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Books that are so good I don't know what to say about them
How to Read The Bible, by James Kugel.
I'm not even going to give you a pithy excerpt or try to find the right adjectives. It is simply so, so, so good. If you wish to learn more, here is a NYT review.
As long as we are on the topic of very good books, there is a new and very nice hardcover edition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 26, 2007 at 11:36 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Have you ever read God, A Biography? It treats God as a literary character as the basis for analysis of the Old Testament. I'm curious as to how Kugel's book compares. (I lost interest in Miles' book after 200 pages or so...there's surprisingly little of God in the Bible and all the guessing as to His purposes got a little tiresome.)
Posted by: jkottke at Sep 26, 2007 1:17:00 PM
Thanks, I must have it!
Posted by: J at Sep 26, 2007 1:25:47 PM
I'm extraordinarily disappointed that Amazon's "expedited" international shipping could still take almost a month. And I'm moving on Saturday to a new town and have no idea what if any bookstores will indulge me to order it.
I seem to remember watching this talk on YouTube just the other day about how a good alternative to traditional charity is often just to send a gift to some needy soul halfway around the world. I can't remember the speaker's name, but he seemed a decent kind of fellow, the type that might be willing to send a poor young ex-pat living in Germany a random act of kindness--especially given that the fellow could be sure the ex-pat would value the gift at least at 100% of the cost to give it.
Even, say, a signed copy of a recently written book would be valued highly by the ex-pat.
Not that he’s begging for it or anything--he'd never want to be rewarded for that.
Posted by: Jeff at Sep 26, 2007 2:13:15 PM
The review reminds me of the following quote:
"In the Jewish Old Testament, the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it. One stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly... To have bound up this New Testament (a veritable rococo of taste in every respect) along with the Old Testament into one book, is perhaps the greatest audacity and sin against taste which literary Europe has upon its conscience."
Posted by: Charles at Sep 26, 2007 4:51:06 PM
I'm sure many people will be impressed with the "scholarship" that Kugel crams into his book, but does Kugel ever mention that several schools of Biblical scholarship exist that contradict each other's findings as much as the differing schools of economics, especially Austrian and Keynesian, contradict each other? For every scholar who defends the documentary hypothesis of Genesis, another scholar equally qualified attacks it.
So Kugel has decided to side with the "scholars" who attack the historicity of the Bible? What is so new or amazing about that? "Scholars" have done that for the past 200 years. Other scholars, using the same tools that Kugel's scholars use, have proven the OT to be amazingly accurate historically. Does one scholar see contradictions and impossibilities? Another finds the same passages contain amazing paradoxes and deep insights.
Just out of curiosity, I would like to know if Tyler has ever read any scholarship that defends the accuracy and historicity of the Bible? If not, why not? Would you consider yourself educated in economics if you didn't know at least some aspects of Keynesian, neo-classical and Austrian econ?
I encourage everyone to read Kugel's book. Then read the Wikipedia entries on "The Bible and History" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_history and "The Documentary Hypothesis" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis. Both articles seem to give a balanced view of the opposing sides in the argument with bibliographies for further reading.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at Sep 26, 2007 8:02:43 PM
Why is it that The Wealth of Nations is always cheaper than Das Kapital?
Posted by: mike at Sep 26, 2007 8:17:32 PM
For every scholar who defends the documentary hypothesis of Genesis, another scholar equally qualified attacks it.
So Kugel has decided to side with the "scholars" who attack the historicity of the Bible?
What's with the scare quotes around scholars? You just said the documentary folks are as qualified as the non-documentary folks.
Posted by: Wild Pegasus at Sep 26, 2007 10:26:23 PM
Under US law, Das Kapital is probably still under copywright :)
Posted by: doctorpat at Sep 26, 2007 10:32:47 PM
The bible can in fact be 100% historically accurate and written by multiple authors without any divine inspiration.
Posted by: jb at Sep 27, 2007 2:27:57 AM
jb: "The bible can in fact be 100% historically accurate and written by multiple authors without any divine inspiration."
That's true. And by "inerrancy", most people mean little more than that it's accurate.
Posted by: at Sep 27, 2007 8:53:34 AM
Instead, Kugel tries to separate scholarship and belief. At bottom, Kugel seems to conclude that, scholarship be damned, there is some seed of divine inspiration in the Bible, even if he can’t say exactly where it is
Meh.
Posted by: Kieran at Sep 27, 2007 1:57:44 PM
Not to detract from the considerable and important work done by James Kugel, but a lot of this territory was covered in "Asimov's Guide to the Bible" by Isaac Asimov, written in two parts in 1967 and 1969. Check it out.
Posted by: Dean Austin at Sep 27, 2007 5:30:00 PM
Not to detract from the considerable and important work done by James Kugel, but a lot of this territory was covered in "Asimov's Guide to the Bible" by Isaac Asimov, written in two parts in 1967 and 1969. Check it out.
Posted by: Dean Austin at Sep 27, 2007 5:31:02 PM
I don't spend much time on biblical exegesis -- less than I should, I suppose -- but I found The Great Code by Northrop Frye, the eminent literary critic and Protestant minister, very illuminating.
Posted by: M. Grégoire at Sep 27, 2007 11:54:16 PM
Why not just ask the Pope? He's infallible, you know.
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