BOOK REVIEW ALERT: The following is in today's New York Times:

'Whose Bible Is It?': God Speaks; Man Translates
By JAMES KUGEL

Published: March 27, 2005

Most books about the Bible are principally concerned with how it came to be and what it meant in its historical context. But -- as readers of Jaroslav Pelikan's ''Whose Bible Is It?'' will find -- that is really only the beginning of the Bible's story. Even before the last chapters of the Hebrew Bible itself had been written, an ancient school of biblical interpreters had come upon the scene -- the earliest of them going back to the third century B.C. or so -- and they changed forever the way the Bible would be read. They (mostly anonymous) were decidedly not interested in what the stories, laws or prophecies had meant in their original context. They believed the Bible was a divinely given guidebook, eternally relevant. What interested them was what it had to teach people in their own day, and often this meant ignoring history and digging deeper, trying to find some hidden lesson in the Bible's words. Sometimes this process involved a great deal of imagination -- reinterpreting a common word or phrase to mean something quite different from its usual meaning, or even ''deducing'' the existence of conversations or whole episodes unreported in the Bible itself. They claimed it was full of teachings only hinted at in its actual words.

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James Kugel, by the way, is a Harvard professor and one of my teachers. He is one of the foremost experts on ancient interpreters of the Bible and I am constantly shoving his work into the hands of my students (twice last week, for example).