Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era

Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era, by James L. Kugel. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press,1998. Pp. xxii + 1055. N.P.

The present volume, an expanded version of the more popular work The Bible As It Was (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1997), is a welcome exception to the wearisome truth that much scholarly output is characterized by inconsequential aims and overblown execution. James Kugel pursues objectives that reach well beyond the scope of his book, and his execution of the agenda within the extent of the book is enchanting.

Kugel's main objective is to offer a sampling of the exegetical traditions that grew from early interpreters' reading of the Pentateuch so as to give readers a sense of what he calls in the book's subtitle "the Bible as it was at the start of the Common Era" (from the third century scE to the first century CE). By this he means the Hebrew Bible as Jews and Christians experienced it in the days of its gestation and infancy. He insists that those audiences rarely encountered the Bible apart from these interpretations and that the Bible became scripture for them precisely because of the exegetical efforts of early interpreters. Because these interpretive efforts made the Bible what it became, Kugel reasons that their fruits ought to be considered with the Bible. Kugel also wants to reveal the interpretive reasoning behind the exegetical motifs that he explores, and to show that interpretation was "traditional," that is, that exegetical motifs transcended individual interpreters and their works, being passed from one generation to the next. And he wants to show his readers that, in spite of the long history of difficulties between Judaism and Christianity, both were.nurtured from birth by the same scriptures and interpretive traditions.

But Kugel has even loftier goals in...