Marc Kettler How To Read The Bible Summary

In his book How to Read the Jewish Bible, Marc Brettler (2005) introduces the reader to the Bible employing the methods modern biblical scholars use to understand the Hebrew scriptures. How successfully he does this depends not only on the content of his book, but also on the intended audience. In order to ascertain how well Brettler accomplished the intended goals of the book, one must first decipher what the goals of the work are. In the preface to the paperback edition of the book Brettler asserts that he wishes to introduce the Jewish Bible to a wider audience than is normally brought into the circle of biblical scholars (Brettler, 2005, vii). His second objective is to present a “Jewishly sensitive” contribution to …show more content…
Rather, Brettler interprets the different genres of the books of the Bible, landing on select texts to dissect in greater detail. Many of his choices for further examination are good ones as an introduction to biblical scholarship, as they are well known text. One such example is the creation story in Genesis 1-3, or rather the creation stories in Genesis 1-3, as is pointed out to the lay reader (Brettler, 2005, 31-32). This is an excellent selection for scrutiny, as most members of western society, believers and secularists alike, will be somewhat familiar with this portion of Genesis as it has become so much a part of western consciousness through popular culture. These particular passages have been presented as ground zero for the battle between fundamentalist religion and science, as they seemingly deal with the material origins of the world. Brettler uses these stories to introduce the reader to source criticism and redaction (Brettler, 2005, 34-35). By examining the content and structure of the stories he draws the reader to the conclusion that the creation stories were written as myths and never meant to be taken as natural history (Brettler, 2005,