The book of J
Rosenberg, David
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In this audacious work of literary restoration, Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg recover a lost masterpiece by a nameless writer known as J, author of the oldest and most powerful stories in the Bible. Religious tradition ascribes authorship of the Pentateuch the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament - to Moses, but scholars agree that it is in fact a composite work consisting of texts by several different authors, woven together around 400 B.C.E. by a master editor known as the Redactor, or R. The oldest of these texts, running through Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, was written by the author whom scholars call J, probably in the tenth century B.C.E. For the first time, Bloom and Rosenberg lift the J text out of the surrounding material so that it stands as the seminal classic it is. Bloom persuasively argues, on aesthetic grounds, that J is a writer of the stature of Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, and on literary and psychological grounds, that) was a woman, very likely a woman of the royal house living at King Solomon's court. His brilliant reading of J's text is accompanied by Rosenberg's wonderfully fresh translation, a resonant and vigorous break with the tired conventions of modern Bible translation. Paradoxically, on Bloom's interpretation, J is in no sense a religious writer. Rather, she is a grand and fierce ironist with an unmatched power of characterization, as revealed in her portraits of Adam, the Patriarchs, Joseph, Moses, and especially the women - Eve, Sarai, Rebecca, Tamar, Zipporah - who emerge with unforgettable force and clarity. But J's supreme literary creation is her Yahweh, an exuberant, capricious vitalist who haggles with Abram on the road to Sodom, unaccountably attempts to murder Moses, and nearly goes berserk at Sinai-a far cry from the fatherly, remote Jehovah superimposed by R and other editors, whose prous moralizing obscured J's towering originality but could not efface it.In Rosenberg's tendering, J's language leaps from the page, endlessly inventive, punning, playful, uncanny and finally sublime. Her men and women, by furns bewildered, crafty, and courageous, are made flesh, and her stories, three thousand years old, are made new. The Book of J triumphantly reclaims the Bible's first and indisputably greatest author, an immense literary imaginer, one of the most stunning writers of her own or any time. --cover flap.
Grove Weidenfeld
1990
340 pages