Interesting Nonsense
Someone from the audience asked James Kugel after his lecture entitled Midrash Before Hazal: Why It’s Important For Orthodox Jews what Julius Wellhausen would have thought about it. Kugel’s answer was “I’m sure he would say ‘This is interesting
nonsense.’” I thought that was a clever answer not only because Wellhausen would have probably agreed with him, but also because sometimes this is exactly what I am thinking when I read what the early interpreters had to say about some biblical passages. While I want show respect and humility towards the deposit of wisdom given to us by our early (some would say pre-critical) interpreters, every once in a while I want to shout out “this is brilliant nonsense!”
However Jame Kugel thinks that listening to these interpreters shouldn’t be divorced from current biblical scholarship. He says,
“It’s kind of surprising but often people who teach modern biblical scholarship are really uninformed about- now I am speaking again of Christian scholars mostly – what the bible looked like from the standpoint of – even just 100 years ago, not to speak of 1000 – and I think that once you are aware of that context everything looks rather different.”
Unfortunately Kugel does not elaborate on how exactly things look different when you are aware of Bible’s history of interpretation. I am still reading his book How to Read the Bible (which I highly recommend) and it could be that he talks more there about the interplay between how the bible was understood by ancient interpreters and how that bears on modern scholarship. I also wonder if his assessment that Christian scholars are particularly uniformed about ancient (Jewish?) interpretation is correct. If it is, it would be interesting to investigate why.
The lecture was given at the Yeshiva University for the TEIQU (Torah Exploration of Ideas, Questions and Understanding), and you can read an unofficial and unedited transcript at The Curious Jew. It is a little hard to follow at times, but it is well worth the effort. The title of the lecture sounds a little strange because of words like midrash and hazal, so let me attempt to paraphrase it:
Why are the Apocrypha and Pseudopigrapha (among other Second Temple writings) Important for Understanding How Later Rabbis came to Interpret the Bible?
Maybe a title like this might attract (or scare even more) some people who wouldn’t otherwise read it.
Kugel says that the Apocrypha and Pseudagripha are loosely referred to in modern Hebrew as the Outside Books (Sefarim Chitzonim) because they were outside of the biblical canon. What a great name for this body of literature! Let me further paraphrase the title:
Why are the “Outside Books” Important for Understanding How Later Rabbis came to Interpret the Bible?
Kugel shows how certain traditions in Rabbinic literature can be detected in books like Jubilees and Judith. These are important because they are quite early and give us a window to see how people were already interpreting certain texts then.
Apparently some Rabbis banned the studying of the some of these Outside Booksalthough we are not sure which ones. About the book of Jubilees he says,
“But I can easily see Rabbi Akiva seeing the Book of Jubilees and saying don’t read that because this guy has all kinds of wrong doctrines – one of the central tenets of the book is that the calendar that we use in Judaism is wrong, the kind of lunar-solar calendar.”
On the other hand, the Rabbis seemed to be “crazy about” the book of Ben Sira since it is cited in the Talmud and influenced Jewish prayer. I couldn’t help but laugh at what Kugel had to say about why Ben Sira didn’t make into the canon:
“Ben Sira couldn’t be part of the canonized scripture because he was too late and he was not a scribe, an inspired prophet – he was just Ben Sira; if only he had had the sense to identify himself as King Solomon, there’s no doubt we would have him.”
(is this an allusion to Qohelet?)
Kugel basically covers in this lecture chapter 6 (The Call of Abraham) and chapter 8 (The Trials of Abraham) in How to Read the Bible. But even those who have read those chapters will benefit from reading this brief presentation of these two stories since he does it from a different angle. Unlike his book, Kugel doesn’t spend any time talking about current scholarship.
The questions and answers are also excellent specially because Kugel spends some time talking about how he got into this field. One of the questions people asked him was if he believed that the five books of Moses were given to him by God. He does not give a straight answer, but says,
“It would be nice to go back to the sages of the middle ages or even earlier but the problem is they didn’t have to recognize/reckon with this new phenomena of modern biblical scholarship so one can try to be guided by their words but I’m not sure that one can find any solution…”
Then he says something intriguing about biblical scholarship:
“The one subject on which biblical scholarship has nothing to say is the divine origin of Scripture – how can they possibly express an opinion on this part of the Torah being divine, this not – words don’t come with little flags that say – I am not troubled by that part of modern biblical scholarship but how Judaism comes to reckon with the things that scholars have found out about historical background – I think that is still an open subject- I don’t know where it is going to go but I doubt it is going to stay the same.”
I don’t think it is hard for us to translate that into current discussions surrounding biblical scholarship and Confessionalism among Evangelicals. But I find Kugel’s bold assertion quite provocative, namely, “the one subject on which biblical scholarship has nothing to say is the divine origin of Scripture.”
Is this really true? In other words, was Kugel right in more than one sense that, for biblical scholarship, the “stuff” we do when we interpret the bible as a divine book is nothing more than “interesting nonsense?” Isn’t it possible for biblical scholarship to have theological aims?
I will leave you with this question.
Check out the article and let me know what you think.
Tags: James Kugel, Midrash, Sefarim Chitzonim
