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The Book of J

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Harold Bloom's 'The Book of J' caused quite a stir when it first was published. The book contains both introductory essays on authorship, a discussion of the theory of different texts being used to make up the books of the Bible (the Documentary Hypothesis), some historical context, and translation notes.

The bulk of the book consists of David Rosenberg's new translation of the J text, that text having been separated and isolated from the other source texts of the Torah (first five books of the Bible).

The concluding section contains essays by Bloom on different characters and themes in the text, as well as some modern theoretical analysis of the text, isolated as it is in this volume from the greater mass of material in the Bible.

There is a brief appendix by Rosenberg with notes specifically geared toward translation issues and difficulties, as well as source materials.

First, for a little background: since the 1800's, much of Biblical textual scholarship and analysis has subscribed to the theory that most books were not first written as integrated wholes, but rather, consist of a library of amalgamated texts, largely put together by a person who goes by the title Redactor, or R, for short. This was (in terms of Hebrew Bible timelines) a relatively late occurrence. Prior to this, there were various sources, including the J (J for Jehovah, or Yahweh, which is what God is called in these texts), but also E (Elohist, which is what God is called in these texts), P (Priestly, which largely comprises Leviticus), and D (Deuteronomist). The separation of these strands is controversial, and will probably never cease to be. But with literary and linguistic analysis, certain traits can be discerned of each of the particular strands.

The most controversial conclusion which Bloom advances in this volume is that J is a woman, who lived in the courtly community of King David, and that her stories are not only a retelling of the ancient stories which would have been known commonly, but is also a satire and indictment of courtly life as she finds it.

'J was no theologian, and rather deliberately not a historian.... There is always another side of J: uncanny, tricky, sublime, ironic, a visionary of incommensurates, and so the direct ancestor of Kafka, and of any writer, Jewish or Gentile, condemned to work in Kafka's mode.'

Bloom's assertion that J is a woman consists of several 'telling' ideas, not least of which that the J text seems to have no heroes, only heroines.

'Sarai and Rachel are wholly admirable, and Tamar, in proportion to the narrative space she occupies, is very much the most vivid portrait in J. But Abram, Jacob, and Moses receive a remarkably mixed treatment from J.'

Also, on the basis of sensitivity to subject and social vision, Bloom argues for a female J. Of course, women in positions of authority (as any courtly author or historian would have to be) were very rare in ancient Middle Eastern culture, but not unheard of; of course, literacy rates for women were incredibly low, and there has always been the unspoken assumption that, naturally, the authors of all ancient texts are men.

Whether or not you subscribe to this (and I must confess, I am less than convinced, clever and interesting and thought-provoking as Bloom's essay may be), both on the person of the author of J, as well as many of his other equally unorthodox views, this text still provides much food for thought, and an interesting side text with which to read the accounts in Genesis and Exodus.

Reading Rosenberg's translation is, likewise, an interesting exercise. I would wish for footnote or some key to be able to follow along in the Bible, but Rosenberg's purpose was to let J stand as its own text, on its own merits, and thus, without interruption, he has done that here. A refreshing look at familiar texts, Rosenberg's new translation will give things to think and argue about for some time.

If you have a King James version of the Bible, the next time you read Genesis, pay attention to how God is referred to. Sometimes He's called "God" and sometimes He's called "The Lord". The reason for this is that the original Hebrew text uses two different names for God, and the translators were careful to preserve this. When the Hebrew text uses "Elohim" it is translated as "GOD". When the Hebrew text uses "Yahweh", it is translated as "The Lord".

If you carefully read Genesis, you'll notice that when Genesis refers to God as "Yahweh", he seems to be very different than when he is refered to as "Elohim". For example, Elohim is invisible--he never appears to anybody nor can he be seen by anybody--but Yahweh talks face-to-face with people all the time: with Abram, to Jacob, and to Moses and the 40 elders. Elohim seems remote and regimented, whereas Yahweh comes across as mischevious and irrascible. This has prompted some to propose the so-called "Documentary Hypothesis" which posits that Genesis was formed by editing together two or more different books, each book using a different word for God and each book presenting a different picture of who God was and what He was all about.

The book of J is the hypothasized book which used 'Yahweh" as the name of God. Scholars try to reconstruct this book by bringing together all of the passages in the first 5 books of the Bible which refer to God as "Yahweh". The result is startling: the same stories you've heard all your life (The tower of Babal, Joseph going to Egypt, Abram bargaining with God over Sodom and Gomorrah), when read together like this, take on a whole different level of meaning.

