JAMES KUGEL'S NEW BOOK is reviewed in the New York Sun. Excerpt:

In his elegant new book,"The Ladder of Jacob: Ancient Interpretations of the Biblical Story of Jacob and His Children" (Princeton; 280 pages; $24.95), James L. Kugel takes on these, and even more perplexing, questions with great erudition and admirable lucidity. Mr. Kugel is Professor of Bible at Bar-Ilan University and a world authority on the history of the biblical texts and their interpretation. Whether unravelling some philological tangle or reconciling divergent readings, he has the enviable knack of capturing his reader's attention and keeping it firmly tethered. He draws on sources in Hebrew and Aramaic, Greek and Latin, with forays into Syriac and Old Slavonic, but the effect is seldom pedantic.This is a scholarly work but not, in the end, an academic one; the riddles that tantalized the early commentators, however abstruse they may at first seem, vex us still.

More on Kugel here. And I'm still shoving his books into the hands of my students.