The Book of David [Hardcover]

David Rosenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 1998

In 1990, David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom published the audacious New York Times best-seller The Book of J, which identified one of the earliest writers of the Bible to be a woman. Now David Rosenberg returns with The Book of David, which redefines the meaning of spirituality in our time.

Our ancestors read the Bible sure of its authors, of whom King David was perhaps most beloved. The Book of David illuminates the original story of David so that it becomes, once again, our founding narrative of spiritual consciousness. Based on an exhilarating translation that uncovers the original sources, we behold a radiant writer, often called the Court Historian or Western Civilization's first novelist, who stands behind King David, creating the way we talk to and think about God. His sublime creation reinvents our idea of the spiritual warrior as well as the original language of spirituality.
        
Seven years in the making, The Book of David  starts where the conventional tales leave off, discarding the "David and Goliath" stereotype and providing a startling, mature figure of David. The Book of David will transform the way readers view themselves, their society, and their religion.  It is unique in all that it contains: biography and novel, history and poetry, critique and guide, and, above all, a fountain of inspiration.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Award-winning writer and translator David Rosenberg's Book of David is both repellent and attractive. The commentary section, twice the size of the translation section, is unattractive in its combative tone and hasty dismissals of nearly all prior Biblical scholarship, yet the translation section invites the reader into a world of intellectual vigor and poetic organicism. Through an intriguing and often fanciful reevaluation of the writer of Psalms and the books of Samuel, Rosenberg depicts David as a cultured aborigine hearkening back to the true organic roots of Judaism. Because Rosenberg "had to transform the imagery ... in translation to remain true to the vitality of the original," the psalms come off as gorgeous paeans to nature--and look nothing like the psalms you've read before. Rosenberg, a curious mix of intellectual hatchet man and poet, deserves to be read, if not always listened to. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Like The Book of J, on which Rosenberg collaborated with Harold Bloom, this is a highly speculative theory about a biblical author--here, of the novella-like section on King David in 2 Samuel--plus a very free adaptation of that biblical narrative. Poet and critic Rosenberg hypothesizes that the author of the Davidic narrative was ``S,'' a member of the royal court during the end of the tenth century b.c., a ``companion'' of J's and also an ``aboriginal'' who was revising the poems and narrative of an earlier Canaanite culture. The problem is that Rosenberg never specifies what the aboriginal culture consisted of or how it interacted with the civilizations that migrated to Canaan. For that matter, he provides not a shred of evidence for his thesis from Hebrew or other ancient Middle Eastern texts. Further, his perspective on David's character and relationships is highly romanticized, utterly distorting the text, as in the claim that ``David and Bathsheva demonstrate an intimacy based on equality.'' Really? The biblical narrative plainly states that David lusts after Bathsheva, has her brought by his men to his court, and arranges for her husband to be killed so that he may possess her. As for Rosenberg's poetic and prose adaptations, they too often are clumsy, as in his rendering of 2 Samuel 13:2: ``Amnon is sick with a mess of feelings for his sister Tamar--she is a virgin besides- -and it is a forbidding task to imagine what to do with her.'' Finally, there is a long, tiresome, and often esoteric appendix, mainly written by Rhonda Rosenberg (the author's wife), condemning such biblical scholars as Richard Friedman and Robert Alter. Both Rosenbergs are so focused on pseudo-scholarly speculation, creative flights of fancy, and polemics, that for pages on end they almost entirely lose contact with the beguiling, ever-contemporary narrative that the author of the David story, whoever he was, offers. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Random House Value Publishing (November 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517288788
• ISBN-13: 978-0517288788
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,679,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Poet-scholar David Rosenberg is co-author of the New York Times bestseller, The Book of J (with Harold Bloom), and the former editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society. A poet of Toronto Coach House, New York School, and Jerusalem Cricket lineage, he has published several volumes of poetry. A Literary Bible presents thirty years of his original translation from ancient Hebrew.

