The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible

by James L. Kugel

Free Press, New York, 2003. 270 pp. $13.00. ISBN 0-7432-3584-3.

JAMES KUGEL, RECENTLY OF HARVARD AND NOW in Jerusalem, here con - tinues his publishing trajectory that combines an erudite awareness of the ancient Near Eastern critical apparatus and an acute Jewish sensitivity about how texts work. The book revolves around Kugel’s passion con - cerning two matters for which he employs strange but eventually illuminating phrases. On the one hand, the title of the book, The God of Old, refers to the peculiar character of the divine attested in the Hebrew Bible long before there have been overlays of Hellenistic, rationalistic, or modern theological impositions. The phrase for the title Kugel takes from Deuteronomy 33:26–27, a phrase rendered in KJV as “eternal God.” (The NRSV offers a quite alternative rendering.) By this phrase Kugel refers to the raw character of the God of Israel who appears de novo in the history of religion, even though Kugel knows all the data about religious evolution toward monotheism.

On the other hand, Kugel refers to “The Project” by which he seems to mean a theological investigation into the “realness of things” that lies deep beneath the appearances that are so taken for granted among us: “They [the texts] can indeed come back to life, and their world, their way of seeing, can let us in to take the measure of things that are strange” (p. 3). At the end, Kugel concludes: “It is important to glimpse how things once were otherwise; certainly we then may better understand where the present came from. And perhaps also for another reason, somewhat more sublime: to remember that that ‘otherwise’ is, for all that has intervened, not unrelated to what exists in the fullest reality of today” (p. 199).

Thus in the most restrained and almost whimsical way, Kugel’s ultimate concern is not historical but contemporary. His book, in a rich variety of offerings, makes the case that the contemporary world, like the ancient world attested by the text, is indeed visited, haunted, and ultimately defined by the reality of God who is palpably, even if hiddenly, alive and effective in the world. The inference this reader draws from Kugel is that the contemporary secular, profane, technological, self-sufficient enterprise of a growth culture is sadly misinformed, a misconstrual that is soon or late destructive. That is my inference, but I believe it squares with Kugel’s passion. In some sense then, that “old God” still matters; the project is to attend to the ways in which that old God matters, a project that begins in and focuses on texts that do not square with our conventional propensities. To serve this subtle but sweeping horizon Kugel offers a series of textual forays (each REVIEWS Interpretation 65 richly supported by bibliography and critical exploration wisely placed in endnotes) that stand more or less independent from each other, even though the effect of the argument is cumulative. Each of these scenarios is a suggested reread of texts in order to show that there is something strange, compelling, and deeply visceral concerning the Theological Character in the text that is most often missed in a conventional critical perspective.

The first exposition concerns texts that are eerie in their comment on divine presence. These texts include the theophany in Joshua 5, the birth narrative of Sampson, the birth announcement to Abraham and Sarah, the theophany to Gideon, and Jacob’s dream at Bethel. The participants in these several narratives are most often in a “fog” that Kugel takes to be “a moment of confusion.” The confusion arises because the participants are bewildered about what has been seen . . . a God, an angel, a man? Out of this material Kugel takes such confusion “as evidence that the interpenetration of divine reality and human reality, is easy, without sharp distinction.” Thus, “there are not two realms in the Bible, this world and the other, the spiritual and the material—or rather, these two realms are not neatly segregated but intersect constantly. God turns up around the street corner, dressed like an ordinary person” (p. 35). Our modern, critical field of perspective, so Kugel implies, misses the point and so misconstrues the world.

In a second expository venture, Kugel reinforces the conviction of a God who is palpably and freely at work in the world. Kugel contrasts the capacity of “the old God” to be freely and spontaneously in communication with human persons “out of the blue.” This includes direct address—without being sought—to Abraham, Moses, and through prophetic calls. This directness, Kugel opines, is quite in contrast to a later notion, already apparent in the later parts of the Hebrew Bible, that God is to be understood as both bigger and less remote than portrayed in these early narratives. It is the exile that required a bigger God as Israel had to account, in its monotheism, for God’s rule of all nations. But such remoteness sacrificed the intimate directness of older traditions and eventually produced the omniscient, omnipotent God that became normative in Judaism and Christianity (p. 63). Kugel of course knows the story of theological development in both Judaism and Christianity; but he invites the reader to reconsider the older direct, intimate God who stands well behind the emergence of a more conventional orthodoxy: “Perhaps this other God, the theological embarrassment, should invite our renewed attention. . . . Perhaps, in the end, all the things examined in this book—the angels, the absence of divine images, the victim’s cry, the soul on its journey, and so forth—can fit together to create a rather different understanding” (p. 64).

