What should a Jew consider before marrying a non-Jew? What should a Jew know about Hebrew? What does it mean to keep the Sabbath? In the Medieval period, young Jews found answers to their most pressing questions about Judaism in The Book of the Kuzari. That book, written in the form of a dialogue, addressed an array of questions that led from explanations of everyday practices to the depth and grandeur of the Torah. On Being a Jew brings The Book of the Kuzari up to date. In a conversational format, it answers basic questions about the purposes of ritual, the duties of study, work, and home life, the importance of prayer and history, and the subtleties of the Torah and its interpretations that are obscured or lost in translation.

Is there poetry in the Bible? Does it have rhyme or meter? How did ancient Hebrew writers compose their works? James Kugel's provocative study provides surprising new answers to these age-old questions. Biblical "poetry" is not a concept native to the Bible itself, he proposes, and the idea that the Bible is divided into prose and verse is merely an approximation of the reality of biblical style. Arguing that the Bible presents a continuum of speech heightened in varying degrees by different means, Kugel sets out to describe Hebrew's high style on its own terms. He also offers a thorough history of the idea of biblical poetry, starting with Philo of Alexandria and Josephus in the first century C.E. and charting its development through the Church Fathers, medieval Jewish writers, the Christian Hebraists of the Renaissance, and on into modern times. The story of how each age understood the nature biblical poetry, Kugel concludes, is a key to understanding the Bible's place in the history of Western thought.

What should a Jew consider before marrying a non-Jew? What should a Jew know about Hebrew? What does it mean to keep the Sabbath? In the Medieval period, young Jews found answers to their most pressing questions about Judaism in The Book of the Kuzari. That book, written in the form of a dialogue, addressed an array of questions that led from explanations of everyday practices to the depth and grandeur of the Torah. On Being a Jew brings The Book of the Kuzari up to date. In a conversational format, it answers basic questions about the purposes of ritual, the duties of study, work, and home life, the importance of prayer and history, and the subtleties of the Torah and its interpretations that are obscured or lost in translation.

Is there poetry in the Bible? Does it have rhyme or meter? How did ancient Hebrew writers compose their works? James Kugel's provocative study provides surprising new answers to these age-old questions. Biblical "poetry" is not a concept native to the Bible itself, he proposes, and the idea that the Bible is divided into prose and verse is merely an approximation of the reality of biblical style. Arguing that the Bible presents a continuum of speech heightened in varying degrees by different means, Kugel sets out to describe Hebrew's high style on its own terms. He also offers a thorough history of the idea of biblical poetry, starting with Philo of Alexandria and Josephus in the first century C.E. and charting its development through the Church Fathers, medieval Jewish writers, the Christian Hebraists of the Renaissance, and on into modern times. The story of how each age understood the nature biblical poetry, Kugel concludes, is a key to understanding the Bible's place in the history of Western thought.