Rosenberg is a survivor of the writing programs at The New School (with Kenneth Koch and Robert Lowell), University of Michigan (with Donald Hall), Syracuse University (with Delmore Schwartz), and University of Essex, England, where he pursued doctoral studies. He taught for several years at York University (Toronto), the City University of New York, and as a Master Poet for the New York State and Connecticut Arts Councils.

At the age of thirty, Rosenberg retired from teaching. For two decades, while working as a literary editor and translator, he studied the origins of ancient Hebrew literature and the Bible, in New York and Israel (with Robert Gordis, Harry Orlinsky, and Chaim Rabin), while his work appeared prominently in Harper's, The New Republic, Hudson Review, Paris Review and elsewhere around the globe (most recently in Chicago Review, Jacket in Australia, and Open Letter in Canada). A Poet's Bible (1991) won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the first major literary award given to a biblical translation in the U.S.

Rosenberg is the author and editor of more than twenty books, including volumes of contemporary writers on the Bible that first raised the question of how Judeo-Christian culture can be newly reinterpreted. During the past decade he has studied the context for ancient biography, leading to a diptych: Abraham: The First Historical Biography (2006) and An Educated Man: A Dual Biography of Moses and Jesus (2010). He continues to publish critical essays on poetry, as well as his long poem, The Lost Book of Paradise (1993) and a literary version of Kabbalah, Dreams of Being Eaten Alive (2000).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Are You Ready to Be Challenged?, December 15, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Book of David: A New Story of the Spiritual Warrior and Leader Who Shaped Our Inner Consciousness (Hardcover)

What a revelation! It's hard to read a novel or poem again in the same way after the illuminations in The Book of David. I suppose this must be infuriating to some who want things to stay just as they are, but I was glad to see that the Publishers Weekly review had an intelligent response: (Oct.13, 1997) "In this imaginative and provocative work...Rosenberg's interest is in evoking the characters who inhabit the biblical narratives, and his translations and transformations of the text are powerful and moving...It tells David's story in a way that reveals the characters of David, Rosenberg and "S"." What Publishers Weekly leaves out is that this will not only change the way a reader thinks about the Bible but also how we view contemporary writers as well. I always thought there was an element of creative fiction and poetry in the Bible, yet now I can see just how it was transformed by great writers.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad Translation, Worse Biblical Commentary, January 27, 2001

By 

David Richter (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Book of David: A New Story of the Spiritual Warrior and Leader Who Shaped Our Inner Consciousness (Hardcover)

Remember David Rosenberg? The guy whose strange, awkward but inaccurate translation of parts of Genesis and Exodus led Harold Bloom to expose his ignorance of both the Hebrew language and the biblical world in THE BOOK OF J? Rosenberg is back and ready to make more trouble for anyone who trusts his view of ancient Israel. This time he plays both translator and literary critic, about equally well.

Here is Rosenberg's translation of the beginning of 2 Samuel 11:

"Here we are: a year was passing, and it is the season best for the wars of kings. David sends out Joab, his own retinue, and all of Israel's army; and they bring the Ammonites to their knees, beseiging Rabbah. Meanwhile David lingered in Jerusalem. It happens one late afternoon that David rises from his bed, takes a walk around the palace roof, and from there, his glance falls upon a woman in her bath. The woman appeared very beautiful in his eyes."

Breathlessly dramatic but the tenses are all wrong, and words like "lingered" and "glance" miss the simplicity of the Hebrew text. Rosenberg subsequently has David try to "uncover more" about the naked woman in her bath, and has his messengers "beseige" Bathsheba, just as Joab is beseiging Rabbah. These coy, leering figures are not in the Hebrew text, either, which presents the affair in eight blunt words: Vayishlach David malachim vayikachah vatavo eilav vayishchav imah (literally "And David sent messengers, and he got her, and she came to him, and he slept with her"). This story is filled with ironies. Why is it necessary to add ones that aren't in the text?

