Ancient Biblical Interpreters vs. Archaeology & Modern Scholars

Home > Magazines > BAR > January/February 2008

Around 25 years ago, Jim Kugel and I confided to each other that we each wanted to write a book for the general public. We both believed it important to make scholarship accessible to all. As it turned out, we each wrote several such books. His newest is How to Read the Bible. It is an important book. Kugel here gives a guided tour of the Hebrew Bible, showing both what traditional interpreters said and what critical scholars and archaeologists have discovered. Kugel speaks for the scholars who respect both the old learning and the wonders that archaeology and […]

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Endnotes

See the contribution of Rabbi Breuer and the responses of other Orthodox scholars to him in Shalom Carmy, ed., Modern Scholarship in the Study of Torah in the Orthodox Forum Series (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). I have also known Orthodox laypersons who likewise have recognized the correctness of the documentary hypothesis. Meanwhile, other Orthodox writers about the documentary hypothesis and current scholarship have often been hopelessly out-of-date. They answered arguments that were a hundred years old, and they misunderstood the present state of evidence, both from the text and archaeology.