The Good Book, and How They Made It Better

The Bible is still regarded by fundamentalists in all three Bible-based religions as a sacred work that must be read literally and heeded strictly. But the literalists are overlooking some fundamental truths about its origins and its original uses: The Bible was not taken literally by those who first collected and assembled the sacred texts of ancient Israel, and even the most pious readers of antiquity felt at liberty to explain and elaborate upon the Scriptures.

“Even before the Bible had attained its written form, its stories, songs and prophets had begun to be interpreted and so it was this interpreted Bible--not just the stories, prophecies, and laws themselves, but these texts as they had, by now, been interpreted and explained for centuries--that came to stand at the very center of Judaism and Christianity,” writes Bible scholar James L. Kugel. “This was what people in both religions meant by ‘the Bible.’ ”

When Kugel refers to the interpretation of the Bible, he is not talking about the modern exegesis that has become a kind of cottage industry among contemporary scholars, theologians and even novelists and journalists. Rather, he reaches all the way back to the earliest commentators who shaped the text of the Bible in the century or so before and after the birth of Jesus. The raw material of “The Bible as It Was” includes sermons and commentaries, apocalyptic and wisdom literature, early translations and “rewritten” Bibles, all of which flowered among the sages and scribes of antiquity.

The premise of Kugel’s work, a crucial insight and a gentle corrective to Bible literalists, is that “almost any written text contains potential ambiguities,” and none more so than the ancient texts of the Bible. Priests, scribes and sages felt at liberty to retell the stories of the Bible, explain and interpret them, unravel their mysteries and resolve their apparent contradictions. So Kugel leads us through the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, pausing here and there to point out and explain some passage that may seem deeply familiar but still hums with hidden meanings and resonances.

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” God announces at the moment of creation, which seems to suggest that God was in the company of other heavenly beings, perhaps even other deities. The passage is probably not an example of the “royal we,” which is “less common in biblical Hebrew than in English,” and so the ancient interpreters struggled for an explanation--God might have consulted with “the heavens and the Earth” or his own “wisdom” or “the ministering angels” or, in Christian tradition, “the Son.” But the pagan implications are unavoidable, and one rabbinical sage imagined a cry of exasperation by Moses to the Almighty: “Master of the Universe! Why should you give support to the heretics?”

Kugel makes a convincing case for the authenticity and enduring importance of such exegeses: “The activity of ancient biblical interpreters was a--perhaps the--striking instance of how interpretation is inevitably a kind of second authorship,” he concludes. “It was their Bible, and no ragtag collection of ancient Near Eastern texts, that was canonized in the closing centuries of the Second Temple period, and their Bible is, to an extent with which all who love God’s word must reckon, ours today.”

Kugel is a distinguished scholar who holds appointments at both Harvard and Bar Ilan University in Israel, and he promises that “The Bible as It Was” will eventually be joined by a “technical” edition designed for specialists. But he is also a gifted teacher, storyteller and interpreter in his own right. His class on the “interpreted” Bible is a favorite among undergraduates at Harvard, and “The Bible as It Was” allows the rest of us to understand why.