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Zusatztext "Fascinating."— The New York Times "A magnificent job of bringing important ideas from the academy to a broad readership...Kugel gives readers a sense of history’s convoluted texture, its ironies, and thus its beauty."— The Jewish Review of Books " The Great Shift is a carefully crafted literary work that is both an indictment of modernity and a hope that tightly closed modern people can regain the unique “semipermeable” qualities that defined spiritual lives of long ago."— Reform Judaism "Biblical scholarship has reached considerable agreement for most scholars in the last 75 years, and The Great Shift is the culmination of its maturity. Readers of all stripes who want to make sense of God’s Word will find this landmark book written with great erudition, clarity and, dare I say it, a humor that seems to be God’s peeking through." — Michael D. Langan, NBC-2.com "Lively, inviting account . . . the author is at home in every era from that of the ancient texts to our own, and he makes for an excellent guide. Biblical exegesis at its best: a brilliant and sensitive reading of ancient texts, all with an eye to making them meaningful to our time by making sense of what they meant in their own." — Kirkus Reviews , STARRED “Provocative . . . likely to interest both believers and nonbelievers with some familiarity with the Old Testament.” — Booklist Informationen zum Autor JAMES L. KUGEL is Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University (emeritus). Kugel is a specialist in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Bible As It Was, which won the Grawemeyer Prize in Religion in 2001, and How to Read the Bible , which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for the best book of 2007. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. Klappentext A world-renowned scholar reveals how a pivotal transformation in spiritual experience during the biblical era made us who we are todayA great mystery lies at the heart of the Bible. Early on, people seem to live in a world entirely foreign to our own. God appears to Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and others; God buttonholes Moses and Isaiah and Jeremiah and tells them what to say. Then comes the Great Shift, and Israelites stop seeing God or hearing the divine voice. Instead, later Israelites are "in search of God," reaching out to a distant, omniscient deity in prayers, as people have done ever since. What brought about this change?The answers come from ancient texts, archaeology and anthropology, and even modern neuroscience. They concern the origins of the modern sense of self and the birth of a worldview that has been ours ever since. James Kugel, whose strong religious faith shines through his scientific reckoning with the Bible and the ancient world, has written a masterwork that will be of interest to believers and nonbelievers alike, a profound meditation on encountering God, then and now. 1 Seeing Biblically In the book of Genesis, Hagar is the maidservant of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. At a certain point she and Sarah have a falling out, and Sarah orders her to be banished?​—?​in fact, sent off into the bleak wilderness along with her young son Ishmael. This cruel decree is carried out, and poor Hagar wanders about with her son for a time. Eventually they run out of drinking water, and it seems they will both die of thirst. Hagar, despairing, leaves her son under one of the nearby bushes and sits down some distance away. “I don’t want to have to watch the boy die,” she says, and bursts into tears. But help is on the way: God heard the boy’s cry, and an angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid: God has heard t...
