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James Kugel’s essential introduction and companion to the Bible combines modern scholarship with the wisdom of ancient interpreters for the entire Hebrew Bible. As soon as it appeared, How to Read the Bible was recognized as a masterwork, “awesome, thrilling” (The New York Times), “wonderfully interesting, extremely well presented” (The Washington Post), and “a tour de force...a stunning narrative” (Publishers Weekly). Now, this classic remains the clearest, most inviting and readable guide to the Hebrew Bible around—and a profound meditation on the effect that modern biblical scholarship has had on traditional belief. Moving chapter by chapter, Harvard professor James Kugel ...
The author invites readers to witness the exploration on religion that he undertook after being diagnosed with an aggressive, and likely fatal, form of cancer.
One of the country's greatest Bible scholars reveals the very different God envisioned by early Israelites.
Leading us chapter by chapter through the Hebrew Bible’s most important stories—from the Creation and the Tree of Knowledge through the Exodus from Egypt and the journey to the Promised Land—Kugel shows how a group of anonymous ancient interpreters radically transformed the Bible and made it into the book that has come down to us today.
Rife with incest, adultery, rape, and murder, the biblical story of Jacob and his children must have troubled ancient readers. By any standard, this was a family with problems. Jacob's oldest son Reuben is said to have slept with his father's concubine Bilhah. The next two sons, Simeon and Levi, tricked the men of a nearby city into undergoing circumcision, and then murdered all of them as revenge for the rape of their sister. Judah, the fourth son, had sexual relations with his own daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, jealous of their younger sibling Joseph, the brothers conspired to kill him; they later relented and merely sold him into slavery. These stories presented a particular challenge for an...
From the creation and the tree of knowledge through the Exodus from Egypt and the journey to the promised land; James Kugel shows us how the earliest interpreters of the scriptures radically transformed the Bible.
Composed as a meandering dialogue between a wily Syrian-Jewish banker and an American graduate student of literature, this engaging book explains all the basic beliefs and practices of Judaism—Jewish teachings on intermarriage and conversion, keeping the Sabbath, prayer and Torah, midrash and mitzvot, and God's presence in the world. Although the book has plenty of the "how to" of religious practice, Being a Jew is in the end an eloquent reflection on Judaism's deepest theme: living life as a way of serving God.
The first part of this book is an extensive verse-by-verse commentary on the Book of Jubilees. Kugel's stated aim is "to understand what the text is saying and why it is saying it," and in particular to explore the numerous bits of biblical interpretation found in Jubilees and their connection to other exegetical writings of the Second Temple period. Subsequent chapters focus on the possibility that Jubilees had more than one author, as well as on the book’s specific relationship to four other Second Temple texts: the Genesis Apocryphon, the Aramaic Levi Document, 4Q225 Pseudo-Jubilees, and the writings of Philo of Alexandria.
In this Festschrift, James Kugel's creative scholarship in biblical interpretation provides the inspiration for a wide-ranging collection of essays that treat the history of Jewish and Christian scriptural interpretation from antiquity to the present
In this illuminating study of early biblical interpretation, James Kugel examines a series of exegetical stories that elaborate on the Joseph narrative in Genesis. These stories - which appear in such diverse sources as rabbinic midrash, early Christian writings, liturgical poetry, and the Quran - often contain details or whole incidents not found in the Bible itself. In tracing the development and function of these tales, Kugel reveals a dynamic interpretive process: the living, changing significance of texts through generations of discussion, analysis, and application.