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Lay­er upon lay­er, stone upon stone, they built a wall around the Torah, to per­fect and pro­tect it. Fur­ther, they didn’t usu­al­ly return to the orig­i­nal text alone, but incor­po­rat­ed pre­vi­ous inter­pre­ta­tions. With Kugel as the guide, we are shown how ear­ly rab­bini­cal exegetes were also trou­bled by seem­ing tex­tu­al con­tra­dic­tions or ambi­gu­i­ties and used midrash to cor­rect these. The sim­ple sto­ry of Jacob’s dream in the desert is exam­ined, and with­in a few pages, it becomes obvi­ous that there is much going on here that needs expla­na­tion. Kugel has spent a life­time delv­ing into the mean­ing of midrash, the ear­ly inter­pre­ta­tion of the text by the rab­bis, and with this effort, he throws an extra­or­di­nary light upon the method.

This is the fas­ci­nat­ing world of ancient inter­pre­ta­tion to which James Kugel trav­els in The Lad­der of Jacob.

In fact, final­iz­ing the text may have only begun the process. The text of the Bible may have been can­on­ized thou­sands of years ago, but that has not stopped the process of edit­ing.