The Old Testament – the Hebrew Bible or Tanach – combines myth, allegory and particularly in the later books, historical events. Modern biblical scholarship has worked for over a hundred years to decode the text so as to reveal the “true story” of the group that became the Jews. James Kugel is one of the leading contributors to that effort. Now at Bar Ilan University in Israel, he taught before that at Harvard where his undergraduate course in the Hebrew Bible usually drew 800 or 900 registered students. He joined us in this memorable 2007 program about the hidden meanings of the biblical text.