Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

THE GREAT SHIFT: ENCOUNTERING GOD IN THE BIBLICAL ERA

James L. Kugel

A world-renowned scholar brings a lifetime of study to reveal how a pivotal transformation in spiritual experience during the Biblical Era made us who we are today

Why does the Bible depict a world in which humans, with surprising regularity, encounter the divinewrestling an angel, addressing a burning bush, issuing forth prophecy without any choice in the matter? These stories spoke very differently to their original audience than they do to us, and they reflect a radically distinct understanding of reality and the human mind. Yet over the course of the thousand-year Biblical Era, encounters with God changed dramatically. As James Kugel argues, this transition allows us to glimpse a massive shift in human experiencethe emergence of the modern, Western sense of self.

In this landmark work, Kugel fuses revelatory close readings of ancient texts with modern scholarship from a range of fields, including neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and archaeology, to explain the origins of belief, worship, and the sense of self, and the changing nature of God through history. In the tradition of books like The Swerve and The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Divine and the Human tells the story of a revolution in human consciousness and the enchantment of everyday life. This book will make believers and seekers think differently not just about the Bible, but about the entire history of the human imagination.

JAMES KUGEL is Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University (emeritus). Kugel is a specialist in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Bible As It Was, which won the Grawemeyer Prize in Religion in 2001, and How to Read the Bible, which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for the best book of 2007. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel

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Book Published 2017-09-01 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Comments

"An inquiry into how the contemporaries of Solomon and Sheba viewed the presence of the deity and why the reality of that highly personal divine/mortal relationship changed over time. Talking to God is usually a silent affair these days, lest those around the conversant think him or her crazy. By Kugel's (Emeritus, Hebrew Literature/Harvard Univ.; In the Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief, 2011, etc.) lively, inviting account, the reason we read today of the likes of Adam and Moses talking before the living presence of the deity is that they really did talk to a living deity; in their reality, there was no question whether God existed or not, only how people came to him and he to them. Probing not just the texts, but also the secondary literature of neuroscience and anthropology, the author charts a trajectory that follows something like a child's development of the sense of self, from the world as "not-us," "this undifferentiated Outside that did almost everything," to a place that we navigate and even master. At first, Kugel writes, God appeared, lifting the veil of illusion. Later, that work was done by intermediariesby angels and souls and psalms that marked a newfound "steady gaze inward," as if self-regarding humans somehow came to say, don't worry, we've got this, even as God replied through the likes of "a human-sized angel who could communicate with prophets and sages by addressing them face-to-face." Readers may feel that Kugel himself is a little nostalgic for the Yahweh who needed no temples or cedar palaces but instead found his home among the tents and tabernacles. Even so, 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." (starred review)

"Awesome, thrilling. . . Kugel aims to prove that you can read the Bible rationally without losing God. A magisterial, erudite, but remarkably witty tour."