This “different understanding” is Kugel’s concern, a theological understanding that is immensely subversive of the settled theological world of orthodoxy. This general argument is, of course, not new to students of the text. But Kugel’s way with textual performance is remarkably effective and inviting.

Among the other themes he develops, the one most compelling to this reviewer—and others who seek to work in a liberationist perspective—is his chapter on “the cry of the victim.” Kugel gathers together texts of “cry” that emerge on the lips of the helpless in society 66 Interpretation JANUARY 2005 and those who are oppressed. Kugel, however, is not interested in social analysis, but in the character of God who responds to the cry. He observes that God is “disturbed principally by the cry” and not by the situation of injustice itself that produces the cry (p. 113). God’s response to the cry is not out of omniscience but out of attentiveness to those who cry. The conclusion drawn from this textual evidence is that a response to the cry of the victim is “God’s duty” (p. 124). This leads, moreover, to a wondrous explanation of God’s “compassion” out of Psalm 82 and the dramatic response of Exodus 2:24–25:

Now, what God actually says to Moses about His being merciful is really not news—as we saw in Psalm 82, it was simply any god’s job to be compassionate and merciful, and this truth was so universally assumed in the Bible that, as we have seen, it underlies the dozens of passages that speak of the victim’s cry. Yet here, in Exodus, this cliché is presented as a revelation, God’s ultimate self-revelation to Moses: I am by nature h9annun and rah9um (despite all evidence to the contrary). I hear the cry of the victim; I can’t help it (pp. 135–136).

There are two other themes developed that move in the same direction. The book is of course knowledgeable, but at the same time, elusive and teasing, a mode of articulation that is a match for the text and for the subject at hand. The book takes up material long since recognized among us. Kugel’s fresh capacity, however, suggests a quite alternative mode of biblical theology, one that lets the text have its say and lets the reader do some of the work.

The subtext, so it seems to this reader, is that these old texts with this Ancient Character expose our contemporary world as mistaken. Kugel does not go very far in telling us how to construe the world; he nonetheless gives us supple material for a fresh beginning in subversion that grows from this old subversion.

Walter Brueggemann
COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
DECATUR, GEORGIA

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Leviticus

by Samuel E. Balentine

Interpretation. John Knox, Louisville, 2002. 220 pp. $24.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8042-3103-6.

THIS VOLUME IS PART OF THE Interpretation series that is designed for use in the parish. It intends to synthesize historical and theological research in a manner that will allow the message of the entire book to be grasped by interested laypersons and pastors. This contribution fills these criteria admirably.

In Balentine’s mind the role of ritual is key to interpreting the message of Leviticus. In this respect he makes available for the average reader the many groundbreaking insights that accompany Jacob Milgrom’s massive three-volume commentary. In addition, the work of Frank Gorman (The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time, and Status in the Priestly Theology) and Mary Douglas (Leviticus as Literature) on Leviticus and ritual is also mined and used effectively. On occasion, his appeal to ritual theory leads to an overly anthropocentric focus that cuts across the grain of Leviticus’ uncompromising theocentric claims. Nevertheless the comparative examination is generally illuminative. The book also juxtaposes the insights of Leviticus to a number of classic poets (my personal favorites were his citations of George Herbert) and contemporary Jewish thinkers such as Leon Wieseltier (Kaddish) and Abraham Heschel (The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man). These more than occasional asides will allow the more alien features of the book to reach contemporary ears.

Of course, none of the Levitical ritual will derive any theological traction unless the actions are viewed over against the claim that the God of Israel dwells in the tabernacle. We take these rituals seriously because they map out the manner we are to behave when we draw near to the Holy One of Israel. To drive home this point, the book of Leviticus is redolent with the vocabulary and imagery of Genesis 1. The point here is

that God’s creational order is generative of and sustained by human observance of an imaging ritual order. This ritual order is manifest in the litany of the primordial week, when through seven commands God speaks into being a cosmic order that finds its culmination in the observance of the Sabbath day (Gen 1:1–2:4a). This primordial design provides the foundation for the liturgy of the covenant making, when God’s seven commands (Exod 25–31) and Israel’s seven acts of compliance (Exod 40:17–33) bring into existence a cultic order centered in the tabernacle, which provides God’s holy residence in the midst of a fragile world (p. 4).

