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, The Bible as It Was, On Being a Jew, 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.