Once upon a time, some biblical scholars maintain, when a scribe felt that there was an ambiguity or an omission in the Biblical text that required explanation, the scribe felt free or even obliged to amend or add to the text in order to clear up the confusion or fill in the gap. After all, there were no ancient Bible police to prevent him from doing so. But as the process of scriptural canonization evolved, there came a time when the possibility of amending the text was no longer acceptable and the only way to explain ambiguities and omissions was through interpretation. On Wednesday, October 3rd, congregant Phil Kruger will lead a two hour class based upon Biblical scholar James Kugel's essay, "The Descent of the Wicked Angels and the Persistence of Evil." (The essay is included in The Call of Abraham: Essays on the Election of Israel in Honor of Jon D. Levenson, edited by Gary A. Anderson and Joel S. Kaminsky (University of Notre Dame Press 2013). In that essay, Professor Kugel shows how a passage (Genesis 6:1-4), originally inserted in the Genesis text as an appendix to an ancient genealogy so as to explain the origin of ancient "heroes, warriors of renown," was later utilized to offer an explanation for the wickedness of mankind that precipitated (pun intended) the flood. In this discussion, Phil Kruger will argue, as does Professor Kugel, that the process of scriptural interpretation seems to have developed and evolved to preserve the ancient malleability of the text that ancient textual rewriting once offered to earlier scribes. And, as the means of explaining problems with the text changed, so did conceptions of scriptural authorship.

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