Scholars have pumped enough barrels of ink into their inter-pretations of the Bible to equal the massive discharge from the Exxon Valdez. Whether the outpour of manuscripts will present a long-term environmental hazard depends in large measure upon how well a cultural ecosystem already inundated with academic fads and fashions can tolerate the spill. We may sometimes wonder if the spillage will slow to a trickle and if the flow of literary, historical, and theological novelties will even-tually dry up. Yet the rising tide of publisher catalogs in our office mailbox confirms a suspicion: As long as there are academics seeking tenure and religious professionals in hot pursuit of something original to say, there will be plenty of ink in which we can swim or sink. The literary flood reminds me of a former student who, when asked if he had ever read the Old Testament, replied, "No, I decided to see the movie instead." With so many commentaries and so many walking tours around the Good Book available, many of us may not have the time or inclination to turn our attention to the actual source and plunge into the Bible itself. We have grown accustomed to the shallower waters in which professional critics wade and limit our attention to the flotsam that drifts onto the shore.

In his recent volume The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible, James Kugel, Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, has done a wonderful job of inviting a general audience to dive into the neglected depths of the biblical tradition. He shows readers how to engage biblical narratives where we encounter the surprising God of our earliest ancestors. Here is a book that reminds us why we navigate better with a map and a compass. Here is an author who listens to the shifting currents and takes his bearings in the dead of night from distant glimmers. The God of Old is a rare combination of scholarly analysis and religious meditation, of historical excavation and literary flight, of playful tangents and serious engagement. In short, it is one of the most infor-mative and inspiring invitations into the world of the Bible that I have read in several years.

Kugel begins his book by introducing readers to a series of biblical passages that overturn many of the prevailing theo-logical assumptions about the God Whom we expect to find at the heart of the Tanakh or Old Testament. Readers are guided through a series of passages that disclose a very different understanding of how the world works. The God of the ancients does not dwell on high and pull strings but interacts with the creation in far different and far more surprising terms than our traditional understandings suggest. Those who im-merse themselves in this volume will gain access to the earliest strata of the Bible, and they will in the process learn how to interpret their own experiences from an unfamiliar and exhilarating distance.

The first biblical episodes in Kugel's book revolve around uncanny experiences with God's angels, and his initial obser-vation inspires some sustained commentary. People who find themselves face to face with an angel do not know whom they are up against. They bumble and stumble in the presence of a stranger who is mistakenly identified as another person. Manoah and his wife (Judges 13), Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 18), and Joshua (Joshua 5) encounter angels whom these characters regard as human. As the story traces the slow movement out of what Kugel calls "a fog of confusion," the narrator lingers on the moments leading up to the astonishing discovery when the protagonists accurately recognize the angel's true identity. An exchange that began in the domain of the ordinary suddenly shifts, and the characters find them-selves on holy ground, pushed into an uncharted land from which there is no escape.

Why, Kugel asks, does this turning point require such a bizarre intervention? Why does God need these odd, human-like figures to disorient people? The later tradition seems especially eager to dispense with these angelic intrusions and increas-ingly substitutes the more abstract notion of Wisdom as the mediator of the Divine. To highlight the contrast, Kugel notes that the idea of Wisdom emerges when the divide between the spiritual and material domains has grown deep and wide. In the later segments of the Bible, God dwells on high, aloof from the mundane affairs of the world, in the remote reaches of the heavenly realm. Wisdom serves to secure the natural order and bridge the gap between the spiritual and material domains. Wisdom works behind and beneath the flow of historical events by inspiring apprehensions of an intangible and invisible divine reality. This rationalistic conception of God stands in radical contrast to the more unpredictable world buried within the earliest layers of the Bible. Kugel's project is to retrieve this almost forgotten legacy and to re-imagine the world within this more ancient framework.

So what then are we to make of these anachronistic figures that pop in and out of our sacred stories and generate such an embarrassment for subsequent generations of Bible dwell-ers? Angelic intruders can only burst into a world that lacks a stable border separating the spiritual from the material, a world where appearances often obscure a deeper reality. "What life seems to be can change in a minute to something else, and everyone in the biblical world is apparently ready for such a change to occur." "The angel straddles these two domains." "The fact that people are confused for a while appears to be a necessary element, a way of indicating how these two realms overlap without people noticing anything at first. An ordinary encounter turns out to be something else entirely. It is all about perception, something that suddenly opens in the human mind" (p. 24).

