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

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Two Introductions to Scripture:James Kugel and the Possibility of Biblical Theology Benjamin D. Sommer (bio) Keywords Benjamin D. Sommer, James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, Bible, Biblical Interpretation, Biblical Hermeneutics James L. Kugel . How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. New York: Free Press, 2007. Pp. xiv þ 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 the normal marks of a successful academic career. Transforming the very nature of a field is another sort of accomplishment altogether. Over the past three decades, James Kugel has done both: not only has he contributed to the 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 the academy only a few decades ago seems now to defy explanation. How can it be that so few scholars for most of the twentieth century attended to the way the Bible was read by the communities that shaped what came to be Judaism and Christianity? Why did scholars so long view what Kugel has called "the pre-Bible"1—that is, the [End Page 153] oral and written traditions that were redacted to form the biblical books, along with the ancient Near Eastern traditions they drew upon—as the sole legitimate object of inquiry, while the interpretive works that explained and moved forward from the Bible were largely ignored? After all, the reality of many texts of the pre-Bible—J and Dtr2 and Hosea B—is a matter of speculation, while the Book of Jubilees and Chrysostom's homilies on Genesis and 4QPesher Nahum actually exist. Kugel has spent his scholarly career attempting to rectify this situation. He has analyzed the interpretive techniques and the evolution of exegetical motifs in the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, historical and philosophical compositions by ancient Jews, patristic literature, and rabbinic texts. He elucidates the 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 the text, and very clever. Even more importantly, Kugel demonstrates that those early interpreters are the real authors of the Bible as it came to function in Judaism and Christianity. The Bible is, after all, more than the sum of its parts. While the parts, composed by scribes and poets, psalmists and prophets, sages and priests, reflect the cultural world of ancient Israel, it is the whole that formed, and forms, the religious world of Jews and Christians. That whole is by definition postbiblical, the product not only of the editors who put it into its current configuration but of the early interpreters who established ways of reading it that endured from before the rise of Christianity well into the Middle Ages and to some degree to the present day. Those interpreters, Kugel teaches us, made the collection into what Western culture knows as Scripture. Further, Kugel shows, the interpretive traditions dating to the three or four centuries before and after the rise of Christianity constituted a shared heritage, reaching across the lines that divided between and within Judaism and Christianity. Of course, Kugel is not the only scholar to attend to these issues. Already a century ago Louis Ginzberg began to show that the interpretive traditions of the pseudepigrapha, the rabbis, and the Church Fathers displayed an impressive degree of commonality. The growth of these traditions and the interpretive methods they used were impressively described by two unrelated Heinemänner, Isaac and Joseph. Isac Leo Seeligmann and Alexander Rofé 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 the techniques of both, received expert treatment from Michael Fishbane, Yair Zakovitch, and Avigdor Shinan. But Kugel's work has been especially [End Page...