Take & read: New books in Old Testament

Recently I attended a meeting of biblical scholars from a variety of academic settings in the United States and Canada to discuss what many perceive as a crisis in biblical studies. Threats to the disciplined, academic study of the Bible come from a number of quarters. On the one hand, fewer and fewer institutions in higher education are hiring Bible scholars as apathy toward, and even distrust of, religious traditions pervade a secularizing culture. On the other hand, some powerful expressions of Christianity in North America (and elsewhere) deeply distrust the academic study of the Bible and instead embrace naive and often damaging interpretations of scripture.

The Bible scholars at this gathering—all committed to the academic study of the Bible for the life of faith and all active participants in living faith communities—have decided to respond to this moment of stress not by issuing a manifesto or holding a conference, but by creating testimonies of how their own rigorous academic study of the Bible has nurtured their faith over the course of their lives and within their faith communities, sometimes in complex and challenging ways. One aspect of these testimonies is the sense that scholars, in the way they have embraced the historical critical project as an end in itself, have exacerbated the problems we now face. It’s not that we think that we alone can turn the course of these powerful forces working against serious study of the Bible. Far from it! Rather, at this stressful juncture we feel called to witness to the power of informed scriptural interpretation for the flourishing of self, faith communities, and the world.

I mention this meeting because some of the titles emerging in the study of the Old Testament (and New Testament as well) speak to this context, with varying degrees of explicitness. In The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), James L. Kugel argues—in conversation with neuroscience, anthropology, and other disciplines—that in ancient Israel (and the ancient world more broadly) the self was understood differently from the modern self that is operative today. The biblical figures reflect a self with a “semipermeable mind,” one that is open to the divine in ways largely closed off to us moderns. We are stunted in some ways, unable to find the opening within ourselves to the divine. Kugel’s argument is a kind of prequel to Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, which traced the development of the modern self through the Greeks and on to Augustine and the Western tradition. For Kugel, this argument has existential significance. He finds a kindred spirit in Flannery O’Connor, who prayed, “Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. . . . I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.”