James Kugel
Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617)-495-1681
Contact via E-mail at jlkugel@fas.harvard.edu or kugelj@ashur.cc.biu.ac.il
The Bible As It Was: Biblical Traditions of Late Antiquity
Harvard University Press, 1997
Preface: The Bible As It Was
This book was written for students and scholars alike. It is intended to be a new kind of guide for anyone interested in the Hebrew Bible (or "Old Testament"). Let me begin by saying why I think that such a guide is needed.
The Hebrew Bible contains the history, prayers, songs, laws, and prophecies of ancient Israel. These texts were written down over a long period of time, more than a thousand years. Recently, thanks in part to advances in archaeology, linguistics, and ancient history, scholars have been able to learn much about how the Bible came to be. We now know a great deal of the historical background of various biblical stories, as well as about how different parts of the Bible first came together.
When people study the Bible nowadays in schools and universities, it is often this "new knowledge" that is highlighted. Most standard guides and introductions to the Hebrew Bible discuss little else. Thus, people learn about the various stages in which the Bible was written, and about the work of different editors or redactors. They are told about the background history of Israel, and about other texts from the ancient Near East that shed light on biblical events. All this is extremely interesting information.
But it is really only half the story of the Hebrew Bible.
The other half has to do with what happened to these texts once they were written down. For, even before the Bible had attained its final form, its stories, songs, and prophecies had begun to be
interpreted . From very early times, sages and scholars in ancient Israel had made a practice of looking deeply into the meaning of these sacred writings, and, with each new generation, their insights and interpretations were passed on alongside of the texts themselves. As a result, as each new age inherited what were to become the Bible's various books from the previous age, it also inherited a body of traditions about what those texts meant.
The traditional interpretations were of all kinds. Some simply aimed at explaining the meaning of a difficult word or resolving some apparent contradiction. But others were more wide-ranging and imaginative. Interpreters sometimes felt themselves obliged to explain why a particular person in a biblical story should have behaved in the way that he or she did, or to find some connection between what a particular prophet had predicted and some later event in history. Often, interpreters ended up actually adding to what the biblical text said, "deducing" whole incidents or facts which, the interpreters felt, were implied if not stated outright in the Bible's words.
More than anything, though, these interpretations tried to bring out the universal and enduring message of biblical texts, for the interpreters considered Scripture to be a sacred guidebook for human existence. Interpreters therefore tried to look beyond the obvious content of what was being said in order to find some relevant, usable lesson, even if it was less than obvious at first glance. And so, whatever their particular form or purpose, these interpretive traditions all tended to
transform the apparent meaning of biblical texts.
Such transformations were immensely important. As any reader of this book will see, chapter after chapter of the Bible took on a new, sometimes radically different, significance when its words were scrutinized in the characteristic manner of early interpreters.
The story of Adam and Eve, for example, only
became the story of the "Fall of Man" thanks to a certain ancient interpretation of one of the verses in the story. The snake in the story came to be identified as the Devil -- but only by later interpreters, not by the story itself! And it was only because of yet another interpretation that the Garden of Eden (also known as "paradise") came to be thought of as a
heavenly garden, one in which the righteous would live eternally after their death.
Similar transformations occurred with other biblical narratives. Interpreters came to the conclusion that Abraham was the son of an idol-maker, that he was the first person to believe in one God, and that among his many virtues was an extraordinary generosity toward strangers. None of these things is stated outright in the Bible, though each of them
is based on some slight peculiarity in the biblical text. Other creative interpretations helped to change the "images" of Sarah, Jacob, Rachel, and Joseph -- what each of these biblical figures did and stood for took on an entirely different aspect when their stories were read and interpreted in the special fashion of these early interpreters. The shape and significance of the entire Bible came to be modified because of their work.
Then, gradually, as the centuries passed, these traditional understandings came to be
the meaning. The historical circumstances in which a particular biblical passage might have originally been uttered were eventually forgotten or, in any case, considered irrelevant. What was important by, say, the third or second century B.C.E. (and, quite possibly, even somewhat earlier) was what was thought to be the text's deeper significance, that is, how it was explained by the traditional interpretations that now accompanied it. And this traditional
, interpreted Bible -- that is, the Bible itself plus the traditions about what it really meant -- was what was taught to successive generations of students, expounded in public assemblies and, ultimately, canonized by Judaism and Christianity as their sacred book.
