The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times

by James L. Kugel, Ellen Geiger

A world-renowned scholar brings a lifetime of study to reveal how a pivotal transformation in spiritual experience during the Biblical Era made us who we are today

Why does the Bible depict a world in which humans, with surprising regularity, encounter the divine—wrestling an angel, addressing a burning bush, issuing forth prophecy without any choice in the matter? These stories spoke very differently to their original audience than they do to us, and they reflect a radically distinct understanding of reality and the human mind. Yet over the course of the thousand-year Biblical Era, encounters with God changed dramatically. As James L. Kugel argues, this transition allows us to glimpse a massive shift in human experience—the emergence of the modern, Western sense of self.

In this landmark work, Kugel fuses revelatory close readings of ancient texts with modern scholarship from a range of fields, including neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and archaeology, to explain the origins of belief, worship, and the sense of self, and the changing nature of God through history. In the tradition of books like The Swerve and The Better Angels of Our Nature,The Great Shift  tells the story of a revolution in human consciousness and the enchantment of everyday life. This book will make believers and seekers think differently not just about the Bible, but about the entire history of the human imagination.

Genres: Religion, History, Philosophy, Judaism, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Judaica

476 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12, 2017

Reviews

[Bebe (Sarah) Brechner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scholarly, spiritual, and integrative, this densely researched and deeply thoughtful book uncovers many Biblical historical gems unknown to most of us and synthesizes it all into a rich, analytical perspective. Covering the spiritual history of the Hebrew people, Kugel brings all of his years of research into this sensitive and probing work. He is professor emeritus at Harvard (Hebrew Literature) and professor emeritus at Bar Ilan University (Bible), and in 2016, won Israel's highest award - the Rothschild Prize - in Jewish studies. The fortunate reader certainly benefits from all of his years of deep study and teaching in this new book. It is brilliant.

Kugel flexes his impressive multidisciplinary muscles here, bringing in anthropological and cognitive sciences, as well as his expert scholarly skills in Biblical history and texts, into a consideration of how the people of the Bible perceived God throughout the historical period of the Bible. When Kugel includes non-canonical texts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and those of neighboring cultures of the times, alongside the Bible itself, the result is a brilliant analysis that leaves the reader both dazzled and thoughtful. At the end of the book, Kugel ponders on the writer Flannery O'Connor's words about God -- truly a fitting ending to such a stunning book. This is one of my best books of the year. It's not an easy book, but well worth the effort.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why have I never read James Kugel before?

This is a thought-provoking and brilliant book on the transformation in how humans relate to God as seen throughout the Old Testament. In tackling this subject Kugel is asking a similar question to the questions asked by Charles Taylor in his magisterial A Secular Age, as well as many other authors. Much of my reading on this has focused on the shift between pre-modern and modern ways of thinking. As Taylor and others have shown, and what is patently obvious once you think about it, is that the way we think about God is dramatically different today than it was prior to the 1500s.

They lived in an enchanted world, ours is disenchanted.

They experiences life as open to super nature, we live with a thick line between nature and super-nature (we are buffered selves).

Yet, we are amiss if we think that all humans prior to 1500, going the whole way back to prehistory, experienced God the exact same way. The most recent transformation was not the first. Nor will it be the last.

Kugel describes how we see a transformation in the very pages of scripture. Early on in Genesis we meet people who encounter God in visions. In these fog-like visions, God appears with a body and confronts people in dramatic ways. Further, we rarely get insight into these people’s inner thought. This changes over time as God sort of recedes from the picture. God no longer shows up in a body from time to time, but instead is believed as being everywhere at all times.

We see this shift just in Genesis. In the stories of Abraham, God mysteriously shows up and chats with Abraham. But in the stories of Joseph, God does not speak. Yet, Joseph sees God as guiding everything.

For the interested reader, two caveats may be worth mentioning. Kugel writes as a serious scholar and thus accepts all the scholarly findings in regards to the Hebrew Bible. This means he does not just take it, from Genesis on through the prophets, as the straightforward narrative conservative fundamentalist Christians do. We may see later ideas in Deuteronomy and earlier ideas in Judges. Second then, Kugel notes that history is messy and thus not always straightforward. These transformations are not clean breaks as much as slow movements with a lot of overlap.

By the time we get to the common era though, the transformation is complete. Kugel notes how prayer and scripture reading had replaced sacrifice and vivid encounters with God. As I was reading this book, I was also beginning to read Genesis and I noted how different the people’s experience with God was back then. Why doesn’t God show up to us like to Abraham or Hagar? Kugel’s point is that the experience of God by the first-century, even by the middle of the Hebrew Bible, is already different.

