The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible

The God of the modern world -- all-powerful, all-knowing, invisible, and omnipresent -- has been a staple of Western civilization. Yet in this remarkable book, James Kugel shows that this God is not the same as the God of most of the Hebrew Bible, the God who appeared to Abraham, Moses, and other biblical heroes. That God, the "God of Old," was actually perceived in a very different way -- a way that has much to teach modern believers.

James Kugel is renowned for his investigations into the history of the biblical era, a time beginning more than three thousand years ago, when the Bible's earliest parts first took shape. Now he goes even deeper, attempting to enter the spiritual world of ancient Israelites and see through their eyes God as they encountered him.

The God of Old appeared to people unexpectedly; He was not sought out. Often He was not even recognized, at first mistaken for an ordinary human being. The realm of the divine was not as it is today -- a spiritual dimension set off from the material world. The spiritual and the material overlapped, and the realm of the dead was a real domain just beyond the world of the living. Ordinary reality was in constant danger of sliding into something else, something stark but oddly familiar. God was always standing just behind the curtain of the everyday world.

Kugel suggests that this alternative spirituality is not simply an archaic relic, replaced by a "better" understanding. Kugel's picture of the God of Old has much to tell us about God's very nature, and about the encounter between Him and human beings in today's world. This is a book to treasure side by side with the Bible, and for years to come.