This book provides two things in one handy volume: it provides a reconstruction of the book of J, freshly translated by David Rosenberg, and it also provides an extended commentary by Harold Bloom, who is certainly the best reader alive today, and who is uniquely qualified to serve as a tour guide through the experience of reading J. So to review the book I'd like to review each of these seperately.

First, Rosenberg's translation. To illustrate just how good it is at bringing things out of the text which you ordinarly wouldn't notice, I'd like to quote from his translation of the story of the Tower of Babal: "We can bring ourselves together" they said "like stone on stone, use brick for stone: bake it until hard." For morter they heated bitumen.

Notice how this translation brings out the parallelism between the tower of Babal and human society: The tower is made out mud bricks bound by bitumen, and society is made out of people bound by language. But people are also just made out of mud--recall the creation story where Yahweh breathes the breath of life into mud. Baking the mud into bricks is symbolic of the people making themselves hard, and using bitumen for morter is symbolic of them using language and government to organize themselves. Rosenberg's translation makes available to us many of the puns and wordplay which other English translations unfortunately lose.

Now, to review Bloom's commentary. Scholarly types are fond of dising Bloom for his tendency to be speculative, to use his imagination to illuminate the reading of the text. But what they are forgetting is that J is a bunch of stories, written for us to experience! To use an parable of Rorty's, its like a surgion describing your wife as a bunch of tissues and organs vs. describing your wife as warm and loving, important person in your life. Yes, "warm and loving" arn't medical terms, but that doesn't make them a bad description of your wife.

Also, the very greatest literature, such as J is, will admit of more than one reading, more than one interpretation, more than one point of view. Bloom here does us excellent service by showing us his point of view on the text, telling us how the experience of reading the text impacts him. The author of J didn't write J just to chronicle some historical figures--the author of J wrote J so that we could read it, and by reading it, become changed into new people. _This_ is the aspect of experiiencing J which Bloom's commentary helps along, and this is the aspect which critics of Bloom's commentary are missing the most.

Harold Bloom has never been shy of making bold assertions, and in his The Book of J we have the boldest - that is that the central core of the Pentateuch is the work of single writer - the J Writer - living during the Davidic or Solomonic dynasty. He speculates that the J Writer is probably of noble birth, of unparalleled education and literary talent and is probably a woman. In a later work (I think in his "The Western Canon"), he further speculates the J Writer to be Bathsheba, the fateful love of David's life. The implications, of course, are that the Books of Moses are of late origin and essentially a work of the imagination arising from the Shadowland of History.

This work must be taken for what it is - a patchwork translation of the Torah by a fine poet with an historical introduction written by a renowned literary critic and Shakespearean authority. I personally am a great admirer of the work of Professor Bloom, but here, I think, he strays into ground where he is (by his own admission) at best an amateur.

Some additional random thoughts:

1. There is considerable weight of authority on the side of Professor Bloom as to the stepwise redaction of the Tanakh by writers and editors in late Old Testament times, though scant authority for his imaginative view of the personal characteristics of the J Writer herself. However, the entire field of Biblical scholarship and criticism is so volatile and fluid at present, that any "authority" on the subject represents only one scholars private opinion at any given time.

2. The current popular view is that the Bible is essentially a profound literary creation assembled by the hands of some late master from early "primitive" narratives. A contrary view is that the Bible as we know it is essentially a "descent from glory" - a miniature and much garbled and mistranslated product which can only approximate a much clearer, earlier and larger corpus of sacred works.

3. Poets might very well make the best translators - though not the most accurate. David Rosenberg's translation I find to be fresh and compelling. Reading it gave me a flood of new insights into a text many of us associate most strongly with the language of the KJV.

4. Bloom's desire for certainty as to the character of the J Writer remind me of his equally vivid but somewhat stretched account of the creation of Hamlet in Bloom's "Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human."

Unlike many I suppose, I did not find the idea that J was a woman of royal blood particularly shocking. The Torah never seemed to me a work of the people and by the people; the people who wrote it and commented on it were nothing if not the elite. I had always taken that pretty much for granted. But Bloom did present a hypothesis that I found startling. For in this book he claims that the author of what many consider to be the core of the Torah/Old Testament conceived of her work as an epic, a kind of Iliad. Indeed, that she could do little else--for she (Bloom asserts) was not a terribly religious person herself.

This idea may seem blasphemous to many. It certainly seemed that way to me at first. But it also helps. It helps us recall that the men and women who wrote the Torah were intensely human and that whatever their motives they wrote a book that is, all else aside, brilliant literature that captivates so many as literature.

Surely then, it is worth rescuing the work of the first of these luminaries from the numerous redactors and the prison of holiness? Surely it is worth remembering that the author of the Book of J was, if nothing else, a brilliant writer. Bloom and Rosenberg have helped me at least do just that. And for that I thank them.

