Synopses & Reviews
The God of the modern world -- all-powerful, all-knowing, invisible, and omnipresent -- has been a staple of Western civilization. Yet in this remarkable book, James Kugel shows that this God is not the same as the God of most of the Hebrew Bible, the God who appeared to Abraham, Moses, and other biblical heroes. That God, the "God of Old," was actually perceived in a very different way -- a way that has much to teach modern believers.
James Kugel is renowned for his investigations into the history of the biblical era, a time beginning more than three thousand years ago, when the Bible's earliest parts first took shape. Now he goes even deeper, attempting to enter the spiritual world of ancient Israelites and see through their eyes God as they encountered him.
The God of Old appeared to people unexpectedly; He was not sought out. Often He was not even recognized, at first mistaken for an ordinary human being. The realm of the divine was not as it is today -- a spiritual dimension set off from the material world. The spiritual and the material overlapped, and the realm of the dead was a real domain just beyond the world of the living. Ordinary reality was in constant danger of sliding into something else, something stark but oddly familiar. God was always standing just behind the curtain of the everyday world.
Kugel suggests that this alternative spirituality is not simply an archaic relic, replaced by a "better" understanding. Kugel's picture of the God of Old has much to tell us about God's very nature, and about the encounter between Him and human beings in today's world. This is a book to treasure side by side with the Bible, and for years to come.
Review
Peter J. Gomes
Harvard University, author of The Good Book
Once again my colleague James Kugel presents us with an irresistible book about the Bible. The lost world of the Bible has been made accessible to us by an expert, and again we stand in the debt of a gifted scholar and gregarious guide to the land and look of God.
Synopsis
The God of the Old Testament is familiar to us all: He is all-powerful; he punishes sinners but gives us hope for the future; he is larger than life itself.
Now one of Harvard's most popular teachers has assembled evidence within the Bible that the earliest Israelites did not see God the way we do -- as a distant, omnipotent being who rules us. Instead, their God was nearby and human in appearance; he inhabited a spiritual world that existed in parallel with the physical world, just out of sight. It was nonetheless an utterly real and highly consequential world, and God would often force Himself into human awareness and demand that people recognize the spiritual world all around them. Kugel argues that, far from being "primitive, " as the earliest Biblical texts are sometimes called, they actually present a different way of seeing in which the "real world" is not so real or so important after all.
The God of Old is intended for religious and agnostic readers alike -- it does not preach, nor does it require any foreknowledge of Biblical teachings. Kugel brings his extraordinary range of learning to bear, offering beautiful readings of many of the Bible's oldest verses. The result is a revealing and often surprising take on the origins of God by one of the world's most learned guides.
Synopsis
One of Harvard's most popular teachers has assembled evidence within the Bible that the earliest Israelites did not see God the way we do--as a distant, omnipotent being. Instead, their God was nearby and human in appearance; he inhabited a spiritual world that existed in parallel with the physical world, just out of sight.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-253) and indexes.
About the Author
James L. Kugel is Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, and Professor of Bible Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He is the author of a number of books of biblical scholarship, including
The Great Poems of the Bible (1999) and
The Bible As It Was (1997). In 2001, Kugel was awarded the prestigious Gawemeyer Prize in Religion. He lives in Jerusalem, Israel, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.