The Bible as It Was.

James L. Kugel Harvard University Press, $35,647 pp.

Some graduate students and I gathered once a week during the last academic year - just for fun - to read Genesis in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. No rough stuff or higher criticism, merely the joy of mucking about with the Masoretic text and trying to figure out how the Septuagint and Vulgate got from the Hebrew to their versions, which often looked more like interpretations than translations. We could have used James Kugel's book, which engages the reader in just this sort of intellectual exercise, but does so without demanding knowledge of any ancient languages, and in a prose so sweetly reasonable that daunting scholarship gets spooned out as the delight of discovery.

At the most superficial level, The Bible as It Was is an anthology of ancient interpretations of Torah - the first five books of the Bible - drawn from Jewish and Christian sources. As such, it offers rich resources for the study of comparative scriptural interpretation. At a deeper level, this book invites readers into a world that is imaginatively shaped by the reading and study of the Bible as a source of wisdom and life. As such, it not only reminds us of a deeper and broader tradition of biblical study than the profoundly amnesiac version called the historical-critical, but provides a sense of what that older tradition might still offer.

In his first chapter ("The World of Ancient Biblical Interpreters") Kugel establishes the framework for the materials he has collected. His concern is not the process by which the biblical texts came into existence, but the process by which they entered into the lives of readers through interpretation. Interpretation of the Hebrew text was necessary from the first, not only because changing circumstances demanded adaptation, but also because the language of the Bible was itself so peculiarly susceptible of multiple readings. From the start, interpretation was carried out by priests, prophets, and sages; indeed, many later compositions within the Bible represent interpretations of earlier texts through what has been termed "inner-biblical exegesis."

This living conversation with the text continued in the oral discussions and the literary compositions of Judaism and Christianity. Between the third century B.C. and the third century A.D., interpreters in diverse geographical, social, and ideological locations sought to ground their identity and their practices by appeal to these texts. Because the interpreters were often disputants within the same symbolic world of Torah, their interpretations helped create a scriptural world that was larger than the texts themselves.

Kugel notes how in spite of their many superficial disagreements, all ancient interpreters shared four basic premises. First, the Bible is "a fundamentally cryptic document": What it says and what it means may not always coincide, but what it says is always a pointer guiding the interpreter to what it means. Second, Scripture is a unified "Book of Instruction, and as such is a fundamentally relevant text": The point of interpretation is not antiquarian but existential; the Bible is not a report from the past but a message to the present. Third, Scripture is "perfect and perfectly harmonious": Every part of the Bible can be read to understand every other part, for despite having many writers, it has a single voice; if understanding fails, it is not the fault of the text but of the interpreter, who has not sufficiently inquired into every word and letter of this endlessly giving text.

Putting these first three premises into operation means that biblical heroes, even when they seem to be doing something wicked, are really - when properly understood - doing something virtuous. Thus (in an example not included by Kugel but well known to Catholics), Augustine's cryptic comment on Jacob's deception of Isaac, "non est mendacium sed mysterium" ("It wasn't a lie but a mystery"). As this citation illustrates, the premises articulated by Kugel were not confined to the Jewish interpreters of antiquity but were shared by all interpreters within Judaism and Christianity up until recently. This is at least in part because of the fourth premise, that "all of Scripture is somehow divinely sanctioned, of divine provenance, or divinely inspired": The Bible, in short, is God's Word in human language, and the task of interpretation is to discover God's message through deciphering the complexities of the language that encodes it.

Such premises lead naturally to a blurring of the boundaries between authoritative text and interpretation, as well as to the expansion of the biblical tradition. Why do we identify the serpent with the devil? Why do we assume Cain was wicked and Abel good? Why is homosexuality associated with Sodom? How do we know that the magicians opposing Moses in Pharaoh's court were Jannes and Jambres? How did Jacob predict the coming of the Messiah? How do we learn that God revealed both written and oral Torah to Moses on Sinai? The answer to these and a myriad other questions is not "because the Bible tells me so," for the Bible does not say any of these things as such; the Bible can, however, be read in such fashion as to mean these and many other things popularly thought to be contained within the texts themselves but in fact deduced from the texts by a process of interpretation and then "found" in the text by subsequent readers. Some such readers were translators, which is why the Septuagint, the Targums, and Jerome's Vulgate often expand the Hebrew text or turn it according to various exegetical traditions.