Now, I don't pretend to be a scholar, let alone a biblicalscholar. And I can not say that I am particularly religious, but Ihave found "The Book of J" to be particularly fresh and intriguing.

I have read Tanakh, the Jewish Publication Society's 1985 translation of the Torah, and have dipped into both its earlier 1917 version and the King James version. I have fought my way through Jonathon Kirsch's "Moses, A Life" and have delighted in reading and rereading Thomas Cahill's "The Gifts of the Jews"; and while I have enjoyed them, I've never really thought about the authors of the Old Testament. But David Rosenberg's translation of J's work, and Harold Bloom's wonderful commentary have brought a new sense of wonder towards my reading of these sacred works and has made them fresh and new to me.

I look forward to furthering my own study into my religion and my spirituality and would recommend highly to anybody who is interested in reviving their interest in the Torah to read "The Book of J" and take a new look at an old text.

The Bible was written by men (or in this case, women) who had something to say. None of the writers had any idea their history or poetry or advice or simply, their tale, would one day be revered as the "Word of God". Bloom feels this is particularly true for the Book of J, the underpinnings of much of the Torah.

He surmises - in a wild burst of conjecture - that a Hebrew woman (slightly over 40, mind you) penned much of the Torah, drawing together stories and generational sagas while adding her own peculiar twist to them. Of course, all he can offer is circumstantial evidence - style of writing, oddity of current scripture, the particularly stunning biographies of the various characters, especially the vivid accounts of the many women... Tamar, Zipporah, Sarai, her famous handmaiden, and that woman of woman, Eve.

The text is beautifully translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg who captures the essential poetry of the words that are inevitably lost in the English translation (although the King James version does its best to imbue the lines with an appropriate stateliness).

This is a book on two levels. The first is the text itself and by this I mean both the text that has become known as the Torah and the various bits and pieces he selects as having come from a single transcriber/collector/author. Just reading the words inspires allows us to wonder as we wander with this ancient band of people who had the imagination, faith and yes, audacity, to claim a special place in the heart of the creator of the Universe. The second level is the story itself, the hunt for the clues, the interpretation and the startling thought humorous conclusion.

Modern biblical scholarship has established that the Old Testament is an amalgam of many sources composed over many centuries. Of the four primary texts thought to constitute the Pentateuch, or Torah, the J text (so-called for its reference to the name of God as Yahweh, or Jehovah) contains most of the best-known stories. In J, we find Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the bulk of Noah, Abraham, and Jacob, the adventures of Joseph, Moses' encounter with the burning bush, and the twelve plagues, among other arresting stories.

Naturally, we cannot be certain exactly which passages come from which sources, but stylistic similarities suggest with some reliability a common authorship behind all of these stories. Settling who this source is, and how it was composed, presents a much more complex set of problems, one which will most likely never be settled with any confidence. Harold Bloom offers us a compelling conjecture in this book, whose primary merit is to give us a fresh view of a great text.

Bloom argues that the J text was written by an aristocratic woman in the generation after King Solomon's death. The J author, Bloom claims, was one of the supreme ironists and psychologists of Western literature, and did not intend for her narrative to become a part of normative religion. Bloom attempts to dig J out from under the crushing weight of tradition and examine the text as the literary masterwork that it is. He readily acknowledges that this project verges on the impossible, since the J text has formed the center of a normative tradition that most of us have been familiar with since early childhood. Still, the effort is enough to jog us into reading these familiar stories with fresh eyes, and what emerges is truly miraculous.

The book consists in part of a translation of the J text by David Rosenberg and in part of commentary and interpretation by Harold Bloom. The Rosenberg translation does far more than just isolate the passages that can reasonably be attributed to J and detach them from the usual chapter and verse divisions that were added by later editors. More important, Rosenberg's translation consciously departs from the usual rhetorical styles of Biblical translation, which vary from the lofty to the scholarly literal. Instead, Rosenberg aims to capture the playful irony of the J text, and writes with the energy and sense of discovery we find in the best of children's literature.

I can't comment on the accuracy of the translation, but its readability is commendable. Rosenberg has approached the translation, in keeping with Bloom's mission, as a work of literature. As such, he conveys to the reader the immense literary virtuosity of the text, which is often lost in translations that try to render the Bible in a monotone of lofty sententiousness. Part of Bloom's thesis is that the Book of J defies genre categorization: the author draws on all the genres that Middle Eastern literature to that time had made available to her, as well as inventing some of her own. As such it should read more like a novel than an epic poem, and this is in part what Rosenberg achieves.

