FEBRUARY 27, 2004—"Can We Still Read the Bible Today?" is the title of Oberlin College’s 2004 Haskell Lectures series to be presented March 14, 15, and 17 by James L. Kugel, one of America's foremost biblical scholars.

Kugel is Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies and a member of Harvard's Divinity School. His course, The Bible and Its Interpreters, is one of the most popular at Harvard, with an enrollment of 900 to 1,000 students. He has taught at Harvard since 1982, following three years as assistant professor of religious studies and comparative literature at Yale.

Kugel will discuss "When God Met People Face to Face: A Fresh Look at Some Stories from the Bible" at 8 p.m. on Sunday, March 14; "The Divine Guidebook: Biblical Interpretation and the Transformation of Scripture" at 8 p.m. on Monday, March 15; and "Has Modern Scholarship Destroyed the Bible?" at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 17. The talks, which are free and open to the public, will be held in the Craig Auditorium of the College’s Science Center, 119 Woodland St.

For 12 years, Kugel, an orthodox Jew, has frequently alternated semesters between teaching at Harvard and at Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv. This year the scholar—described in a recent Harvard Magazine profile as "a Woody Allen in a state of grace"–will retire from Harvard to settle in Israel.

"I've been living part-time in Israel since I was 46," he says. "But I'm not as young as I used to be! That's the practical reason, and the other is ideological; I have always been a Zionist. Anyone who wants the state of Israel to survive, as I do, should be a part of it."

A specialist in the history of biblical interpretation, Kugel is the author of some 40 research articles and eight books, including In Potiphar's House, On Being a Jew, and The Great Poems of the Bible.

His 1997 book The Bible as It Was earned him the prestigious 2001 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, a $200,000 prize presented by Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville. The book also ranked as a finalist in the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Kugel has worked extensively on the Dead Sea Scrolls and is co-editing a new edition.

Now in its 96^th year at Oberlin, the Haskell Lectureship is one of the most distinguished lectureships in the United States and is sponsored by the Department of Religion. It was established in1899 by a generous bequest from the will of Mrs. Caroline E. Haskell to examine "Middle Eastern literature in its relation to the Bible and Christian teachings."