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Reviewed by:
  • The God of Old
  • Evelyn Somers
The God of Old by James KugelThe Free Press, 2003, 270 pp., $25

Kugel is a noted Bible scholar and Harvard professor of Hebrew literature whose previous books have dealt generally with the history of the Hebrew Bible and specifically with the interpretive problems its ancient texts present for a contemporary audience. In the introduction to The God of Old, Kugel identifies his book as a small piece of what he calls "The Project," an impassioned, multifaceted effort by all seekers after religious truth "to get to the bottom of this, to see how far it goes; not to deceive oneself, not to be sentimental or weak, but to see how far one can go."

The God of Old is a fine example of good scholarship and careful literary analysis rendered intelligent, interesting and truly pleasurable. I picked up the book when a friend of mine kept asking, "Why doesn't God speak directly to people anymore, as He did to Abraham and Moses?" Not a question I would dare try to answer, but the jacket copy suggested that Kugel could.

He does, in a way. In seven virtually self-contained chapters (each is almost an essay in its own right) that deal with different aspects of God's relationship to the people of ancient Israel, Kugel surveys the evolution of that relationship. In the most ancient biblical texts, says Kugel, God "turns up around the street corner, dressed like an ordinary person . . . he appears in an actual brushfire at the foot of a mountain" because [End Page 176] the authors of those texts—and the audience they were writing for—did not perceive a permanent or absolute rift between the material and spiritual worlds. In a world that had what Kugel calls "little cracks" in it, God and/or His angels appear to ordinary people who are just going about their business and commission them for unusual or unexpected tasks. Three visiting strangers (undoubtedly angels) inform the barren, postmenopausal Sarah that she is going to have a son. The fearful young Gideon, engaged in hiding grain from the enemy, is hailed by an angel as a "mighty warrior" and told to go out and save Israel, not wheat, from the Midianites. Moses encounters God in a burning bush, and the traitorous Balaam is made aware of His presence through the words of a talking donkey.

But as God's omnipotence began to be grasped by the Israelites, they could no longer believe that He would pop up in their midst without a powerful reason. Later scriptures and rewritings of older texts offer a picture of a God who exists at a distance from His creation and "no longer come[s] unbidden." Two rewrites of a story from Genesis, for example, in the Book of Jubilees and the Apocalypse of Abraham, have Abraham soliciting God for instructions about what to do—in contrast to the older biblical account, in which God simply addresses Abraham out of the blue, tells him to leave home and promises to "make you into a great nation."

The questions Kugel addresses are nothing short of fascinating: Why does God seem to recruit the most unlikely, unwilling and unqualified individuals for the most important jobs? Moses has no public-speaking ability; the prophet Isaiah is burdened with "impure lips" and Jeremiah is ridiculously young. Why, in a world in which so many cultures revered divinities that they represented by statues and other art, does the Bible expressly forbid the production of divine images? How is it that the harsh and frightening God of the Old Testament appears to have a soft spot for the weak and a zero-tolerance policy toward anyone who victimizes them? What can we make of what Kugel calls the "starkness" of the soul's experience in much biblical poetry, the Psalms in particular? And how is that starkness re-lated to human mortality?

For the most part, Kugel strikes a good balance between historical explanation and textual analysis, though occasionally the analysis gets top heavy. He refuses to even try to be conclusive about a subject so large and so mysterious—a refusal...

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