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TEN YEARS AGO Harvard professor James Kugel was diagnosed with an aggressive likely fatal form of cancer I was of course disturbed and worried But the main change in my state of mind was that the background music had suddenly stoppedthe music of daily life thats constantly going the music of infinite time and possibilities Now suddenly it was gone replaced by nothing just silence There you are one little person sitting in the late summer sun with only a few things left to do Despite his illness Kugel was intrigued by this new state of mind and especially the uncanny feeling of human smallness that came with it There seemed to be something overwhelmingly true about itand its starkness reminded him of certain themes and motifs he had encountered in his years of studying ancient religions This I remember thinking was something I should really look into furtherif ever I got the chance In the Valley of the Shadow is the result of that search In this wide-ranging exploration of different aspects of religioninterspersed with his personal reflections on the course of his own illnessKugel seeks to uncover what he calls the starting point of religious consciousness an ancient sense of self and a way of fitting into the world that is quite at odds with the usual one He tracks these down in accounts written long ago of human meetings with gods and angels anthropologists descriptions of the lives of hunter-gatherers the role of witchcraft in African societies first-person narratives of religious conversions as well as the experimental data assembled by contemporary neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists Though this different sense of how we fit into the world has largely disappeared from our own societies it can still come back to us as a fleeting state of mind when you are just sitting on some park bench somewhere or at a wedding while everyone else is dancing and jumping around or else one day standing in your backyard as the sun streams down through the trees Experienced in its fullness this different way of seeing opens onto a stark new landscape ordinarily hidden from human eyes Kugels look at the whole phenomenon of religious beliefs is a rigorously honest sometimes skeptical but ultimately deeply moving affirmation of faith in God One of our generations leading biblical scholars has created a powerful meditation on humanitys place in the world and all that matters most in our lives Believers and doubters alike will be struck by its combination of objective scholarship and poetic insight which makes for a single beautifully crafted consideration of lifes greatest mystery.
About the Author
James L. Kugel, Starr Professor of Hebrew at Harvard from 1982 to 2003, now lives in Jerusalem. A specialist in the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation, he is the author of The God of Old and The Great Poems of the Bible. His course on the Bible was regularly one of the two most popular at Harvard, enrolling more than nine hundred students.
