I am reading James Kugel’s new book, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now, and overall it is a very good book and I have enjoyed it quite a bit. I haven’t yet reached his conclusions–I am trying to read through the material in the way in which he intended to present it, that is, I’m not skipping to the end. At the beginning of the book he surveys the assumptions with which the ancient and modern interpreters approach the Bible. Then, he works methodically through the Hebrew Bible showing how the ancient and modern interpretations are often at odds.

Most of the time his treatments are good and fairly well supported, however, it is not infrequent that I find him presenting what I believe is a less than fully accurate picture. For instance, in his discussion of the Psalms he stresses the fact that ancient interpreters believed that David wrote the Psalter while modern scholars do not believe this. He points out that about half of the Psalms include the superscription ledawid “to/of David” but he does not mention other superscriptions that mention people such as Asaph (459-60) and he doesn’t discuss the implications of psalms without headings.

Furthermore, right after this section he presents Psalm 137 as evidence that David did not write the Psalter (460). Psalm 137 refers to the “rivers of Babylon” and mentions Israel’s captors and says, “How could we sing a song of the LORD’s in a foreign land?” This makes modern scholars think that Psalm 137 probably had an exilic or post-exilic origin. However, no where does Kugel mention that Psalm 137 does not have a superscription, much less that it never attributes its origin to David. It does not seem to me that the Psalter presents itself as an exclusively davidic product and when modern scholars affirm this fact it should not be “upsetting” as Kugel asserts (467).

I think that Kugel sometimes presents a less than complete discussion in his desire to show a sharp contrast between ancient and modern interpretations. It is true that there are in many cases radical differences between ancient and modern views upon a biblical text, however, there are also many occasions in which these views are much closer than modern scholars might think–in many instances the Rabbis saw the same phenomena that modern scholars gleefully point out. Kugel is right to illustrate some of the genuine divergences in interpretations, however, there is no need to create a sharper contrast than the data suggest.