At the same time, we have lived through additional transformations. Not only is the experience of the divine today different then 1500 BC, our experience of the divine is different then in 1500 AD as well. In some ways, reading Kugel’s book helps me make sense of these later transformations. Its not that everything was fine and wonderful until the modern period. This is the old “subtraction story” as Taylor calls it, where all those naive folks in all of history believed in god until we learned science. Kugel shows that belief in and experience of God was never just one thing.

Living in a secular age, a world always changing, I find that insight particularly helpful.

Finally, Kugel also brings in findings from neuroscience and archaeology and elsewhere. Its truly a brilliant work.

[Daniel Hoffman · Rating 4 out of 5]

When we read the Bible (Old Testament especially), it's just taken for granted that God sometimes spoke or appeared to certain people in quite vivid ways. Now, it seems that he doesn't. Even most believers—certainly in the West—assume so anyway. Kugel wonders what changed, and particularly from the human side. So his project, as he puts it, is this:

"The question I wish to answer, using all that we now know about biblical Israel and its neighbors, is: What was the actual, lived reality of God in biblical times, and why have most people lost it today?"

"Why do these biblical texts say what they say, and if there was any reality to them, why has it mostly disappeared?"

"Rather, my question is: What did the first audience of these stories assume—about God, and about seeing—that made these accounts seem plausible and even realistic?"

It's a good and in some ways obvious question. I don't know if Kugel is a believer though, actually. His focus in this book is not really on what God himself does or did, but on human perception of God's speaking and revealing. There is a lot of fascinating exploration relating anthropology to this issue, especially how the human "sense of self" is not a uniform or static thing across times and cultures. In lots of places even today, and probably more so in the ancient world, people tended not to see themselves as closed off units, impermeable to outside influences. In the end though I don't think he really answers the question. He does seek to show a shift in how people related to God across the biblical time period (in general, from more immediate and fearful encounters locally focused at altars or in temples to a more "mundane" experience in regular prayers and inscripturated text), and argues that this reflects a shifting human perception of God. So for example, he notes the difference between how God is portrayed in the Abraham/Isaac/Jacob narratives, an active participant, vs. how he is portrayed as a more distant overseer in the Joseph story (which Kugel takes to be a significantly later composition).

The "shift" that Kugel notes is there, and it's interesting, but I don't think it goes that far to answering his initial question. The anthropological issues are not irrelevant, and certainly the experience of history (Israel's own, especially) influenced how God was perceived to relate to humanity. But the answer in the Bible itself is probably better sought along the lines of Hebrews 1:1, that "God who formally spoke at many times and in many ways to the fathers by the prophets has in these last days spoken to us in his Son." There seems to be a kind of climactic finality implied there in the coming of Christ that, despite the presence of New Testament prophets and continuing gifts of the Spirit, lie behind the "great shift" that Kugel explores.

Four stars for being very clear, well-written, engaging, and insightful and many points; loses a star for unsatisfying conclusion (or lack of real conclusion at all) and lots of standard liberal assumptions about biblical composition (dating Daniel in the 2nd century B.C., etc).

[Connor Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kugel places you in the elusive mindset of what it might have been like to be you in ancient Israel. Most proponents of the Bible never fully consider what it might have been like read like to read or hear those texts in their original context, outside of a post-enlightenment, modern, westernized world. The task itself is clearly impossible, but Kugel squeezes whatever clues are to be gleaned from that unfeasible question and then ties it to a view of a god or gods that is so elucidating that it might have you questioning what you believe simply because of where and when you were born.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was outstanding. Kugel's discussion regarding how humans have interacted with God was easily understandable, as well as rich with ideas from biblical and extra biblical texts. I loved this book.

Spoilers ahead

James Kugel's book "The Great Shift" argues that there was a significant shift in religious thinking among ancient Jews around the time of the Second Temple period (516 BCE - 70 CE). He posits that early on, God was seen as a distant, impersonal force, but over time, people began to understand God as more personal and involved in their lives. Kugel also argues that this shift in understanding God is reflected in the development of the Hebrew Bible, with the later texts, such as the Prophets and Wisdom literature, reflecting a more personal and involved God than the earlier texts, such as the Pentateuch. In addition to this, he identifies a shift in the way of interpreting the biblical texts as well, from the symbolic to the literal, which is seen as a consequence of the shift in the understanding of God.

Kugel argues that before this time, Jewish religious thought was focused on the performance of rituals and the adherence to laws, but after this time, there was a shift towards an emphasis on inner, personal religious experiences and the interpretation of biblical texts. He also argues that this shift can be seen in the development of new religious texts and the rise of new religious movements, such as the emergence of the Pharisees and the emergence of early Christianity.
Kugel provides several pieces of evidence to support his argument of a shift in religious thinking among ancient Jews. One piece of evidence he cites is the emergence of new religious texts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish Pseudepigrapha, which reflect a new focus on inner, personal religious experiences and the interpretation of biblical texts.

