The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times

Why does the Bible depict a world in which humans, with surprising regularity, encounter the divine-wrestling an angel, addressing a burning bush, issuing forth prophecy without any choice in the matter? These stories spoke very differently to their original audience than they do to us, and they reflect a radically distinct understanding of reality and the human mind. Yet over the course of the thousand-year Biblical Era, encounters with God changed dramatically. As James Kugel argues, this...