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Pass the Kugel

Alan Brill writes about the latest stage in the discussion over James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible.

Posted on March 12th, 2010 under Academia, Bible Studies • RSS 2.0 feed • You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed

One Response to “Pass the Kugel”

  1. 1
    R' Daniel:
    March 12th, 2010 at 5:14 pm

    I wrote about this topic extensively here: http://progressiveorthodoxy.wordpress.com/

    Essentially, Kugel’s work places the Bible into a broader sociocontextual milieu, emphasizing realia and the necessity of interpretation in formulating any moral or theological constructs (not the Bible itself; after all, reading just the pshat, or plain meaning of the Bible itself, without the interpretative glosses of Rashi or the theological graces of the Aggadata will leave one with perhaps little more than a literary or grammatical understanding of the text itself). After all, when understanding the text itself, without the theological aids of Rashi, Radak, or other parshanim or commentators, but with the sociocontextual tools of history, anthropology, and philology, one is gleaming an understanding of the text as it existed at the time of its redaction, not the text as it was understood among the Church Fathers or the medievals.

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