Two Introductions to Scripture: James Kugel and the Possibility of Biblical Theology

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Two Introductions to Scripture: James Kugel and Possibility of Biblical Theology ... JAMES L. KUGEL. How to Read Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. New York: Free Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 819.There are few scholars of whom one can say that they have fundamentally changed an academic field. To contribute to a field, to alter how we look at this issue or that text, to refine or critique a particular technique of analysis - these are normal marks of a successful academic career. Transforming very nature of a field is another sort of accomplishment altogether. Over past three decades, James Kugel has done both: not only has he contributed to academic study of Bible but he has transformed how we define it. Through his work in early biblical interpretation, Kugel has helped to open up a facet of biblical scholarship whose near absence from academy only a few decades ago seems now to defy explanation. How can it be that so few scholars for most of twentieth century attended to way Bible was read by communities that shaped what came to be Judaism and Christianity? Why did scholars so long view what Kugel has called the pre-Bible1 - that is, oral and written traditions that were redacted to form biblical books, along with ancient Near Eastern traditions they drew upon- as sole legitimate object of inquiry, while interpretive works that explained and moved forward from Bible were largely ignored? After all, reality of many texts of pre- Bible - J and Dtr2 and Hosea B - is a matter of speculation, while Book of Jubilees and Chrysostom's homilies on Genesis and 40Pesher Nahum actually exist.Kugel has spent his scholarly career attempting to rectify this situation. He has analyzed interpretive techniques and evolution of exegetical motifs in Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, historical and philosophical compositions by ancient Jews, patristic literature, and rabbinic texts. He elucidates process of interpretation in these works, taking what often seemed to modern readers baffling, random, and somewhat mad and rendering it intelligible, closely connected to text, and very clever. Even more importantly, Kugel demonstrates that those early interpreters are real authors of Bible as it came to function in Judaism and Christianity. The Bible is, after all, more than sum of its parts. While parts, composed by scribes and poets, psalmists and prophets, sages and priests, reflect cultural world of ancient Israel, it is whole that formed, and forms, religious world of Jews and Christians. That whole is by definition postbiblical, product not only of editors who put it into its current configuration but of early interpreters who established ways of reading it that endured from before rise of Christianity well into Middle Ages and to some degree to present day. Those interpreters, Kugel teaches us, made collection into what Western culture knows as Scripture. Further, Kugel shows, interpretive traditions dating to three or four centuries before and after rise of Christianity constituted a shared heritage, reaching across lines that divided between and within Judaism and Christianity.Of course, Kugel is not only scholar to attend to these issues. Already a century ago Louis Ginzberg began to show that interpretive traditions of pseudepigrapha, rabbis, and Church Fathers displayed an impressive degree of commonality. The growth of these traditions and interpretive methods they used were impressively described by two unrelated Heinemanner, Isaac and Joseph. Isac Leo Seeligmann and Alexander Rofe established that a single body of scribal practices and concerns formed biblical and postbiblical literature. The continuity of inner-biblical exegesis and postbiblical exegesis, along with techniques of both, received expert treatment from Michael Fishbane, Yair Zakovitch, and Avigdor Shinan. …