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The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times [2017, PDF/EPUB, ENG]

by James L. Kugel

(103 ratings)
Book cover
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..
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Book details


  • Author : James L. Kugel
  • Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Published : 09-11-2017
  • Language : English
  • Pages : 496
  • ISBN-10 : 0544520556
  • ISBN-13 : 978-0544520554
  • Reader Reviews : 103 (4.3)
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About the Author


James L. Kugel


James L. Kugel, Starr Professor of Hebrew at Harvard from 1982 to 2003, now lives in Jerusalem. A specialist in the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation, he is the author of The God of Old and The Great Poems of the Bible. His course on the Bible was regularly one of the two most popular at Harvard, enrolling more than nine hundred students.

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Reader Reviews

J
Paul B
Good quality
Reviewed in Canada on 05-10-2020
Never read it. Wife did. Book quality was good.
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J
DJ
Understanding the Self and Understanding God
Reviewed in the United States on 11-26-2022
James Kugel has once again penned a highly readable account of a key element of Judaism, in this case our understanding of God. Here, he describes the progression of that understanding, from an entity walking about the earth, capable of interacting directly with various Biblical characters, to a more distant, universal, and abstract deity that must be actively sought. Kugel ties that Progression to a change in the concept of the self, positing a movement from an open, “semipermeable” self to a more detached, self-contained individual. This is a fine work of scholarship, and an excellent read..
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J
Israel Drazin
Kugel explains that the Jews had a shifting understanding of God
Reviewed in the United States on 11-01-2017
James L. Kugel's thesis is that the Bible describes God in different and evolving ways, depending on when the biblical book or section was composed, and this points to a developing idea about what God is and how God functions, as well as what humans thought about themselves and their abilities. For example, Genesis 3:8 states that Adam and Eve 'heard the sound of the Lord God walking about the Garden [of Eden] at the breezy time of day.' Kugel remarks that this depiction of God is different than later ideas. God in Genesis 3:8 is not remote, “nor a deity who inhabits a special temple or shrine reserved for Him, along with a specially trained cadre of priests who serve Him in a state of ritual purity.” God is depicted as being present in the same garden inhabited by the naked humans God created. Still later, Kugel writes, “God is generally just elsewhere and only on occasion crosses over into the world of human beings,” unlike Genesis 3:8 where, “He is already there.” (Emphasis by Kugel.)
Another development is a new view of what God wants. Why, Kugel asks, did Abel’s sacrifice to God of meat gain divine favor while his brother Cain’s gift of vegetables did not (Genesis 4:4-5); and he answers that the ancients felt that God liked meat. He points out that the modern concept of a temple being a house of prayer is not the ancient idea; the Bible describes the sanctuary as a place where sacrifices were offered; prayer is not mentioned. The early idea about the gods was that the gods controlled nature and needed to be bribed; the ancients did not think of the gods as the makers of laws. Later, after the temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the Jews ceased thinking that God wanted or needed sacrifices.
Kugel asserts that the early Hebrews changed from being convinced that there were many gods to the idea that there is only a single deity. The introductory sentence of the Decalogue does not mean “there is no other gods except Me.” Scholars recognize that the Hebrew should not be translated “except Me,” but “in My presence” – “You can’t worship Me and some other god or gods.”
The ancients also did not think that God or gods were all-knowing and all-powerful; and this would explain why God asked Cain where his bother Able was (4:9). Kugel also tells us that the ancient Hebrews thought that the Israelite God had power only in Israel, similar to the pagans who had a different deity for every location.
The greatest shift resulted from an understanding of human nature. Why, he queries, did prophecy cease? He explains that this was due to the developed sense of God as no longer being present on earth, a new sense of self and understanding of human capabilities, including knowledge that people can act to control their lives..
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