He also points out that there is a significant change in the way biblical texts were interpreted and understood, with a shift away from a literal reading of the text to a more metaphorical or allegorical reading. He also cites the emergence of new religious movements, such as the Pharisees and the Essenes, as evidence of this shift in religious thinking.

Kugel also notes that there is a change in the way people understood God, from God as a distant ruler and lawgiver to a more personal, involved God who is more concerned with the individual's inner religious experiences. He also provides evidence from the writings of Jewish sages and the Talmudic literature which portray this shift in thinking.

Additionally, Kugel uses the emergence of early Christianity as a further evidence of the shift in religious thought, as early Christianity emphasized their inner personal religious experience and the interpretative reading of the scriptures.

The Hebrew Bible Shifted from a Polytheistic View to a Monotheistic One

Kugel masterfully tells the story of the development of Israelite monotheism in chapter 9: To Monotheism… and beyond:

In the human heart, something there is that loves the One. Perhaps it had always been so. No one knows who the first deity was, or if such a deity started off alone or as part of a whole group of divine beings, a company that might have included deified ancestors, all the wandering stars of heaven, plus marauding evil spirits and goblins and sprites, the inhabitants of this sacred tree or that stone. But it is not hard to imagine that the very first personification of what had previously been the great, undifferentiated Outside was barely even that: some sort of lone divine being who could be thought of as such, a usually hidden, human-like causer of all things whose cause was unknown. Whether or not this is so (and of course we shall never know), the fact is that—at least with regard to the ancient Near East— scholars have demonstrated that any sharp differentiation between a primordial polytheism and a much later monotheism is not altogether descriptive of what really existed. Here and there, in ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and elsewhere, “the gods” often had a way of sliding into “the god,” the One whose shimmering unity encompassed all the manifestations of specific deities and their personal domains and functions.

The very existence of a pantheon, in which a given society’s various divinities are considered to make up an established collectivity, also bears witness to a certain hesitation between the One and the many. A collectivity obviously bespeaks a polytheistic inclusiveness; but a pantheon usually also features one supreme deity, whose existence makes (or once made) possible the collective functioning of the other gods and goddesses. In theory, of course, conceiving of such a divine company was not logically necessary: indeed, the phenomena to which its gods and goddesses were connected—a fruitful harvest, success on the battlefield, human fertility, various heavenly bodies—did not seem to be working in any coordinated fashion. If not, then wasn’t the existence of a supreme deity ruling over the others a kind of quest for unity in the midst of diversity, for the One over all the others? It is striking, in any case, that in the Semitic lands, specific deities named El, Il, Ilu, Elohim, Allah—all derived from the basic word for “god”—seem to head (or to have headed) the pantheon, as if to say that this “generic” deity, who lords it over all those other ones beneath him, is somehow the very essence of divinity. Noteworthy as well is the pedigree and distribution of a similarly generic “god” name in the Indo-European world, beginning with the hypothetical proto-Indo-European deity Dyeus, as in Sanskrit Dyàuṣpítaḥ (the pítaḥ part means “father”), whose form is paralleled in Latin Jupiter; meanwhile the same root is reflected in the Greek Zeus, Latin deus, “god,” Germanic Tuesday, and perhaps even Greek eudia, “fair weather” (presumably, for sailing the Aegean).

At Ugarit, a council of gods held sway; it was known as the “assembly of the gods” or “assembly of El,” who headed it. Strikingly, the same phrase occurs in Psalm 82, which relates how Israel’s God long ago dissolved this assembly and took over as the reigning One:

God stands in the divine assembly, He rules among the gods. “How long will you [gods] judge falsely, showing favor to the guilty party?

Give justice to the poor, the orphan; find in favor of the needy, the wretched. Rescue the poor and the lowly, save them from the wicked.”

(But they did not know or understand, walking about in darkness; the earth’s foundations tottered.)

“I used to think that you all were gods, sons of the Almighty; and yet you will die like humans, and fall like the falling stars.”

Arise, O God, rule over the earth, since all the nations are Yours.

Here is a scenario designed to explain how the many became the One; it all came about because the lesser gods were not doing their job, specifically, not joining together in the fair administration of justice. As a result, the very foundations on which the earth rests were in danger of collapse. So God condemned his former subalterns to oblivion and took over all their previous functions for Himself. (But these “previous functions,” as we shall see shortly, presented a sharp challenge to any such deity.) (Kugel, The Great Shift, p. 158-159)

Later in chapter 9 Kugel explains the difficulties with an embodied monotheistic god, and how the texts tried to fix this issue (p. 163-166).

