The "Real Thing": How to Read How to Read the Bible

Abstract

The Real Thing: How to Read How to Read the Bible James L. Kugel. How to Read the BibL·: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. New York: Free Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 819.About decade ago at an interdisciplinary conference at Jerusalem's Hartman Institute, kipa-donning Hebrew University professor presented paper on the dual authorship of one of the books of the prophets; an argument for single authorship, as the sages maintain, could simply not be sustained in the face of the book's many contradictions. The talk consisted of neatly organizing the work, attributing different of the allegedly contradictory passages to one or the of the hypothetical authors. That evening, at festive meal of the scholars gathered for the conference I mentioned that I was writing book on Milton and remarked that had there been no manuscript evidence of Milton's authorship of Paradise Lot, then there would be no way to ascribe single authorship, paving the way for documentary hypothesis of multiple authors, as Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) and others had provided for the Hebrew Bible. The poet who wrote the first book of the epic with all of its satanic energies (S) could not be the author who later demanded obedience from Adam and Eve in Book 9 (O). God's speech in Book 3 must have been added by some priestly writer ([P] the authoritarian style and content so different from the rest of the epic!); and the problematic additions of Books 11 and 12, an untransmuted lump of undigested materials as C. S. Lewis called them in 1961, were surely the accretions of some later Miltonic writers (W).With the exception ol the Cambridge classicist Richard Bentley, who in 1732 published an edition oi Paradise Loot attributing the bits he didn't like to either meddlesome editor or Milton's daughter (who supposedly failed to correctly transcribe her father's wishes), scholars have struggled to deal with the unity of the epic. In the long history of Milton's reception, Paradise Loot's, complexity remains troublesome, producing many onesided readings (often caricatural) of the poet. Alternatively, Milton is attacked for his contradictions, or, in recent critical evaluation version of the documentary hypothesis in Milton studies, there is not one Milton but rather plurality of Miltons.1Milton's reception may seem an unlikely starting point for consideration of James Kugel's How to Read the Bible, yet Kugel's methodology has much in common with those who have rendered Milton either contradictory or multiple. Kugel employs the many resources at his disposal - among them archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics - to show the ways that Hebrew Bible, once thought unified, has been revealed to be contradictory and incoherent. Far from one that is seamless and perfect, Kugel argues for Bible that is seamy and all too imperfect, the obvious words of men from different periods and social strata (pp. 14, 766, n. 15). Kugel pursues this argument through almost seven hundred pages (followed by copious notes); his evident charisma - for good reason his survey course on the Hebrew Bible was long the most popular course at Harvard - shows itself on every page. How to Read the Bible is less an original scholarly (as Kugel himself acknowledges) than presentation of biblical scholarship to nonacademic audience. The story which takes center stage is the contrast between the reading habits of and modern scholars, and people went from one way of reading the Bible to reading it in another (p. 2). The shift in reading habits began with early figures like Thomas Hobbes, Richard Simon, and Benedict Spinoza and comes to fruition in the scholars who show how the interpretations of ancient interpreters were meant to occlude the real Bible- in actuality not only human work but a hundred pieces often quite unrelated to each other (p. 766, n. 15). That Kugel, who now teaches full-time at the same religious Israeli university that I do, proclaims himself an Orthodox Jew (even as he provides the devastating evidence of scholars [pp. …