The way in which these traditions of interpretation came to cling to the biblical text may be difficult for people today to comprehend. We like to think that the Bible, or any other text, means "just what it says." And we act on that assumption: we simply open up a book -- including the Bible -- and try to make sense of it on our own. In ancient Israel and for centuries afterwards, on the contrary, people looked to special interpreters to explain the meaning of a biblical text. For that reason, the explanations passed along by such interpreters quickly acquired an authority of their own. In studying this or that biblical law or prophecy or story, students would do more than simply learn the words; they would be told what the text meant -- not only the peculiar way in which this or that term was to be interpreted, but how one biblical text related to another far removed from it, or the particular moral lesson that a text embodied, or how a certain passage was to be applied in everyday life. The people who learned these things about the Bible from their teachers then in turn passed on the same information to the next generation of students.
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. This was what people in both religions meant by
the Bible . Of course, Judaism and Christianity themselves differed on a great many questions, including the interpretation of some crucial Scriptural passages, as well as on just what books were to be included in the Bible. Nevertheless, both religions had begun with basically the same Interpreted Bible. For both were heir to an earlier, common set of traditions, general principles regarding how one ought to go about reading and interpreting the Bible as well as specific traditions concerning the meaning of individual passages, verses, and words. As a result, even when later Jews or Christians added on new interpretations -- sometimes interpretations directed against each other, or against other groups or ideologies within the world in which they lived -- the new interpretations frequently built on, and only modified, what had been the accepted wisdom until then.
This book is essentially an attempt to reconstruct this traditional Bible, the Bible as it was understood in the closing centuries B.C.E. and at the very start of the common era. What I have tried to do is to assemble evidence of the things that scholars and ordinary people believed about the most important parts of the Torah or Pentateuch (that is, the first five books of the Bible).1 But how does one go about reconstructing this Bible-as-it-was? Unfortunately, there is no one single text that contains, chapter by chapter, the commonly accepted interpretations of the Bible in the closing centuries B.C.E. Instead there is a mass of literature of various sorts -- sermons, apocalypses, retellings of biblical stories, and other writings -- in which these interpretations are mostly only hinted at or else taken for granted, assumed to be known to every reader. Trying to reconstruct the Bible As It Was has thus been largely a matter of reading between the lines, figuring out interpretations that are rarely presented as such, from this mass of different sources.
Of course there is more to the Bible As It Was than I have been able to include here.2 But I hope that the present volume will give readers the essential, a view of the most important interpretive traditions that circulated during the crucial period of the Bible's emergence as such, when it was becoming the defined corpus of texts which would lie at the very heart of Judaism and Christianity.
I would like to thank here the many colleagues and students who have helped me with various aspects of this book. In particular, I would like to thank those who have consented to read through and offer suggestions on individual chapters: Profs. Gary Anderson, Ellen Birnbaum, Robert Brody, Hanan Eshel, Jay Harris, Marc Hirschman, and Bernard Septimus. Throughout the stages of preparing the manuscript I have been aided by the comments and suggestions of Ms. Hindy Najman, to whom I am especially grateful. My thanks as well to Ms. Melissa Milgram, who helped at an early stage of the compilation. I am also thankful for the assistance of Ms. Carol Cross and Ms. Rachel Rockenmacher of the Department of Near Eastern Languages at Harvard. Ms. Elizabeth Hurwit admirably edited the manuscript for publication. I should also like to express here my heartfelt thanks to my literary agent, Ellen Geiger of Curtis, Brown Ltd., for her help and guidance at every phase of publication -- I could not have managed it without her.
My gratitude goes as well to the Littauer Foundation, which generously helped to fund a leave in 1991 during which some of the work of this volume was completed, and to the Alan M. Stroock Publication Fund of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard and the Mehiel Center for the Study of Hellenism and Judaism, Bar Ilan University, for their support of the actual publication of this project.
A final note: For all the time spent assembling and checking the material presented herein, I have little confidence that all errors of commission and omission have been identified; moreover, texts now being published for the first time or yet to be discovered will no doubt provide further insights that might have enriched this study. And so I cannot but make a request of my learned readers: I will be most grateful for any corrections or additions that you might be kind enough to pass along, either via the publisher or to me by means of my webpage, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~jlkugel/, where I intend to maintain a regularly updated information sheet about this book and related matters. I can also be reached directly by e-mail, jlkugel@ fas.harvard.edu or kugelj@ashur.cc.biu.ac.il. It is my hope that the age of electronic publishing may yet provide a release from the dire sentence of Eccles. 1:15.
© 1997, James L. Kugel, All Rights Reserved
Return to The Bible As It Was page
Return to Home Page