Within this more remote literary context, the angel is not simply a divine messenger, some supernatural and independent agent of the Almighty. The angel manifests nothing less than "God Himself in human form, God unrecognized, God intruding into ordinary reality" (p. 34). Kugel is a Jewish scholar who does not pursue the implications of a worldview with affinities to the incarnational imagination of Christianity. Instead he invites readers to contemplate how our ancestors conceived the world. He encourages readers to ponder how our vision would change if we recognized that there are cracks through which the divine seeps, transforming our understanding of the ordinary and charging our experience with cosmic import.

In subsequent chapters, Kugel challenges and in some cases undermines our assumptions about the God of Old. He expli-cates stories in which God enters the lives of people without any formal invitation or prayerful solicitation. In the encoun-ters with Abraham and Jacob, Jeremiah and Isaiah, "God simply buttonholes people and starts speaking" (p. 44).

Subsequently, the accounts are reworked and the protago-nists are presented as pious men in search of God's presence. Yet, as Kugel notes, the earlier tradition suggests that God's choices do not fit any predictable patterns. God apparently engages people who are not in search of the divine, and God's appointed leaders often lack the piety and moral stature that we associate with the spiritually heroic. Evidently, God can work with very ordinary human material.

In another chapter, Kugel revisits the command forbidding graven images and investigates what dimensions of ancient Mesopotamian society were rejected in the process. Contrary to our expectations, the prohibition does not signal a doctrinal conviction about God's disembodied nature. The writers of these biblical narratives speak as though God's reality could be discerned in bodily form, however elusive our own perception may prove. Perhaps the condemnation of graven images indi-cates that God cannot be seen in the way we routinely regard the world. "Or put in another way, the world of this God is not really the world that our eyes pick up, although it starts off by seeming to be that world" (p. 106). This notion of God makes it impossible to squeeze the divine into a stable image or fixed representation. "He may be conceived to have a body, but it is not a consistent presence. So the best we can do is designate a special space for Him to appear in, a space that looks empty to the ordinary observer" (p.106). It is this outlook that under-writes the architectural theology of the Jerusalem Temple.

Kugel proceeds with a chapter that examines circumstances in which God is apparently compelled to act. The victim of injustice cries out. Upon hearing this cry of desperation, many biblical passages indicate that God cannot ignore the plea or refuse to respond. "It is the oppressed human's cry, in other words, that will unleash the chain of events. ‘I am powerless not to react,’ God seems to say, ‘once the abused party cries out to Me’" (p. 110). Now these biblical accounts run against the grain of the prevailing views of our own time. In the first place, the cry of affliction seems to be needed to inform God. The texts presuppose a God without absolute knowledge, a God Whose governance of the Creation is not total or abso-lute. God must apparently be aroused, and nothing stirs God into action as potently as the entreaty to help the oppressed. According to these narratives, God cannot remain aloof from human suffering, and this affirmation is attested in the face of crushing historical evidence to the contrary. Indeed, Kugel maintains that one of the most astonishing claims of the psalmist is that it is precisely the failure of the other gods to administer justice that disqualifies them as gods. God alone is the One Who hears the victim's cry, and it is nothing less than God's duty to listen and respond. Dereliction of this responsi-bility threatens the very foundation of the creation.

To see beneath the appearances requires a movement of the soul, most especially the reorientation of the imagination. The Bible maps the odyssey of the soul, tracing discoveries in which the familiar is made strange, encounters where the spiritual and material, the inside and the outside, and the living and the dead are interwoven. The Bible serves to orient us to a stark world where the boundaries are porous. It is no accident that the soul's sight is keenest at night, when the choices between the wicked and the righteous, the foolish and the wise, stand in sharp relief. Kugel leads his readers into that darkness of an ancient narrative where the night sky is uncommonly brilliant and the waters are unknown in their depth. Kugel suggests that we may need to travel to these remote reaches within the heart of the Bible to find our way home.