The Bible as It Was

...if understanding fails, it is not the fault of the text but of the interpreter, who has not sufficiently inquired into every word and letter of this endlessly giving text...

...This living conversation with the text continued in the oral discussions and the literary compositions of Judaism and Christianity...

...This one-volume edition is obviously shorter than Ginzberg's seven volumes (six of legends, one of references), even though Kugel promises a scholarly edition that should run to several volumes...

...Better and more representative are his remarks about Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry...

...Not only is this an impressive--and modestly underplayed--display of erudition, but it provides students at every level of sophistication the materials for the analysis of comparative interpretive traditions...

...Thus (in an example not included by Kugel but well known to Catholics), Augustine's cryptic comment on Jacob's deception of Isaac, "non est mendacium sed mysterium" ("It wasn't a lie but a mystery...

...Fifty pages of an appendix on "Terms and Sources" provides a helpful guide to the readers for whom Artapanus and Eupolemus are as unfamiliar as Jannes and Jambres...

...the Bible is not a report from the past but a message to the present...

...As Kugel acknowledges, his collection of interpretive materials bears some resemblance to Louis Ginzberg's anthology, The Legends of the Jews (Johns Hopkins Press...

...Kugel is a talented teacher, who successfully leads his readers through an imaginative reconstruction of the logic at work at every stage from text to traditions...

...In his first chapter ("The World of Ancient Biblical Interpreters") Kugel establishes the framework for the materials he has collected...

...First, the Bible is "a fundamentally cryptic document": What it says and what it means may not always coincide, but what it says is always a pointer guiding the interpreter to what it means...

...Kugel notes how in spite of their many superficial disagreements, all ancient interpreters shared four basic premises...

...the Bible can, however, be read in such fashion as to mean these and many other things popularly thought to be contained within the texts themselves but in fact deduced from the texts by a process of interpretation and then "found" in the text by subsequent readers...

...Such premises lead naturally to a blurring of the boundaries between authoritative text and interpretation, as well as to the expansion of the biblical tradition...

...No rough stuff or higher criticism, merely the joy of mucking about with the Masoretic text and trying to figure out how the Septuagint and Vulgate got from the Hebrew to their versions, which often looked more like interpretations than translations...

...u t t i n g these first t h r e e premises into operation means that biblical heroes, even when they seem to be doing something wicked, are really-when properly understood--doing something virtuous...

...Christian readers will naturally be drawn to the various narrative texts, but they may profit most from the chapters called "At Mt...

...Kugel concludes this volume with an afterword that sketches how the rise of critical biblical scholarship involved a completely different set of premises concerning the nature of the Bible, and became dominant not only by characterizing this entire long history of interpretation as erroneous, but by offering itself as the only reasonable way to approach the texts...

...As such, it not only reminds us of a deeper and broader tradition of biblical study than the profoundly amnesiac version called the historical-critical, but provides a sense of what that older tradition might still offer...

...How do we learn that God revealed both written and oral Torah to Moses on Sinai...

...We could have used James Kugel's book, which engages the reader in just this sort of intellectual exercise, but does so without demanding knowledge of any ancient languages, and in a prose so sweetly reasonable that daunting scholarship gets spooned out as the delight of discovery...

...There are more important differences...

...At the most superficial level, The Bible as It Was is an anthology of ancient interpretations of Torah--the first five books of the Bible--drawn from Jewish and Christian sources...

...On the face of it, the text is erroneous, for many later biblical figures live much longer lives than 120 years (including Noah who lived to 950...

...Thus 2 Peter 2:5 can say, "God preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness," even though the Bible as such never said that, and the early Christian epistle 1 Clement 7:6 can declare, "Noah preached repentance, and those who obeyed were saved...

...As the future awaits the present, so there is something in looking that enables us to recognize our own soul....This is what we can at last call proof of an American religion...

...In a lesser writer that would have been a slack and irresponsible position, but here Alfred Kazin, who not only knew American literature through and through but lived through it, makes literature, for the moment, something to believe in...

...Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' brings together earth, water, and sky into a wonder of space that alternates time now and time future like the tidal rise and fall of the East River...

...Paul Elie is a frequent contributor to Commonweal...

...It is his constant call to himself to 'merge and merge again'--by no means just as a lover--that has won me all my life to Whitman's rapture here," he explains...

...As such, it offers rich resources for the study of comparative scriptural interpretation...

