Focusing on two dozen core stories in the Pentateuch - from the Creation and Tree of Knowledge through the Exodus from Egypt and journey to the Promised Land - James Kugel shows us how the earliest interpreters of the scriptures radically transformed the Bible and made it into the book that has come down to us today. Even before the Bible had attained its final form, its stories, songs, commandments, and prophecies had begun to be interpreted.

A body of traditions about what the words meant quickly developed and took its place at the center of Judaism and Christianity. Kugel explains how and why the writers of this formative age of interpretation - roughly 200 B.C.E. to 150 C.E. - assumed such a significant role.

Mining their writings - including the Dead Sea Scrolls, works of Philo and Josephus and letters of the Apostle Paul, and writings of the Apostolic Fathers and the rabbinic Sages - he quotes for us the seminal passages that uncover this crucial interpretive process.