How to Read the Bible

"Even in this secular age, the Bible is a pillar of the Western imagination. Everybody has a stake, both in Jerusalem and in the book that really defined it, which was the Bible. The city of Jerusalem is what invented the Bible, and it happened when the people of Israel were kidnapped from Jerusalem and brought to Babylon in the 7th century BCE. It was only when they were outside the city, in exile, that they looked back and realised what it was and that they had become different from their neighbours. They couldn’t worship at the temples in Babylon, because they had a God in Jerusalem who was very different. It was when they looked back and saw how different that God was, that they became the Jews. This was the beginning of the Jewish religion. “The Israelis and the Palestinians are caught in a corner that is 5000 years old, and it’s one that they did not create” The irony is that the religion begins with a view of Jerusalem from the outside, from far away. Jerusalem is the source of this breakthrough in the human imagination – the idea that God the Creator is the God of all people, not just of the tribe. We call this idea monotheism, but monotheism is a very slim word for the powerful reality that this insight reveals. A powerful affirmation that God is the God of all people is the principle of peace, because it means that all human beings are children of the same God. That gives me my main understanding of the Bible, which I see as an on-going, cross-generational act of resistance against violence. The reason there’s so much violence in the Bible is that violence is its subject. And what you have in the Bible is a record of people looking for ways to mitigate, resist and eventually even end violence. Jerusalem is the cockpit of violence. All of the great empires of the ancient world – the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Cretans, the Greeks, and, ultimately the Romans (with devastating consequences) – went to war with each other in Jerusalem; it was at the crossroads. And that continued. The Crusades centred on Jerusalem; the European Christian imagination centred on Jerusalem. What was Lord Allenby doing when he went to Palestine in 1917? Conquering Jerusalem. What was the great battle hymn of World War I in Great Britain? ‘Jerusalem’. Jerusalem is the centre of war, and it’s also the centre of human efforts to resist war. If you have that context in the background, then the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not look nearly so impossible to understand. The Israelis and the Palestinians are caught in a corner that is 5000 years old, and it’s one that they did not create. It illuminates this breakthrough that took place for the Jewish people. Their God was the God of all people. Also, their God was not able to be represented, hence the condemnation of idol worship. Their God transcended representation. I would argue that this is the key religious breakthrough in the human imagination: that our God is present to us, but present through a kind of absence. We can’t possess our God, and therefore we can’t go to war in the name of our God. No one possesses God. The perfect symbol of this is the fact that, when the Jewish people returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, they reconstructed the Temple. But it was different, because the Holy of Holies in the Jewish Temple, from then on, was vacant. God is present through a kind of absence. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That’s a brilliant, complicated, paradoxical insight. It’s a principle that shaped Jewish religion from then forward. When the Romans destroyed the Temple, God was present to the people in exile. The Jewish people could leave Jerusalem and be a permanent diaspora – but they constantly remembered Jerusalem. So Jerusalem became imagined. They carried it with them, praying wherever they were – in Poland, Ukraine, London… ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ Jerusalem lives as an imagined city. Yes – the invention of an imagined Jerusalem. And the understanding that God is present to Jerusalem by being absent from it, that paradox. It’s true. What Kugel does is read the Bible with a view to understanding it historically, which is what I’ve suggested you do here."