The Great Shift

Encountering God in Biblical Times

By: James L. Kugel

Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner

Why does the Bible depict a world in which humans, with surprising regularity, encounter the divine - wrestling an angel, addressing a burning bush, issuing forth prophecy without any choice in the matter? These stories spoke very differently to their original audience than they do to us, and they reflect a radically distinct understanding of reality and the human mind. Yet over the course of the thousand-year biblical era, encounters with God changed dramatically.

As James Kugel argues, this transition allows us to glimpse a massive shift in human experience - the emergence of the modern, Western sense of self. In this landmark work, Kugel fuses revelatory close readings of ancient texts with modern scholarship from a range of fields, including neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and archaeology, to explain the origins of belief, worship, and the sense of self and the changing nature of God through history. The Great Shift will make believers and seekers think differently not just about the Bible but about the entire history of the human imagination.

©2017 James L. Kugel (P)2017 HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books

Changing Conceptions of God and the Self

"The Great Shift" is another erudite yet highly readable book from James Kugler. Reviewing 1,000 years of Biblical history, he ties the changing concept of God to the changing concept of the self. In Kugler's view, the Biblical idea of God became more abstract and universal as the concept of the self became more concrete and individualized. As for the narration, Malcolm Hillgartner's work is first-rate, give or take a few mispronunciations of the Hebrew. His tone is excellent, and he conveys, in this scholarly work, a sense of "story."

Deep and satisfying. Simply awesome.

a rich and broad examination of the changing senses of self and how that plays out in encounters with the divine throughout the earliest biblical accounts though to the post-temple period. Just awesome.

Excellent resource!

Kugel shows amazing erudition as he integrates research on the theory of self with progressive aspects of biblical revelation.