As Kugel acknowledges, his collection of interpretive materials bears some resemblance to Louis Ginzberg's anthology, The Legends of the Jews (Johns Hopkins Press). This one-volume edition is obviously shorter than Ginzberg's seven volumes (six of legends, one of references), even though Kugel promises a scholarly edition that should run to several volumes. There are more important differences. Kugel provides a much wider range of interpretive options, including in his repertoire apocrypha (notably Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon), rabbinic midrashim, apocalyptic (the Enoch literature, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, sybilline oracles), Jewish sectarian writings (especially impressive examples from Qumran), Hellenistic Jewish literature (not only Philo but also ,the rich evidence in the fragments of Aristobulus, Artapanus, Ezekiel the Tragedian, and others), and early Christian literature (New Testament and early patristic).

Not only is this an impressive - and modestly underplayed - display of erudition, but it provides students at every level of sophistication the materials for the analysis of comparative interpretive traditions. Fifty pages of an appendix on "Terms and Sources" provides a helpful guide to the readers for whom Artapanus and Eupolemus are as unfamiliar as Jannes and Jambres.

Most of all, Kugel differs from Ginzberg in the way he shows how the "legends" developed, not by random imagination, but by means of careful exegetical deduction. Here is the real intellectual thrill, to see how the "questions" posed by the notorious gaps, indirections, and obscurities of the Hebrew text led naturally - given the premises of its readers - to the sorts of "answers" gathered together in this volume. Kugel is a talented teacher, who successfully leads his readers through an imaginative reconstruction of the logic at work at every stage from text to traditions.

To mention only an example that my reading group also puzzled over: Genesis 6:3 reports God's resolution, "My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years." On the face of it, the text is erroneous, for many later biblical figures live much longer lives than 120 years (including Noah who lived to 950). So what does the text mean? Already the Septuagint translated, "my spirit shall not remain with these men," making the statement apply to the generation of the flood. The Septuagint reflects a larger tradition, which read Genesis 6:3 in light of other biblical texts and in light of the characterization of Noah as a righteous man, and concluded that Noah's righteousness was to be a warning to his contemporaries, and that the text therefore meant that the flood would come after 120 years of such witnessing. Thus 2 Peter 2:5 can say, "God preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness," even though the Bible as such never said that, and the early Christian epistle 1 Clement 7:6 can declare, "Noah preached repentance, and those who obeyed were saved."

Christian readers will naturally be drawn to the various narrative texts, but they may profit most from the chapters called "At Mt. Sinai" (on Exodus 19-24), "Worship in the Wilderness" (Leviticus 1 to Numbers 10), and "The Life of Torah" (Deuteronomy 1-34), for these sections offer splendid insight into the ways in which classical Judaism grounded itself in the legal texts of Torah and authorized its own rich tradition of interpretation.

Kugel concludes this volume with an afterword that sketches how the rise of critical biblical scholarship involved a completely different set of premises concerning the nature of the Bible, and became dominant not only by characterizing this entire long history of interpretation as erroneous, but by offering itself as the only reasonable way to approach the texts. He does not engage in any sustained polemic against the hegemonic impulses of the historical-critical approach, but proposes, reasonably enough, that any renewal of biblical theology must take this ancient tradition of reading, as well as its premises, into account. And Kugel's anthology, even in this first popular form, offers valuable resources for a fuller and more organic engagement with Scripture.

It should be obvious that I both admire and appreciate Kugel's accomplishment. But there is another side to the interpretive tradition he so masterfully sketches that also needs to be acknowledged, a side that is darker and more dangerous. Precisely the ways in which the readings of the text can stand as equally authoritative as the text itself, so that in some instances, it is impossible to disentangle them; precisely the ways in which communities have simply read their own ideologies into and out of the text without remainder; precisely the power given to tradition and its agents by their assimilating the text's inspiration and authority into their own - these are troublesome tendencies that have sometimes done damage to persons and communities of faith. To some extent, Kugel's placing of discrete and interested readings into contact with each other as parts of a larger conversation itself mitigates the ambiguous power of isolated and exclusionary interpretations. But it should also be acknowledged that these are also the tendencies against which the best in historical-critical scholarship fought when it sought to establish the "voice of the text" as something distinct from "the voice of tradition." If our new conversations are to broaden beyond the merely historical and include this tradition of reading that Kugel has so brilliantly presented - and I have recently argued in these pages (January 16) that it should - the historical-critical moment also should not be ignored but should in some fashion (it is not yet clear how) be dialectically incorporated.

Luke Timothy Johnson is the author of The Real Jesus. He is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.