JAMES L. KUGEL, author of “How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now," Free Press, 819pp. $35.

Orthodox Kugel offers two views of Bible

For Jewish Book Month, no book more Jewish than the Hebrew Bible

By Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett

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Top three reasons to read the Bible even if you’re not religious:

1.    You can’t claim to be well-read otherwise;
2.    Law, societal mores and a huge number of prime-time TV plots are built on its contents; and
3.    James Kugel.

I had the good luck to take Kugel’s “Ancient Interpreters of the Hebrew Bible” course at Harvard a few years ago, shortly before he retired and moved to Israel. (Don’t be impressed; it was Harvard’s summer school, requiring only my MasterCard for admission.)

He is one of the most engaging writers and lecturers in any discipline, and the rarest of Biblical scholars: brilliant, witty, humble.

Carving a successful career out of examining the Bible from both religious and modern-scholastic vantage points is not the done thing among his fellow academics, and even more unusual for an Orthodox Jew. Indeed, Kugel himself calls the schools of thought irreconcilable. Yet, that is exactly what he has done.

A word about the sheer heft of this book: Don’t let the 800-plus pages scare you off. Not for nothing has Kugel been dealing with panicked students all these years. His readers soon learn that when they find themselves in the tall reeds (which most of us do every few pages) the trick is to stay calm and move ahead, slowly. The path comes back into view within a paragraph or three.

The book’s foundation is Kugel’s expertise in the Hebrew Bible’s ancient interpreters, a group of teachers and sages who held forth from about 300 BC to 200 AD.

He draws on their extensive ruminations and judgments to show how these views influenced the way Scripture was—and is—understood.

As he takes the reader through the books of the Bible, he also describes the modern scholarship begun about 150 years ago, which draws on history, translation, archeology and other secular pastimes to form theories that nearly always fly in the face of the religious interpretations.

Kugel’s manifold talents are all employed in “How to Read the Bible.” A former poetry editor for Harper’s (his own translations of the Psalms are beautiful), he has a fine ear for narrative, a lifelong scholar’s discipline, a sense of wonder and confidence fed by his own Judaism.

His gathering up of a life’s work in this book gives readers a chance to brush up against genius, and perhaps examine those beliefs we claim for ourselves.