The Great Shift, James L. Kugel
The Great Shift, James L. Kugel
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The Great Shift
Encountering God in Biblical Times

Author: James L. Kugel

Narrator: Malcolm Hillgartner

Unabridged: 15 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/12/2017


Synopsis

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 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. The Great Shift will make believers and seekers think differently not just about the Bible, but about the entire history of the human imagination.

About James L. Kugel

James L. Kugel is the Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University and a regular visiting professor of biblical studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He is the author of a number of books on biblical scholarship, including How to Read the Bible, for which he won the National Jewish Book Award for best book; The Great Poems of the Bible; and The Bible As It Was. In 2001, Kugel was awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize in Religion. He lives in Jerusalem, Israel, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bebe (Sarah) on December 08, 2017

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 res......more

Goodreads review by David on January 07, 2022

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 Se......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on December 21, 2021

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......more

Goodreads review by Connor on September 30, 2021

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 wo......more

Goodreads review by Aaron on November 28, 2024

---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......more