How to Read the Bible

A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now

James L. Kugel

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781451689099
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Biography

James Kugel's essential introduction and companion to the Bible combines modern scholarship with the wisdom of ancient interpreters for the entire Hebrew Bible. As soon as it appeared, How to Read the Bible was recognized as a masterwork, "awesome, thrilling" ( The New York Times ), "wonderfully interesting, extremely well presented" ( The Washington Post ), and "a tour de force...a stunning narrative" ( Publishers Weekly ). Now, this classic remains the clearest, most inviting and readable guide to the Hebrew Bible around—and a profound meditation on the effect that modern biblical scholarship has had on traditional belief. Moving chapter by chapter, Harvard professor James Kugel covers the Bible's most significant stories—the Creation of the world, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and his wives, Moses and the exodus, David's mighty kingdom, plus the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the other prophets, and on to the Babylonian conquest and the eventual return to Zion. Throughout, Kugel contrasts the way modern scholars understand these events with the way Christians and Jews have traditionally understood them. The latter is not, Kugel shows, a naïve reading; rather, it is the product of a school of sophisticated interpreters who flourished toward the end of the biblical period. These highly ideological readers sought to put their own spin on texts that had been around for centuries, utterly transforming them in the process. Their interpretations became what the Bible meant for centuries and centuries—until modern scholarship came along. The question that this book ultimately asks is: What now? As one reviewer wrote, Kugel's answer provides "a contemporary model of how to read Sacred Scripture amidst the oppositional pulls of modern scholarship and tradition."

1

The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship

Prof. Charles Augustus Briggs, D.D., of New York.

This book is about understanding the Bible from two radically different points of view—that of the Bible’s ancient interpreters and that of modern biblical scholars (see above, “Preliminaries”). But how did people go from reading the Bible one way to reading it in the other? This chapter tells that story.

On a warm May afternoon in 1893, a man stood on trial for heresy in Washington, D.C. This circumstance might in itself appear surprising. The defendant was being tried by the Presbyterian Church, which had always prided itself on its tradition of intellectualism and an educated clergy. While disagreements about church teachings were not rare in the denomination, going as far as putting a man on trial for his beliefs was certainly an extreme step.1 Such a trial might also appear ill-suited to the end of the nineteenth century, a time of great openness to new ideas. Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published a full three decades earlier, and Einstein’s first writings on the theory of relativity were only twelve years away. America itself was a country of electric-powered machines and newfangled telephones, a rising economic and political center with its own burgeoning literary and intellectual avant-garde. Across the Atlantic, Sigmund Freud was working out his ideas on sexuality and the unconscious; Pablo Picasso was twelve years old, James Joyce was eleven, and D. H. Lawrence was eight. Heresy?

Still more surprising was the man in the dock; Charles Augustus Briggs hardly seemed fitted to the role of heretic. In his youth, he had been an altogether traditional Presbyterian, distinguished only by the fervor of his belief. In his sophomore year at the University of Virginia, he presented himself for formal membership at the First Presbyterian Church of Charlottesville, and thereafter he became a committed evangelical Christian.2 The tone of his faith in those early years is well captured by a letter he wrote to his sister Millie:

I trust you feel that you are a sinner. I trust that you know that Christ is your Savior, and I want to entreat you to go to him in prayer. I know by experience that Christ is precious, and that I would not give him up for the world. . . . Do you want to be separated from your brother and sister when they shall be with Jesus? Are you willing to be with the Devil in torment? You can decide the question in a moment.3

So great was Briggs’s sense of calling that he soon abandoned plans to go into his father’s highly prosperous business—Alanson Briggs, known as the “barrel king,” owned and operated the largest barrel factory in the United States—in order to devote himself entirely to a life of Christian preaching and teaching.

Briggs proved to be a gifted student of biblical Hebrew and ancient history, and he was soon ordained a Presbyterian minister. After having served as pastor to a small congregation in New Jersey for a time, he accepted a teaching post at one of the mainline seminaries of his day, the Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he lectured on Hebrew grammar and various biblical themes. He became, by all accounts, a highly respected scholar, acclaimed at a relatively young age as already belonging to “the foremost rank among the scholars of his day.”4 Today, a century later, one of Briggs’s books is still in print (a rare feat among academics!), a dictionary of biblical Hebrew that he coauthored with Francis Brown and S. R. Driver in 1906. Indeed, “BDB,” as this dictionary is commonly known (for the initials of its three authors’ last names), is still a required purchase for any graduate student undertaking serious work on the Hebrew Bible.