As the shift away from an embodied local god took place, a shift also took place as to the power that this god had. Kugel explains:

These conflicting models for representing God’s being are all to be found in the Hebrew Bible. But for all their differences, a definite process of abstraction is observable. If monolatry or monotheism was a cause of this process or its result is hard to say. But one thing is clear: the national deity of a tiny people settled in the highlands of Canaan might quite conceivably appear in the form of a man-sized divine being who has just stepped over from the other side of the curtain. But a deity who rules over entire nations and peoples (even with the help of underlings) could hardly be thought to exist in a body the size of an ordinary human being. He must be as huge as the book of Isaiah says, His throne itself consisting of the whole sky, and for whom the whole earth is just a convenient footstool (Isa 66:1). And after all,

Who has measured the oceans in the hollow of his hand [as God has], or marked off the skies with a yardstick?

Or put the earth’s soil in his bushel, weighed the mountains on a hand-scale and the hills in a balance? …

The nations themselves are [to Him] a drop from the bucket, they weigh as much as the dust on a scale. (Isa 40:12, 15)

Could such a huge being even be said to have a body at all? What happened next, the thing that was to be the most important development in the human encounter with God for later centuries and centuries, may have been anticipated within the Hebrew Bible, but it was not stated explicitly until the period just following the biblical period. God came to be characterized by the three omni’s: omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, that is, all-powerful, all-knowing, and existing everywhere all at once. This understanding had the most profound effect on Judaism and Christianity (p. 169-170). In the next chapter Kugel writes:

We saw in the previous chapter some of the changes that took place in Israel’s encounter with God, as He went from being the people’s main God to being its only God, and then to being the God of the whole world, indeed, the three-omnied God of post-biblical times (p. 177).

Later in his book Kugel covers other ideas like the continuation (or lack thereof) of prophecy, authority, the establishment of written texts with authority, and the loss of the second temple. His concluding ideas sum up much of the ground he covers in this excellent examination of the development of ideas springing from the Bible:

In late Second Temple times, Israel yearned for nothing less than the total reestablishment of God’s kingship on earth, presumably to be brought about by an earthly king who would retake control and fix all that had gone awry. But then, with time, the very nature of God’s kingship came to be redefined. It became at times a way of seeing, something like the visionary state of old, which now allowed people to peer through the veil of apparent reality and glimpse God’s rule behind and through it.

What brought about this gradual but thoroughgoing change in human beings’ encounters with the divine? So many things had happened, people’s whole way of life had so drastically changed in the course of ten centuries, that it may seem altogether inadequate to refer, as I have, to people’s changing sense of self, as if this really clarified anything. Surely something, or rather, a lot of specific somethings, had come along and changed things: technological innovations that made possible new forms of existence; Israel’s geopolitical reality, which brought with it (and not always in friendly fashion) the steady introduction of foreign practices and new ideas; various political and social changes; as well as a host of internally generated changes of various sorts, some of which were altogether nonmaterial, emerging from deep inside and taking wing. No doubt it was all of these that changed Israel’s apprehension of its God. (In mentioning these I am also rejecting by implication what some others have proposed: I don’t believe this gradual shift was the result of a few significant individuals coming along simultaneously in the space of a few centuries, nor of some fundamental change in the functioning of the bicameral brain.)

But to say, “These numerous changes came about and as a result people began conceiving of God in a different way” is likewise incomplete, precisely because it skips over the all-important mediating factor dismissed in the previous paragraph. It was not the material conditions of daily life or mere geopolitics that alone altered Israel’s encounter with God; what was changing along with these—over a period of centuries—was a set of unspoken assumptions about what the self consists of and how it fits into the world. So it was in a substantially reconfigured self (and the self, it should be recalled, is always a human construct) that humans encountered God anew in the late- and post-biblical era. The evidence is in the very texts examined in the previous chapters (p. 340-341).

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

---Intro---
There’s something interesting going on in the Bible that surprisingly seems to have not been given as much focus as it deserves: so where is God exactly? It’s odd in a way, noted in The Great Shift, how chronologically in the Garden story, God is literally described as walking around* and thus always there but in a finite form. Later, He comes and goes, talking directly with Noah, Abraham, and others. Even later, with prophets like Jeremiah and Nahum, but less as ‘face to face’ interactions and more ephemeral. Even more so when we get to the era of Psalms and Daniel, He transforms into the “everywhere and anywhere, within us and all around us” form we most associate Him with today. But why? Why the change?

*while modern (as in Rabbinic, not necessarily 20th century) traditional Judaism views any actual characterizations of God in physical terms as metaphors, the text at times is pretty clear that that may not have been its original intention.


---Interesting Highlights---
“This God (of Old) does not seem to have much in common with the God of later theologians. Here, God is not everywhere, omnipresent”

“We have not quite finished with Joseph, however. It is important to consider what sort of contact he has with God in this story. The answer is surprising: none. He is kicked around a lot—by his brothers, by his master’s wife, by his cellmates, by life itself—yet not once does he lift his voice in prayer to the Almighty.”

