JAMES KUGEL'S NEW BOOK, HOW TO READ THE BIBLE, is reviewed in the New York Times:

Irreconcilable Differences in Bible’s Interpretations

By PETER STEINFELS
Published: September 15, 2007

“How to Read the Bible” is a most unusual how-to book. For one thing, it is more than 800 pages long and has 971 endnotes. It is true that all the familiar figures and events of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament are here: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets.

But the book, written by James L. Kugel and just published by the Free Press, also propounds a stark and challenging thesis, namely that contemporary Bible readers are confronted with two radically different ways of approaching Scripture and that both approaches are impressive and admirable — and fundamentally incompatible.

Professor Kugel, it should be noted, is a rare master of both approaches. Now teaching in Israel, he was for years one of the most popular teachers at Harvard. When attendance at his introductory Bible course (often running more than 900 students) finally edged ahead of a similarly popular course in economics, The Harvard Crimson headlined “God Beats Mammon.”

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That's got to be a candidate for best Crimson headline ever. In the late 80s I was a teaching fellow for The Bible and Its Interpreters and it was less than a third of the size of Ec 10. But it was growing fast.

The book highlights not only the familiar dramatis personae of the Bible, but also two groups who have struggled mightily with biblical texts. He calls them the “ancient interpreters” and the “modern scholars.”

Over the last 150 years, modern biblical scholars have revealed the Bible as an amalgam of often conflicting texts composed from different sources by different authors and with different agendas often far from the spiritual and moral concerns of traditional Judaism and Christianity or of today’s believers.

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These [ancient] interpreters differed wildly in their efforts, sometimes highly fanciful, to resolve inconsistencies or apparent contradictions in the Bible’s texts, to offer moral justifications for biblical behavior and draw lessons for their contemporaries. That was most obvious, of course, in the differences between Jews and Christians.

But Professor Kugel argues that they all converged on four assumptions about the Bible.

They believed, first, that deeper meanings lay behind biblical texts, that the Bible was a book of instruction about the world and how to serve God in it, that it was somehow “seamless” and harmonious despite surface conflicts and, finally, that it was of divine origin.

On the basis of these assumptions, these early interpreters engaged in nothing less than “a massive act of rewriting,” Professor Kugel writes: “The raw material that made up the Bible was written anew not by changing its words but by changing the way in which those words were approached and understood.” It was the Bible of these interpreters that, in his view, actually constituted the Bible for Jews and Christians for two millennia.

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Read it all. Heck, just go and get the book.