What, then, was this son of the Establishment, an expert in Hebrew lexicography and biblical theology, doing on trial? It all had to do with a speech he had made two years earlier, on the occasion of his being named to a prestigious new chair at Union Seminary. Briggs’s inaugural address, delivered on the evening of January 20, 1891, went on for well more than an hour. It began innocently enough; as required of all such appointees at Presbyterian seminaries, he opened with a public declaration of his faith in the Bible and the church’s system of governance:

I believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice; and I do now, in the presence of God and the Directors of this Seminary, solemnly and sincerely receive and adopt the Westminster Confession of Faith [that is, the Presbyterian charter], as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures. I do also, in like manner, approve of the Presbyterian Form of Government; and I do solemnly promise that I will not teach or inculcate anything which shall appear to me to be subversive of the said system of doctrines, or of the principles of said Form of Government, so long as I shall continue to be a Professor in the Seminary.

But as Briggs went on, he touched on some of the more controversial issues facing Presbyterians in his day, particularly those matters having to do with his specialty, the Hebrew Bible. What he had to say—new, disturbing ideas about how the Bible came to be written, and the nature of its authority, as well as its place in the life of the church—shocked some of his listeners. He said that, contrary to what was claimed by many of his coreligionists, the Bible was not verbally inspired—that is, there was no reason to think that each and every word of it came from God. In fact, he said, it was obvious that the Bible contained numerous errors.5 What is more, he stated that it was now quite certain that the supposed authors of various books of the Bible—Moses and David and Solomon and Ezra and the others—did not, in fact, write them; these books were the work of people whose true names would never be known.6 He asserted that the things described as miracles in the Old and New Testaments could not actually have “violate[d] the laws of nature or disturb[ed] its harmonies”—thus they were not, at least in the usual sense, miracles at all. In particular, he suggested, the supposedly miraculous acts of healing recounted in the Old and New Testaments might merely have been the result of “mind cure,1 or hypnotism, or [some] other occult power.”7 Finally, he pointed out that while the Bible’s prophets frequently announced what God was to do in the future, many of their predictions had failed to come true; in fact, he said (a most surprising assertion for a Christian), most of the things predicted in the Old Testament about the coming of a Messiah had “not only never been fulfilled, but cannot now be fulfilled, for the reason that [their] own time has passed forever.”8

What happened to Charles A. Briggs to cause him to say such things? The short answer is: he had become acquainted with modern biblical scholarship. Following his initial calling to the ministry, Briggs began to study the Bible in earnest, first in the United States and later in Germany, which was then the very center of modern biblical science. Once back in the United States, he had continued the line of his teachers’ research with his own; during his years as a professor and scholar, he had published widely on various topics connected with the Hebrew Bible and biblical theology. Many of the things Briggs proclaimed out loud in his inaugural address were thus not altogether new—they had been building up over decades of intensive research and publication.

Still, that hardly made Briggs’s assertions acceptable to everyone in the audience on that evening. Some of his listeners resented the confident, often aggressive tone of his remarks, and they liked even less his apparent endorsement of these new ideas. Despite the orthodox cast of his opening confession of faith, they found that most of his speech was anything but orthodox. Briggs seemed, they felt, out to undermine the Bible’s place as the very heart of Protestant belief and practice.

The evening ended with handshakes and congratulations, but as news of Briggs’s speech spread throughout the Presbyterian Church, his conservative opponents felt called upon to take action. They instituted formal proceedings within the church to have him suspended as a minister and removed from the academic chair to which he had just been appointed. No one who said such things could be considered a proper teacher for future Presbyterian ministers! The ensuing deliberations were long and complicated, moving from one judicial instance to the next. At first Briggs had been hopeful, believing that he could count on support from within the liberal wing of American Presbyterians; but he had underestimated the strength and determination of his opponents. They pressed forward, and it was thus that Charles A. Briggs eventually found himself a defendant at the church’s 1893 General Assembly in Washington, D.C., his future in the hands of the more than five hundred delegates gathered there.