(in reference to Cain and Abel)
“Meat was the ideal sacrifice, and it always spoke louder than a vegetable offering, and certainly louder than good intentions or heartfelt prayers.”

“In theory, God was in charge of everything, including good and bad angels. But how different was this from saying that He was the head of a polytheistic pantheon?”


---Review---
When the NY Times, as noted on the book’s cover, is quoted as calling The Great Shift “fascinating”, they may have been on to something. Because really, so much ground is covered here ‘fascinating’ only scratches the surface of it.

While there were not really any times I had to put the book down in awe, the author combines many aspects of not how we view God now, but how those living in biblical times viewed Him. Some of it may be seen as heresy to more traditional modern adherents to Judaism, but working with non-canonical text alongside Scripture, it does become apparent that God and His interactions with the world were not thought to be as universal as they are now.

The Great Shift got going with a unique look at the Garden story and only got more interesting as things progressed. However, the last section which focuses more on post-biblical times (think first century CE) packed less of a punch since it went beyond the main theme of the book and for readers coming from a religious studies background, felt a bit samey to what one already has studied.

Nevertheless, there is a ton to digest in this book. Calling it ‘controversial’ may be pushing it, but it really is surprising that an author who identifies as an Orthodox Jew also is very comfortable with concepts such as the documentary hypothesis. And I do not mean this in any negative way; as the Rambam has said, it’s important to accept the truth from wherever it may come and to get there, one needs to study and one should try to figure out just how one’s ancestors interacted with the Other. The Great Shift helps immensely in this journey.

[Stephen Branstetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good book on how humanity understood and interpreted the Bible through the different ages.And how we engaged with God then, and now.

[Jake Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an awesome book. An overview of the Hebrew Bible and how the characters and their relation to God changed over the narrative? Yes please! This book was incredibly insightful weaving together lots of different discipline and I was thoroughly impressed. Would recommend.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revelatory!

It's impossible to guess how interesting or helpful someone not well-acquainted with the bible would find The Great Shift. It's also impossible briefly to describe the basic content of James Kugel's most recent book: is it about the gradual development of the concept of the individual (I, id, person, ego, self, soul), or does it describe humanity's slow recognition of the nature and essence of the God of the bible? Yes.

When a person studies scripture seriously, they learn something about sources, a fair amount about historical, cultural, political, and economic context. After some time and a lot of study, they can make educated and often accurate conjectures about where a passage might have originated, to what degree and how – sometimes even where – it could have been edited. For people of church or synagogue, making the witness of scripture a vital part of everyday family, community, and civic life is the ultimate goal.

Like the author, I claim membership in a faith community that affirms the authority of scripture as a testimony of the life together of God with the people of God and as a guide for daily life. If I'm teaching or presenting to a group that doesn't already know me, in order to defer some questions and concerns I usually explain, "I have a very high view of scripture as the word of God; I have an equally high view of scripture as a human word, with all the ambiguity that implies."

Kugel reveals new aspects of some passages many of us thought we knew. He enhances many of his observations regarding the texts of [mostly] the Hebrew bible with parallel and similar instances in extra-biblical and non-canonical literature from the same periods. It's interesting how Hebrews (later known as Israelites and then Jews) imagined and then created a religion with gods that reflected characteristics, preferences, and habits of divinities belonging to their neighbors; we're learning more and more about the strong human tendency toward mimesis or imitation, so not surprisingly, that's what they did. Or... was the original modality of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the rest a real religion as we define religion? Or not? A thread that weaves through The Great Shift reminds us how early on, in many instances the god or the god's emissaries appeared or spoke in a form similar to a human person's, though communication and from the great outside, from heaven, or from elsewhere than here hardly astonished those early hearers and observers. You remember God's charge to Abram in Genesis 12? Abraham's visitors in Genesis 18? Jacob/Israel's wrestling into an out of joint hip and a new identity in Genesis 32? Those types of encounters seems to have stopped happening; the "why" belongs to some of the book's trajectory.

With a centuries-long history that ultimately becoming codified in the words of a book that at first was a neuter plural, later feminine singular, among all the deities of the ancient near east, the God Whose people would be His prized possession if they obeyed uniquely was a god of commandments (ordinances, laws, ways, statues, precepts, testimonies) spoken and given – and written down – as grace-filled gift not solely for the glory of God, but also for the well-being of all creation. A long time arriving at an understanding of a Divinity who does not require extravagant tribute, whose first concern is the integrity of the creation He even chooses to inhabit!

