James Kugel

DEAR FRIENDS,

I wanted to let you know about my new book, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times. The title really says what it’s about. People did encounter God in biblical times—as some people do today—but the form these encounters take place changed radically over the roughly the 1,000 years of ancient Israel’s existence. At first, people like Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Moses and other prophets, are actually said to have seen God. Now this is puzzling. No matter what really happened, wouldn’t it have been a more reasonable thing to say that the people involved heard God’s voice or saw God in a dream. But apparently the opposite was true—for a while. And then, perhaps halfway through the biblical period, things began to change. This is my attempt to explain why.

Regarding The Great Shift, The Atlantic said: "What was it about the minds of ancient Israelites that allowed them to hear and see God directly—or at least, to believe that they did? In his new book, The Great Shift, Kugel investigates these questions through the lens of neuroscientific findings, [showing] that ancient people had a “sense of self” that was fundamentally different from the one modern Westerners have—and that this enabled them to experience and interpret prophecy differently than we do. Then he uses scientific research to show that we shouldn’t assume their view was wrong. If anything, our modern Western notion of the bounded, individual self is the anomaly; most human beings throughout history conceived of the self as a porous entity open to intrusions. In fact, much of the rest of the world today still does."

JAMES L KUGEL

The Great Shift

Encountering God in Biblical Times

A lively, inviting account... The author is at home in every era from that of the ancient texts to our own, and he makes for an excellent guide. Biblical exegesis at its best: a brilliant and sensitive reading of ancient texts, all with an eye to making them meaningful to our time by making sense of what they meant in their own. - Kirkus Review (starred review)

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How To Read The Bible:

A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now

All these interpretations for the binding of Isaac — and still others — can be found in James L. Kugel’s “How to Read the Bible,” an awesome, thrilling and deeply strange book. Kugel, an emeritus professor of Hebrew literature at Harvard and, mark this, an Orthodox Jew, aims to prove that you can read the Bible rationally without losing God. - THE NEW YORK TIMES

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In the Valley of the Shadow

On the Foundations of Religious Belief

A powerful hybrid of memoir, scholarship, and speculation…an unflinching look at that greatest of mysteries, our own death.- Commonweal

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DEAR FRIENDS,

The Great Shift

Encountering God in Biblical Times

How To Read The Bible:

A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now

In the Valley of the Shadow

On the Foundations of Religious Belief

Videos of Recent Talks

Essays, Bibliography, and Other Things—for Free

Parasha - Weekly Torah Reading

Questions About The Bible and Judiasm

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