The God of the modern world -- all-powerful, all-knowing, invisible, and omnipresent -- has been a staple of Western civilization. Yet in this remarkable book, James Kugel shows that this God is not the same as the God of most of the Hebrew Bible, the God who appeared to Abraham, Moses, and other biblical heroes. That God, the "God of Old," was actually perceived in a very different way -- a way that has much to teach modern believers.
James Kugel is renowned for his investigations into the history of the biblical era, a time beginning more than three thousand years ago, when the Bible's earliest parts first took shape. Now he goes even deeper, attempting to enter the spiritual world of ancient Israelites and see through their eyes God as they encountered him.
The God of Old appeared to people unexpectedly; He was not sought out. Often He was not even recognized, at first mistaken for an ordinary human being. The realm of the divine was not as it is today -- a spiritual dimension set off from the material world. The spiritual and the material overlapped, and the realm of the dead was a real domain just beyond the world of the living. Ordinary reality was in constant danger of sliding into something else, something stark but oddly familiar. God was always standing just behind the curtain of the everyday world.
Kugel suggests that this alternative spirituality is not simply an archaic relic, replaced by a "better" understanding. Kugel's picture of the God of Old has much to tell us about God's very nature, and about the encounter between Him and human beings in today's world. This is a book to treasure side by side with the Bible, and for years to come.
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
To call to a God you know can be here:
Kugel is one of the world's foremost Bible scholars. In this work he makes an effort to understand what he calls , "The God of Old". He distinguishes between the conception of God created in the Babylonian Exile in which God is omnipotent and omniscient. With this he contrasts the "God of Old" Who is in a sense a more limited God appearing at certain times and not appearing at others.
As Kugel sees it the world in which the Bible was created did not have a separate spiritual and material realm. The... more info
stale:
The author made entirely too many assumptions for the average reader. I found his style dry.
Insightful, contemplative, well-written:
Few people can write as well as Kugel. In discussing the starkness of Psalm 90, Kugel compares the summation of one's life to a painting: "This canvas is the only thing of our existence that endures. To be sure, it does not endure in any tangible way, since nothing tangible endures in any case. [...] But it is no less real for being intangible--that is the essence of the stark world--in fact, it is only thanks to its intangibility that it does endure, and it is the only thing that matters. [...] when... more info
interesting read:
I can recall the experience of afternoon Hebrew school and the small group of us being urged to pontificate on the nature of God - we had several choices, namely, the Watchmaker, the Unmoving Mover, the Captain of a large ship, etc. My utter disappointment in myself at not knowing the correct answer is of course part of this lucid memory. I still retain a certain faith in the nature of right answers but now I appreciate how these right answers can vary, dependent on the multiple realities inherent in... more info