This is a thick, heavy book; chapters average about twenty pages each. Kugel writes extremely well, without any of those annoying habits we all know about and wish people would forget about using. Although he's also a person of religious conviction, Professor Kugel presents the material like the scholar and the teacher he is. Because of my familiarity with the biblical texts and my theological background, I found none of it tough or rough-going, but again I'd caution whether or not you're religious or even somewhat spiritual, The Great Shift may or may not be for you. It has shifted my broad perspective on the story of the God and the people of the bible and sparked my interest in reading a little more anthropology. In the end, James Kugel agrees with a quote from the late Flannery O'Connor "I do not know You, God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside." That's where I find myself.

[Bob Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Old Testament is a vast library of differing theologies, explanations and experiences of God. The older texts seem to indicate a more direct and personal experience of God while the later texts seem to point to a more indirect and distant experience. James Kugel writes about this in the The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times and attempts to explain why this shift happened and what this means for our experience of God today.

At the outset, the reader must come to a conclusion: does the Old Testament theology 'evolve' or 'develop' or has it always been a constant, stagnant and permanent theology. The answer to this question will determine how much of Kugel's work the reader is willing to follow. For many Christians, this might be alarming and they might be tempted to dismiss the book as an example of liberal theology.

Kugel's main point is that the changes in culture and self understanding have forced people to reconsider their understanding of God and the divine. This shift occurs in a very practical and real way as people move from encountering God in a physical way to a more 'spiritual' way...especially with the development of prayer and Scripture.

Kugel does a great job in investigating people's religious experiences. He writes about the way people experiences visions and auditory hallucinations. These experiences still occur today, but we are much more dismissive of them.

Kugel's writing is academic, but accessible. This may not be a summer page turner, but it is interesting enough to keep the reader engaged. Some casual readers may not enjoy Kugel's academic sidesteps.

I encourage this book for pastors, teachers, Christians who are interested in the Old Testament and people who are interested in the history of religion.

Grade: A-

[Franz · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Old Testament scholar synthesizes a lifetime of biblical study to trace how the Israelites encountered God. In the earliest books, God is a physical presence: he walks in the Garden of Eden looking for Adam and Eve; he isn't quite omniscient yet. Abraham hears God's voice, and Moses meets him in a burning bush instead of face to face. Not even at this point are the Hebrews strictly monotheistic, something most people will find as surprising as I did. YHWH is their tribal god, and they often pray to the gods of neighboring tribes. Later, god communicates with the kings and prophets in their dreams. By the time the last books of the Old Testament are written, god becomes the distant all-knowing and all-powerful deity with which we are more familiar. In addition, Kugel traces how the notion of the self changes as god becomes increasingly distant from people. The idea of a soul and an afterlife is non-existent in the early and middle books. Not until the second century BCE does the full-blown notion of the soul as some sort of spiritual entity that somehow survives death of the body appear in the Bible, the writers of those books undoubtedly influenced at least to some degree by Plato and his followers. Kugel constantly references and quotes biblical passages as well as scores of other scholars hoeing in the same field to support his argument. Kugel writes well, and in spite of what seems like an arcane topic and long book, rarely were there moments interest sagged. Granted, this book isn't for everyone, but if you have any curiosity of how the Hebrews and Israelites felt about their relationship to God, this book will satisfy it. Highly recommended for believers and non-believers alike.

[Ben McFarland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book feels like listening in on one side of a conversation in which you support the speaker and want to interject but really shouldn't. I've admired James Kugel's translations of Hebrew poetry before, and so I was eager to read this book as a more interpretive, big-picture work. Kugel asks why the Biblical stories in which God speaks and works miracles seem so distant from our modern experience, He explains that it might be US who changed, from pre-modern to modern selves. I deliberately omit post-modern because Kugel seems to be speaking to the "default" modern reader. This is reasonable because most academic non-fiction is addressed to precisely that reader: the good student who wonders about these things but doesn't study them in depth. Because he's explaining ancient religious people to modern irreligious ones, there's not much time to address other parties (like, say, me!), but I'm fine with filling in the blanks and extending the conclusions myself. Then, at the very end, Kugel brings in a Flannery O'Connor quote that shows that 20th-century believers do actually exist, shaped by the same texts into something like the ancient believers. And the book stops. It's done all it should do at that point, but there's so many more questions: What does the Great Shift really mean? What can continue to Shift ... or can Shift back (e.g., Owen Barfield's recovery of original participation)? At the end of the day, and despite Kugel's protestations to the contrary, I think we can participate in ancient belief as we move into the future, because the object of belief is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The Great Shift opens a door to that possibility by showing how it used to be, which (to me at least) implies that it might be again.

[Theresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

According to Biblical stories, people in ancient times encountered God. They did not seek him, in fact, quite the opposite. The way these encounters happened doesn't seem to happen anymore. Kugel wants to explore why that is.
There are a number of quick answers to that question, which he mentions as well.