Time and again the text of Leviticus uses the pattern of a seven-fold iteration of a command not as a piece of literary artistry but rather as a way of granting what might appear to be a time-bound ritual role in marking and imitating the cosmic order. 68 Interpretation JANUARY 2005 Given the importance of the sacrifices of atonement in Leviticus for the epistle to the Hebrews, this is one section of the book that all Christian Bible readers would do well to become familiar with. Here Balentine does an admirable job of making one of Milgrom’s most important contributions to the study of Priestly literature accessible to the lay reader. The key chapters are Lev 4 (the basic outline of how the purification offering, often translated, “sin offering,” works) and Lev 16 (the incorporation of the purification offering into the ritual for the annual Day of Atonement rite). As Childs has long reminded us, the relationship between the two testaments is an exceedingly complex affair and before one embarks on the important theological task of describing how the two are related, each testament must be heard on its own grounds. Balentine makes quite clear that for Leviticus sin is not merely some symbol of things gone wrong but rather “actualizes the belief that the sanctuary is no ordinary place.…The sanctuary is holy because it is the visible center of God’s presence in the world. When it is defiled, God’s presence is compromised, and the world’s stability is threatened” (p. 58). In light of this, one can see why some sort of strong atonement theory is needed to make sense of the cross. God cannot simply declare an amnesty or overlook sin in a casual manner; sin creates a barrier that must be dealt with. According to the logic of the New Testament, God has no choice but to enter the created world to redeem the created order God so deeply loves.

The so-called Holiness Code (Lev 17–26) concerns itself with the moral life of the Israelite community. If the beginning of the book appears too “clerical” in focus or too restricted to the domain of the altar, this is more than compensated for in the lengthy treatise that ends this book. Here Israel is enjoined to be holy just as God is holy. Whereas concern for impurity in Lev 1–16 was, by and large, limited to the effect it would have on the sanctuary, in Lev 17ff. the concern is for how “unethical and immoral human conduct outside the sanctuary defiles the world with consequences no less catastrophic than religious infidelity. The measure of Israel’s obedience to God is not only the purity of its rituals; it is also the morality of its everyday conduct” (p. 153, author’s italics).

In setting up his argument in this fashion, Balentine makes it clear that the laws governing the moral life in Lev 18-20 are central to the task of being a holy nation. This will create some problems for many readers of the volume because many of these laws (18:6–23; 20:9–21) that govern the moral life of the Israelite concern themselves with sexual propriety, and among those is a law (18:22) that proscribes homosexual behavior (but not homosexual intentions; Leviticus is not interested in the world of internal desire, only the process of acting on those desires).

This proscription of homosexual relations is frequently relativized by setting it next to the food laws of Lev 11, the point being that just as Christians may ignore the laws about shell fish, so they are at liberty to pass over the restrictions on homosexual relations. Balentine’s argument for the centrality of these chapters will not allow him recourse to this strategy. Leaning on Milgrom, he declares that the laws on improper sexual relations are rooted in a theology of creation: “The fundamental issue behind all these prohibitions…is the concern to honor God’s procreational commission to be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28) (p. 158). This sort of law is not subject to abrogation in Christian thought in the REVIEWS Interpretation 69 manner in which the food laws are. Though he provides some appropriate caveats that a reader must keep in mind when interpreting the specific law regarding homosexuality (Balentine himself is quite tolerant on this particular issue), he wisely keeps the creation theology of P at the forefront: “Finally, however we may decide to appropriate these prohibitions, we should remember that the rationale behind all of them, including those dealing with male homosexuality, is the overriding concern to honor God’s procreational commission” (p. 159).

This book is a marvelous introduction to the rich—albeit foreign—world of Leviticus. A careful reading of this volume in consultation with the Biblical text will be immensely rewarding.

Gary A. Anderson
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
SOUTH BEND, INDIANA

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