Subject: Book of J
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliabaader@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Jul 10 2002 - 21:25:07 EDT
--- Will Hochman <hochmanw1@southernct.edu> wrote:
> but the real point I want to make is that at least Bloom and
> Rosenberg are thinking about how a female voice may well have been
> part of the bible's composition. will
Now, I was perfectly happy to watch this discussion go by, silently
agreeing or disagreeing with various assertations, but I've actually done
quite a bit of research on this. Bloom's main thesis isn't as wild as many
knee-jerkers tend to think.
A little history, which some of you may or may not consider heresy:
Traditionally, the faithful claimed that the writer of Torah was Moses and
only Moses. That some of the narrative continued after the death of Moses
and contained information that Moses couldn't have known was generally
disregarded until relatively recently. A recent study by David Damrosch,
THE NARRATIVE COVENANT (1987), posits:
To take Genesis alone, the text actually contains not three epics
but three very distinct literary forms: a creation-flood epic,
a collection of oral sagas and saga cycles, a wisdom-oriented
novella ... the whole body of Yahwistic material in the
Pentateuch would have presented an even stranger violation
of known narrative forms.
Agreed, not a very good proof of multiple authorship, but the mixed nature
of the various narrative forms in Torah do tend to make one doubt in a
single author. Their content makes one even less likely to call that
single author Moses.
So, in the nineteenth century, a scholar named Julius Wellhausen presented
the Authorial Hypothesis of the Pentateuch, that is, that Torah was
composed by multiple people. Various scholars picked up that ball and
established the actual number of authors, the temporal order of the
authors, and the phases of the Hebrew faith associated with each. The
authors are four:
J, or the Yahwist, so named because this author referred to G-d as
"Yahweh." J probably wrote shortly after the reign of Solomon, around 900
B.C.E.
E, or the Elohist, so named because this author reffered to G-d as
"Elohim." E probably wrote about two generations after J, around 850
B.C.E.
P, or the Priestly Author (also called the Deuteronomist), who mainly
concerned himself with setting down the laws of Moses. These were
probably multiple authors who wrote about two hundred years after J and E,
around 587 B.C.E. They wrote an alternative text of Torah shortly after
the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon, and many of their changes are mainly
concerned with keeping the Hebrew people strong throughout the exile.
R, or the Redactor, who took all of the texts and put them down into
the form we mostly know today. Often thought to be Ezra the Scribe, the
redactor worked around 450 BCE, approximately four hundred fifty years
after the original Hebrew text was penned. This redacted text is the text
found in the Septuagint and in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Trying to establish authorship with any certainty is a precarious
enterprise, as I'm sure you can see with just these facts. The authors
are determined by stylistic and religious differences, and are estimated
based upon what was similar to the work they produced. It's scholarship,
but it's just as flawed as any other human enterprise.
This, then, is why one cannot dismiss Harold Bloom's thesis in the Book of
J out of hand. David Rosenberg supplies the text, stripped of any non-J
elements, and Bloom the literarian analyzes it not as an exalted text but
as a work of literature, which indeed it was.
Based upon the themes of the stories written by J, Bloom believes that the
author had access to Solomon's court, loved David (many of J's stories on
a subtextual level involve David and Solomon), and had a strong feminine
slant.
When read together as a cohesive narrative as is presented in Rosenberg's
translation of THE BOOK OF J (1990), it is certainly easy to imagine the
author as female, simply based upon the repeated themes: women saving
their husbands by allowing themselves to be passed off as sister rather
than wife, women securing their son's birthright through nefarious means,
and women presented as thinking creatures rather than as temptress.
And the author as woman would not have been impossible. Solomon's wife,
Pharaoh's daughter*, would have had great influence over the court at the
time (indeed, Solomon was often criticized for his willingness to bow to
her dictates), and the Queen of Sheba was also a great influence. Don't
get me wrong; mysogyny still existed in Solomon's court, but the court
prided itself on its enlightened state, and knowledge was valued on all
levels. Also, although J would never have been allowed to enter the
temple to view the Ark of the Covenant (only men had that honor, and
Levites at that), she certainly would have lived with the immediate
experience of it, for the Israelites still carried it into battle.
So, although none of Blooms claims can be proven, none of them are
impossible, either. The problems I have with his book exist more on a
literary plane, as I think he could have hit me over the head with the
irony stick a bit less.
I suppose he means well.
Regards,
Cecilia.
* It has been suggested that this daughter of Pharaoh is why some of the
Biblical stories seem to have an Egyptian source or equivalent.
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