Kugel's study does an historical survey of the stories/texts, inasmuch as scholars have been able to determine their history in the modern sense.
His conclusion reminded me of John Henry Newman's 'development of doctrine' thesis. And also of discussions of historicity in other studies, that is, of seeing things in the context of their time. I liked, too that he commented on back stories of the texts.

In brief, this was an engaging review of the Hebrew Scriptures in the light of his question. And --in answer to his question-- an interesting allusion to the mystery and he would say, the evolution, of human consciousness.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

One important trend in anthropology and sociology is for authors to explain their racial/ethnic/socioeconomic background in order to place their interpretations in context. In many books about religion, especially those by rabbis, it’s easy to know what influences the authors’ thoughts: their biographies generally mention the movement to which they belong. The same is not always true of scholars of religion, something that came to mind when reading James L. Kugel’s excellent, but challenging, “The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The fact that Kugel is an Orthodox Jew doesn’t play a major role in his new work, but it still exerts an influence: his book speaks to humans’ encounters with a deity as something that actually happens.
See the rest of my review at http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic...

[Michael Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of the book is an interesting one - somewhere between Abraham and the modern era, our perception of (and interactions with) God underwent a huge shift. The God that spoke directly to the prophets recedes from contact with humans. Has there been a change in God, or does this fading into the background (a God no less real, but less involved in altering the course of our lives daily) represent a change in our perception of God?

I thought it was an interesting concept and the author goes deep into the text not only to give examples of the shift in perspective, but to support his thesis.

Nonetheless, I found that the author got bogged down in those very examples. There was a lot of repetition and the narrative is very academic in nature.

It was moderately interesting, but I found it a bit of a slog. Not a strong recommendation.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some years ago I read this author's "The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible," where he presented his interesting hypothesis that people in Biblical times "experienced" God in ways very different from how we think about that today. This new book explores the same hypothesis but in greater depth & with a wider range of references, including to other cultures. But I didn't feel it really added much (for me personally) to what I got out of the earlier book.

[Maya Senen · Rating 4 out of 5]

How come Abraham and Moses would encounter God directly, and later psalms / our present world seem to be straining or pleading for God to show up? Kugel dissects an impressive amount of material, both biblical and beyond, to compile his take on the answer- the human conception of the self and how we relate to the divine. It’s a fascinating study and a compelling perspective on our biblical understanding.

[James Frederick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a strange book for me. I was expecting it to be Christian history. It was partly that. It was part anthropological and part Bible study. It was also really long and it seemed like it kind of jumped all over the place. If there was an organizational pattern to it, I missed it.

I DID learn a lot of things I had never heard before, so it was a worthwhile read. But it was also a bit of a slog for me.

[Bill Dauster · Rating 4 out of 5]

In something of a departure for him, noted Biblical scholar James Kugel looks at religion from the point of view of the ancient worshiper and how that point of view has evolved. When he conducts Biblical analysis, Kugel continues to be brilliant. But although interesting, this book is unfocused and less compelling than his other works.

[Mich · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Kugel is a master at examining the Bible in detail and explaining in clear language how these Old Testament characters (ca., 1300 BCE) must have felt about God and how over the next 1,000 years this changed. He does this by placing the writings in context with what were then contemporaneous descriptions of other religious practices as well as books of the Apocrypha. In times of Moses, Abraham, David, and the earliest prophets the Bible describes how God spoke to these characters and that events attributed to God, as an Outside force, "happened" to them. God often appeared to these characters in a face-to-face encounter. How the Jews were brought to believe in a single God (above all others) is contrasted with other nations who worshipped Baal. The importance of the Temple where God was worshipped through sacrifice was displaced by prayer both because of the destruction of the Temple and the fact that Jews didn't only live near the Temple. To some extent, prayer arose out of a need to account for God outside the Temple.

The Great Shift was the change from God speaking to Man to Man speaking to God through prayer. This could only happen through a sense of self that people could begin to develop beginning around 500 BCE. The later prophets and Psalms provide much of this source support.

The book is heavily footnoted (140 pages of them) so one can delve into as much or little detail as desired. Kugel provides in plain, easily understandable language how the Bible was put together over a 1,000 year period by a group of editors resulting in numerous conflicting accounts of events and rules. The job of reconciling these accounts and obligations was picked up beginning around 100 BCE by the Talmudists resulting in with what we now know as the Jewish religion.

[mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This question - of how it came to pass that God/gods were seen to have steadily retreated from an actual physical presence, seen and heard, in human affairs over the course of just a few centuries in antiquity - has bedeviled many historians. James Kugel, an extraordinary scholar of Jewish and Christian biblical and extra-biblical texts, gives it a shot here. It's a hard question to answer; Jack Miles also tried in "God, a Biography" (an interesting and informative read), and Julian Jaynes famously tried with his "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", a recherché theory that made a splash that has now almost entirely disappeared. I imagine many others have also had a go at it. If I read Kugel correctly, he thinks it was the development of a certain type of self-image, that is separate and distinct, that put this shift in motion. And although what Kugel says makes sense, I remain more than a bit unsatisfied. It is such a momentous change, that did not and still has not occurred in all cultures, that what drives it to occur to some places and times and not in others, stays puzzling to me.

[Adam Glantz · Rating 5 out of 5]

The central question of this book can be asked in subtly different ways. What was it like to have an experience of God in biblical times? Or: Why don't we, in the modern West, have experiences of God like our biblical forebears? The answer has to do with an evolving sense of the self, which changed dramatically though gradually from the early to the late biblical period. In the former period, biblical people retained a primordial "semipermeable self," in which there was no dramatic separation between "in here" and "out there"; indeed, the outside world routinely invade the internal self. This is the root of the theophanies and prophecies we read about in the Bible. There were so many avenues for divine encounters that people built temples where they could try to make them manageable and predictable. And then the self changed, becoming more discontinuous with the rest of the universe. As a result, God became distant and the new preoccupation was to establish a connection with Him, particularly through regular prayers and the study of Scripture.

[LNae · Rating 4 out of 5]

G-d passed behind Moses and met with Abraham, G-d spoke to the prophets. Then the Messengers explained G-d's will and then the word was written down and we should remember it to learn about G-d's will. G-d had a physical home on Earth and then G-d was the great planner from behind the curtain.
Kugel knows that today's understanding of G-d is different than that of the early Biblical era and the era after the exile. He does a good job showing how the encounters with G-d had changed throughout the holy books and religious memory. His explanation of songs, prayers, and psalms calmed some questions I had about the Bible.

[Ionia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst I could certainly appreciate the research that went into the composition of this book, I still found it a bit dry and overly academic. I do believe that this book could have had a much broader appeal if it were written slightly differently. This is on account of the many times that the book repeats itself in the process of quoting scripture. There is so much scripture quoted, in fact, that sometimes the thoughts of the author seem to get lost in it and the point he was trying to make gets forgotten, or at least it did by this reader.

Overall, it was an okay book, but not particularly memorable.

[Ken · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kugel's The Great Shift, reads like an advanced bible study text for serious students of the Hebrew Bible. Whatever the reader's position on the whole spectrum of religious thought, Kugel's book will make believers and nonbelievers alike think differently about the Bible and what that means for the last 10,000 years of human (mainly Jewish) history. The author makes the scholarly case questioning the Hebrew Bible as the inerrant inspired word of god. Just like our Constitution we have to interpret the words and figure out what the framers met - Kugel does a great job doing that same type of analysis with the old testament. Not me cup of tea.

[Jace Broadhurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never read anything I didn’t like from Kugel. His exhaustive grasp of second temple literature is super helpful. This book is about the movement that takes place from one (or more) understanding of God, angels, knowledge, etc to different views. A shift for instance of thinking of gods over countries to a more detailed angelology. He traces this as well as he can with tons of examples from the pseudepigrapha and other tales that can’t help but enlighten us regarding the sacred texts and their flexibility. It is dense and long so I may not recommend it to a novice in biblical studies but it is sure fun.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book that examines why we felt we saw God in biblical times and what has occurred and how have we changed to the point where we don't encounter him physically now. Kugel, in an informative, erudite yet humorous and plain-spoken style pulls together decades of Bible scholarship, psychology and physiology in explaining how God went from a physical and external presence in our life to a more personal and internal presence. Thought provoking and intelligent. An excellent read.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kugel serves as an expert guide through a vast landscape of history, theology, sociology, neurology. His writing is clear. He avoids falling into the trap of scholarly mumbo-jumbo. At the end of his discussion, his conclusions appear clear and sensible. The book is really two halves of a whole: the main section is a survey of history. The more than 60 pages of footnotes are readable and relevant, and offer a condensed overview of the scholarship behind Kugel's analysis.
.

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kugel is stretching his powers of analysis in this book, which indulges in much bolder speculation than the other works of his I've read. But even though I coul think of counter-arguments to many of his suggestions, I noticed that he is cautious about applying theories (his own and other scholars'). By the end I was persuaded that Kugel identifies important trends in our understanding of our selves, our societies, and our spiritual lives.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not to be undertaken lightly, this is a dense book of great learning which looks at the well-known problem that God stops talking to people midway through the Hebrew Bible. The author considers the transformation of prophecy into Torah and animal sacrifice into individual prayer, among other issues. Very interesting and very challenging.