The combined effect of Rosenberg's translation and Bloom's commentary is to give us a piece of literature, divorced as possible from normative religion. As a result, the text's literary merits shine through in unexpected ways. I found myself experiencing simultaneously the thrill of reading something great for the first time and the thrill of discovering fresh insights in a text that's already very familiar. I felt I was seeing something amazing for the first time, even though it had always been right there in front of me.

The main trouble I have with Bloom's writing here, as elsewhere, is that he never really makes arguments. He makes assertions and insinuations, usually with enough force and enthusiasm to make them plausible, but he never provides anything to convince us if we're inclined to disagree. I don't find a sustained argument as to why Bloom should think that the author of the J text was an aristocratic woman in post-Solomonic Judah. He makes this claim a number of times, and occasionally alludes to reasons to believe it, but not with the detail of evidence and refuted counter-arguments that constitute proper rigor. Each mention he makes of J's identity leaves me with a feeling that he's just alluding to a point he's going to come to later, but he never actually comes to that point. I finished the book feeling tantalized but unsatisfied. The book is engaging and exciting and I really want to be convinced, but I'm not.

I could say the same for much of Bloom's commentary as well. One of the themes he draws from J is her disappointment with King Rehoboam and her nostalgia for David. Bloom identifies a number of wicked puns on Rehoboam's name, but his reading falls far short of convincing me that David, in his absence, is really the central figure of the J text. I found myself wondering whether Bloom found David's absence in the text first, or J's identity, and whether reading David into the text would hold up if it turned out that the J author is someone altogether different from whom Bloom claims she is.

Bloom does a better job of picking apart the complex and delightful character of Yahweh, but even here, the grand claims he makes for the subtlety and expansiveness of this literary creation always stretch a fair bit beyond what he successfully shows in his analysis of the text.

These are no small faults, but I don't mind them so much in this book because of its outstanding merits. Rosenberg and Bloom set themselves a very ambitious goal, and they meet with enough success to reinvent one of the most familiar texts in the Western canon.

No, the questionable part is not about J being a woman. While I personally find it to be unlikely given the culture it was written in, if any of the biblical sources was a woman, it was J.

My main criticisms have to do with four things. First and foremost is the date that Bloom suggests for the writing of J- the 10th century BC. While this date was common in the '60s, and is still cited by many general encyclopedias, from an archaeological standpoint, it's just way too early.

Archaeologically speaking, none of the four major sources can be much earlier than 800 BC, due to some obvious anachronisms in the text. J and E were probably both written before the fall of Samaria in 722 BC, so that leaves a roughly 80 year period in which they were both initially composed.

Second, Bloom's understanding of the Documentary Hypothesis is not entirely accurate. He refers to J as the "core" of the Torah, and seems to believe that the other sources were simply taking J and "editing" it, adding their own sections to it. This is not the case. E and P did not "edit" J. E was originally an independent document, and was only later combined with J, probably shortly after the fall of Samaria. And while P was based on JE, it did not edit it; rather, it was written as a rival version. D probably did edit parts of J, E, and P and integrated them into his saga, and R subsequently combined JE, P, and D.

Third, Bloom's reconstruction of J includes material that is not usually attributed to J, and also omits material that is. It seems that he chose what was and was not J based on his ideal picture of J, rather than objective scholarship.

And fourth, changing the name of Zoar to "Smallah" was just plain stupid. If he wanted to explain that pun, he should have just added a footnote.

Despite than those criticisms however, the simple fact that he attempted to reconstruct one of the basic sources of the biblical text as a complete and readable narrative deserves credit. His reconstruction was definitely readable, and captured the feel of what J was probably like better than most translations out there. Recommended if you're into this stuff, but only if you have read Richard Elliot Freidman's "Who Wrote the Bible" first as an introduction to biblical scholarship.

This translation of the elements of the Book that are from the J tradition, complete in a startling simple prose, was very enlightening and useful. As compared to the Richard Freedman book "Who Wrote the Bible?" this book gives you the elements Rosenberg considers from the original tradition isolated and available for clear reading. If we can trust this scholarship this is a great source for those that would not have the expertise to recognize the text within a text themselves. People like me. The introduction by Harold Bloom is excellent.

This was the most insightful commentary on the Bible I have ever read.

Literary analysis was never so meaningful. In fact, I believe the author read in more intricacies from J than were intended. Perhaps, perhaps not, but in any case I now have a far greater understanding as well as a greater appreciation for the Torah.

I have often felt that the drama within Genesis was Shakespearean in quality and design. But for difficulty in translation and an awkward sentence structure from Hebrew to English, this idea of mine was mere guesswork. I now know it is the case. It was explained beautifully. How many new doors are open?