...In a sense, he believed all the things in this book--the best that has been thought and said about God by the great American writers...

...What did he believe...

...At a deeper level, this book invites readers into a world that is imaginatively shaped by the reading and study of the Bible as a source of wisdom and life...

...Why do we assume Cain was wicked and Abel good...

...Why is homosexuality associated with Sodom...

...Why do we identify the serpent with the devil...

...As Lincoln felt about America, so Kazin felt about American literature...

...Some such readers were translators, which is why the Septuagint, the Targums, and Jerome's Vulgate often expand the Hebrew text or turn it according to various exegetical traditions...

...Most of all, Kugel differs from Ginzberg in the way he shows how the "legends" developed, not by random imagination, but by means of careful exegetical deduction...

...Interpretation of the Hebrew text was necessary from the first, not only because changing circumstances demanded adaptation, but also because the language of the Bible was itself so peculiarly susceptible of multiple readings...

...Already the Septuagint translated, "my spirit shall not remain with these men," making the statement apply to the generation of the flood...

...How did Jacob predict the coming of the Messiah...

...His feeling for literature amounted to religious mysticism...

...Sinai" (on Exodus 19-24), "Worship in the Wilderness" (Leviticus I to Numbers 10), and "The Life of Torah" (Deuteronomy 1-34), for these sections offer splendid insight into the ways in which classical Judaism grounded itself in the legal texts of Torah and authorized its own rich tradition of interpretation...

...Because the interpreters were often disputants within the same symbolic world of Torah, their interpretations helped create a scriptural world that was larger than the texts themselves...

...Between the third century B.C...

...So what does the text mean...

...He does not engage in any sustained polemic Commonweal 2 8 July 17, 1998...

...Third, Scripture is "perfect and perfectly harmonious": Every part of the Bible can be read to understand every other part, for despite having many writers, it has a single voice...

...Kugel provides a much wider range of interpretive options, including in his repertoire apocrypha (notably Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon), rabbinic midrashim, apocalyptic (the Enoch literature, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, sybilline oracles), Jewish sectarian writings (especially impressive examples from Qumran), Hellenistic Jewish literature (not only Philo but also the rich evidence in the fragments of Aristobulus, Artapanus, Ezekiel the Tragedian, and others), and early Christian literature (New Testament and early patristic...

...As this citation illustrates, the premises articuCommonweal 2 6 July 17, 1998 lated by Kugel were not confined to the Jewish interpreters of antiquity but were shared by all interpreters within Judaism and Christianity up until recently...

...AN INEXHAUSTIBLE TEXT Luke Timothy Johnson ome graduate students and I gathered once a week during the last academic year-just for fun--to read Genesis in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin...

...This is at least in part because of the fourth premise, that "all of Scripture is somehow divinely sanctioned, of divine provenance, or divinely inspired": The Bible, in short, is God's Word in human language, and the task of interpretation is to discover God's message through deciphering the complexities of the language that encodes it...

...and the third century A.D., interpreters in diverse geographical, social, and ideological locations sought to ground their identity and their practices by appeal to these texts...

...Second, Scripture is a unified "Book of Instruction, and as such is a fundamentally relevant text": The point of interpretation is not antiquarian but existential...

...Here is the real intellectual thrill, to see how the "questions" posed by the notorious gaps, indirections, and obscurities of the Hebrew text led naturally-given the premises of its readers--to the sorts of "answers" gathered together in this volume...

...For Kazin, the great poet's address to his future reader is a line thrown across the generations with the force of a biblical promise...

...The Septuagint reflects a larger tradition, which read Genesis 6:3 in light of other biblical texts and in light of the characterization of Noah as a righteous man, and concluded that Noah's righteousness was to be a warning to his contemporaries, and that the text therefore meant that the flood would come after 120 years of such witnessing...

...indeed, many later compositions within the Bible represent interpretations of earlier texts through what has been termed "inner-biblical exegesis...

...The answer to these and a myriad other questions is not "because the Bible tells me so," for the Bible does not say any of these things as such...

...From the start, interpretation was carried out by priests, prophets, and sages...

...How do we know that the magicians opposing Moses in Pharaoh's court were Jannes and Jambres...

...o mention only an example that my reading group also puzzled over: Genesis 6:3 reports God's resolution, "My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years...

...His concern is not the process by which the biblical texts came into existence, but the process by which they entered into the lives of readers through interpretation...