Another View: James Kugel Reponds—Why isn’t King Solomon Just a “Dirty old man”?

I was honored that BAR devoted so much attention in the most recent issue to my new book, How to Read the Bible,1 all the more so because the review was written by a distinguished Biblical scholar (and long-time acquaintance of mine), Professor Richard Elliott Friedman. But I confess I found the review somewhat disturbing. The review starts off nicely enough; in fact, it’s full of compliments that I hardly deserve. (I am certainly not, for example, “the most learned Orthodox scholar of the Bible on earth.”) But when Friedman gets down to discussing the book itself, I’m afraid […]