect it is exemplary, but I can say how much I appreciate his attitude: He has opinions, but is respectful of others'; he has strong beliefs, but accepts the fact that other people have equally strong but opposing beliefs. How rare it is to find someone able to be opinionated yet tolerant. He also writes clearly, and the book is in the main easily readable.
I would not recommend it to someone who doesn't know the Bible at all, but for anyone like me who knows only one view of it, it is a wonderful book. It concerns mostly the "Old" Testament, but anyone raised in the Christian religion will find it quite valuable. Read this book, and learn something about how the Bible came to be. Like it or not, the Bible is a huge part of our inherited Western culture, and this book helped me understand some of the ways it is interpreted, and misinterpreted, in a historical context.
Thank you, Mr. Kugel, for piquing my curiosity after forty years of disinterest.
Perry Silvey

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