The heresy trial was headline news across the country, closely followed by Americans of all faiths. (Indeed, according to one press report, a clergyman visiting India in 1892 was greeted with the query, “What is the latest phase of the Briggs case?”)9 Charles A. Briggs may have been the immediate defendant in the proceeding, but in a larger sense it was the Bible itself that stood accused. What was it, really? Was it a special book unlike any other, the very word of God? Or was it, as Briggs seemed to suggest, principally (though not exclusively) the product of human industry, indeed, the work of men who lived in a time and place far removed from our own? Are its stories really true? If they are, was not even questioning their accuracy a sacrilege—a heresy, as Briggs’s accusers charged? Or was it perfectly proper for biblical scholars, like all other university-trained researchers, to pursue their theories untrammeled, looking deeply into every aspect of the Bible and letting the chips fall where they may?

As the delegates rose one by one to cast their votes at the General Assembly, many of them must have felt that they were taking a stand on the Bible’s own future. What are we to believe about it from now on? And how had it happened that this basically decent man, a professing Protestant deeply committed to his church, ended up espousing beliefs that so profoundly clashed with traditional faith? The two questions are actually intertwined and a useful point of introduction to this book, since a full answer to both must begin with a look back to the time of the Bible’s own origins, more than three thousand years earlier.

A Tour of the Bible

The Hebrew Bible2 is actually not one book, but an anthology. No one can say for sure how old its oldest parts are; this—like so many of the things discussed by Charles Briggs that night—is a matter of dispute between religious traditionalists and modern, university-style scholars. Almost all would agree that the very oldest parts of the text go back very far, at least to some time in the tenth century BCE3—or considerably earlier. Its latest chapters are a little easier to date; they belong to the early second century BCE. As for the historical circumstances in which its various books were written, and exactly how they came to us, this too is a matter of dispute. According to traditionalists, the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—these books are collectively known as the Torah or the Pentateuch) were revealed by God to one man, Moses. Modern scholars are skeptical about the unity of the Pentateuch; according to them, as we shall see, these five books are actually the creation of at least four or five different authors from different periods in Israel’s history.

Whichever is the case with regard to the Pentateuch, no one denies that the rest of the Bible comes from different authors—it is, and always has been, a collection of texts, a kind of literary miscellany. In fact, the word “Bible” itself indicates as much: our English term comes from what was originally a Greek plural, ta biblía (“the books”)—this is how the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria in ancient times referred to Judaism’s sacred library.

This library contains a range of different kinds of writings. The Pentateuch (Torah) is basically a history of Israel and its ancestors, starting with the very first human beings, Adam and Eve, and leading up to the time when the people of Israel were freed from slavery in Egypt and made their way to the border of the Promised Land. It is thus one long narrative, but interspersed with it are a great many laws. (The Ten Commandments are probably the most famous of these, but they are only one small part of the Pentateuch’s legal codes.) In fact, it is principally these laws that gave the Pentateuch its special character among ancient Jews and, to a certain extent, early Christians as well. They saw in the Pentateuch a great divine guidebook, its laws constituting God’s detailed set of do’s and don’ts for every human life. The Pentateuch was thus read and studied more than other books of the Bible in ancient times. (For this reason, we will devote a good deal of attention to these first five books; they contain many of the best known parts of the Bible and have always occupied a special place in the hearts of its readers.)

The Pentateuch ends with the death of Moses. From there, the historical narrative follows the Israelites and their new leader, Joshua, into the land of Canaan; the conquest of that land is narrated in the book of Joshua. Other books—Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah—tell the story of Israel’s subsequent history: the rise of Israel’s mighty empire under David, and its subsequent split into two separate kingdoms; the conquest of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians and then of the southern kingdom by the Babylonians; the exile of the Jews to Babylon; and then the return from exile and subsequent reestablishment of their land, Judah,4 under Persian rule.

But historical narrative and laws are only two of the main categories of writing found in the Hebrew Bible. A third category consists of the pronouncements of various prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, and others. Actually, prophetic speeches are themselves hardly of one sort; they include writings of different literary genres and styles. Sometimes prophets set out to reprove evildoers, and their words are full of biting sarcasm...