Rosenberg doesn't translate any of the poetry included in 2 Samuel -- David's lament over Saul and Jonathan or the two psalms in chapters 22 and 23--but his translations of other psalms suggest his need to compete with his text, to substitute his own poetic idea for that of his source:

you turn men into dust

and you ask them to return

children of men

for a thousand years

in your eyes

are a single day

yesterday

already passed

into today

a ship in the night

Rosenberg needs to import the cliche of ships that pass in the night. There are no ships in the Hebrew. This is Psalm 90:3-4, which literally runs: "You return mortals to dust and You say: Return, children of earth. For a thousand years are in Your eyes as a day, as yesterday when it has passed, or as a watch in the night." (Tashuv enosh ad-dakah / Vatomer: shuvu, b'nai adam. Ki elef shanim b'einecha ka'yom ethmol ki ya'avor / v'eshmorah ba'laylah.)

(The blurb to Rosenberg's book calls him "the leading translator of biblical poetry... of our time." I hope he isn't starting to believe his own publicity!)

Rosenberg provided the translation for The Book of J, in which the Yale critic Harold Bloom had fantasized that "J" -- the author of those parts of Genesis in which God is called YHWH -- was a princess in Solomon's court or that of his son Rehoboam. For Bloom, "J" and "S" were husband and wife, sharing ideas and developing similar turns of phrase during their pillow talk. Rosenberg evolves a slightly different version of this fantasy. Rosenberg's "S" is a royal prince operating as a scribe and translator in the court of Rehoboam, a son of Solomon or perhaps a cousin. His mother had been a princess of one of the indigenous nations (Moabites, Amorites, Ammonites) whose struggle for autonomy had been quashed by the Israelite monarchy. This for Rosenberg is the key link between David and "S," for he guesses that David too was the son of "a Canaanite princess" who became "Jesse's last and youngest wife." For Rosenberg "J" is an older woman who becomes the companion rather than the wife of "S," and commissions him to write the Succession Narrative because of his similarities to David and their common sympathy for the indigenous nations Israel has displaced. How Rosenberg knows all these things is not clear, unless he too is the son of a Canaanite princess, and consequently has a privileged understanding of his subjects. For the Bible contains not one word about how many wives Jesse had or who David's mother was -- not altogether surprising given how seldom the Hebrew Bible mentions any individual's maternal descent.

Perhaps it is interesting to read the book of Samuel in terms of the conflict between Israel and the Canaanite cultures it displaced, but Rosenberg's ideas about "S" and his vision are undermined by the question whether there ever was an "S" in the sense that there was a "J." "J" has a unique vocabulary, but stylistically, there isn't any real difference between Rosenberg's Book of S and most of the rest of the book of Samuel. And you get the same dramatic ironies from the outset, from the story of Hannah and Eli, in the first chapter.

In my opinion, this book is a full scale disaster, dreadfully misleading to those who trust Rosenberg's translations or ideas about tenth-century Israelite society. Avoid this book, or better, buy Robert Alter's The David Story, with a superb translation of all of Samuel, together with fascinating commentary that is generous to all the scholars that went before him.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very thought provoking, January 29, 2010

By 

Israel Drazin (Boca Raton, Florida) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Book of David (Hardcover)

David Rosenberg, co-author of The Book of J, offers his own translation of the parts of the Bible that he considers the original story of the rise and reign of David as the king of all of Israel. Because Rosenberg omits much of the biblical material, his story, told in easily readable and engaging English in only 28 pages long. For example, the death of David is told by Rosenberg in only eleven lines, while the Hebrew original relates a tale in 65 sentences. He also devotes a chapter to David's Psalms. He states that "a great Hebraic writer at the Solomonic court whom scholars call the Court Historian, or S," was the author of the David tales. The letter S was chosen since the David narrative begins in the biblical book Samuel. This writer was a friend of J. Rosenberg offers his readers an interesting speculation about the identity of S and many of his own and other scholars' ideas about what is considered the authentic David.