James Kugel intends his book How to Read the Bible to be a guide to, and a tour through, the Hebrew Bible. With over eight hundred pages, the book showcases most of what professor Kugel knows about the Bible—and that is a lot! It was a little daunting for me to get through book as I found it almost impossible not to stop here and there to digest its content and to get better acquainted with some ancient interpreter, or conversant with a particular hypothesis of biblical scholarship. This is what the book does: it shows you how the Hebrew Bible was interpreted in the past by both Jews and Christians, and how biblical scholars understand the meaning of the same biblical texts today. Kugel also has a website dedicated to the book worth checking out. And, if you want to know how the book is being received by the public at large, you will probably appreciate the article by David Plotz in the New York Times entitled Reading Is Believing, or Not.

To understand why the “interpretation” of ancient interpreters and modern scholars are almost always divergent, it would be helpful to outline the assumptions that, according to Kugel, ancient interpreters brought to the text:

1) They assume that the Bible was a fundamentally cryptic text: that is, when it said A, often it might really mean B.

4) Lastly, they believe that the entire Bible is essentially a divinely given text, a book in which God speaks directly or through his prophets

The assumption that the Bible is essentially a divinely given text came last because Kugel did not want to give the impression that the other 3 assumptions were just a by-product of it (for example, there is no need to assume that a divinely given text be cryptic). Kugel’s lecture Can the Torah Make Its Peace with Modern Biblical Scholarship? is also helpful in showing the dynamics between tradition and biblical scholarship. In this particular lecture, delivered at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he talks about the reference in the Mishnah to Rosh Hashanah as the “day of judgment” which is not found anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. How this belief came about, and how it became an unquestioned tradition in the Jewish community shows that interpreters were doing much more than just reading the Bible. Kugel says that although the Jewish people are known as the people of the Book, a much better title would be “the people of the interpretation of the Book.” And, I would venture to say, this is no less true of Christians.

Let me show you an example of Kugel’s approach in the book. The passage is Numbers 20:2-13 which recounts the events at Kadesh where the people of Israel once more complained about the lack of resources, and God tells Moses to get water from a rock. At first glance, the account seems to be about a similar miracle as the one back at Meribah in Rephidim. But, what is puzzling about it is that Moses says “these are the waters of Meribah.” Of course, we could look at this assertion theologically and say that Moses is just using a metaphor; in other words, he might be just making an allusion to the waters at Meribah to remind the people that their lack of faith is the same even forty years later. But, how did the ancient interpreters handle this, especially when we keep in mind the four assumptions above? And there is one more thing: there had not been a word about the Israelites lacking water since the book of Exodus.
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Sparks, Kenton L. God’s Words in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academy, 2008.

There are some books that have the ability to drastically shape your worldview. This is one of them, at least for me. I found the book to be quite a challenging read and made me think about things I had never thought of before.

This book sort of reminded me of my experience reading Peter Enns’ book “Inspiration and Incarnation.” Whereas Enns focused primarily on the Old Testament, the scope of this book is a lot broader, and I felt that the author wrote as much as he wanted to get his points across without worrying about making it easier for a general audience. To me, that’s one of the strengths of the book. I liked Enns’ book quite a bit and, after all the controversy surrounding it, I have come to the conclusion that one of Enns’ book’s primary weaknesses is that it should have probably been double its size. Although Enns wrote the book for lay people at a popular level, it is quite apparent that many evangelicals are not ready for this type of book (given all the objections against it). You not only have to be nuanced when writing about the nature of Scripture, you also need to spend the time building your case from the ground up. You need to interact with other people and attempt to answer more questions than you ask even if they are tentative or preliminary. And I think Sparks’ book does a better job in that sense.
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