The book of B

...But he is not, as we say these days, quite "up front" about it either...

...Bathsheba is a real woman, full of all the appetites of which fiction is made...

...My J is a Gevurah [sic] ("great lady") of post-Solomonic court circles, herself of Davidic blood, who began writing her great work in the later years of Solomon, in close rapport and exchanging influences with her good friend the Court Historian, who wrote most of what we now call 2 Samuel...

...It is not implausible, in principle, that a foreign writer-whether Bathsheba or another-could have had a hand in writing some of the fledgling kingdom's first scriptures and could have introduced a subversive note of hostility to the exclusive covenant that Israel understood itself to have with the god of its fathers, whom it had boldly identified with El, the universal Semitic high god, and then declared the only true god...

...Frank Moore Cross, Hancock professor of Hebrew at Harvard University until his recent retirement, has been for a generation the learned and subtle proponent of a thesis crucial to The Book of J; namely that Israel's epic-Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses-must be read in the light of the beliefs and prejudices of the Davidic dynasty...

...Boisterously, let me suggest that Bloom's most important card is not on the reader's desk at all...

...In the present instance, Bloom denies, ignorantly and without argument, that oral tradition is possible or that literary creativity may be exercised by a community as well as by an individual...

...It is in this sense that The Book of J is more than it seems...

...The text, now more deeply and artistically understood, further specifies the imagined personality of the author...

...And if he could do all that, then he might have the nerve to face the implication in his own research that part of the Hebrew Bible was a gentile "captive" in its opening moments...

...Bloom writes, intuitively (and defensively): "We need to be like wise children in reading or listening to J, because her mode, and not just in the primeval history of humankind, is like a more sophisticated kind of children's literature than we now possess...

...There is a grand hardness in J's women," Bloom writes, "in Sarai, Rebecca, Rachel, Tamar, and Zipporah, a hardness that perhaps J found in herself, or in Solomon's mother, Bathsheba...

...Jacob wins the new name of Israel...

...It is less than it seems when Bloom writes, at the end of his introduction: "I am aware that it may be vain labor, up Sinai all the way, as it were, to seek a reversal of twenty-five hundred years of institutionalized misreading...

...But before taking up its originality, I would digress for a moment on the background question of the recent use of historical-critical scholarship by literary critics...

...No strong misreadings here, if you please...

...4. J and Yahweh are cool not just to Moses but also to the Israelite rank and file...

...The possibilities for an imaginative (and heuristic) elaboration of her role are endless, particularly if we recall that the Solomonic era represented the high tide of Israelite openness to and other foreign cultural influences, not just in art and architecture but also in literature and religion...

...Biblical history in the modern sense became possible only when archeology, including the recovery by archeology of lost languages and entire lost literatures, made possible the independent correction, completion, and, not infrequently, the confirmation of the Bible's own version of the events it reports...

...The New Testament is indeed a literary and religious raid on the Jewish covenant, but it only continues a struggle that began much earlier...

...I will put all my cards on the reader's desk here, face up...

...Not even the separate publication of the Yahwist document is a new idea...

...Bloom's essays, "The Representation of Yahweh" and "The Psychology of Yahweh" present a god with a daylight clarity that can be stunning...

...The fact is that this removal produces an effect rather like that of an opera cut to just the arias or a film with all the dissolves and fade-outs, all the "continuity," eliminated...

...Why does Bloom, otherwise so acute, fail to see it...

...The Yahwist herself is not a Yahwist," Bloom writes...

...I don't know that a serious case can be made that Bathsheba was the Yahwist...

...even more gloriously, Tamar wins the immortality of her own name, and a central place in the story that she was not born into and so had to usurp for herself...

...Interestingly, however, a similar charge is regularly leveled against the neo-historicist criticism of modern literature that has lately become so influential on American campuses...

...When the Hebrew Bible celebrates gentiles, it gives evidence of an ancient quarrel, whether that quarrel be regarded as between contending ideas in the mind of Israel or between contending groups sharing the life and worship of Israel...

...Bloom never thinks to ask about the overall aesthetic effect of the removal of those other materials that were combined with J by the ancient redactor...

...In that book, Bloom taught us that a literary successor can escape the humiliation of being merely a successor by a "strong misreading" of his predecessor, strong misreading being the kind of deliberate, calculated error that brings new truth into view...

...But then can that process of becoming be called to a halt at the end of the Hebrew Bible...

...Regrettably, he ducks it...

...In The Book of J, by sharpest contrast with The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom wants history to stop...

...But so far, so fair: when historical-critical scholarship has done its best (or worst), it cannot and does not deny that there are genius writers and genius critics...

...Among ancient literatures, that of ancient Israel is in this regard utterly without parallel...

...Bloom has lifted the notion that the author of J may have been a woman from Richard Elliott Friedman, who proposed it in Who Wrote the Bible...

...The earliest stratum of Yahwism is the only one worthy of consideration...

...Does this mean that Bloom's work is without originality...

...Bloom writes: "Of all J's heroines, Tamar is the most vivid, and the most revelatory of J's identity...

...It was archeology, then, that turned critical scholarship into /z"ton'ca/-critical scholarship...

...What Bloom loses by this dismissal, this default, is nothing less than the plot of the Hebrew Bible...

...and Christianity's resolution of it via anew covenant, though dramatically successful, is not the only possible resolution...

...Bloom, Yahweh's psychoanalyst, cannot fail to see the intrinsic interest in watching God's character change as the rest of the Hebrew Bible comes into being...

...Bloom never adjusts his Bible interpretation by a hair's breadth in the light of an artifact or the evidence of literary parallels from elsewhere in the ancient Near East, and yet he is capable of reassigning a verse or an incident from another source to J simply because he finds it congenial...

...Bloom may go perversely to those verses that most critics find peripheral or even undecipherable and ignore those verses, even in J, that most critics find central...

...All I have done is to remove the book of J from its context in the Redactor's Torah and then to read what remains, which is the best and most profound writing in the Hebrew Bible...

...What does this pudding taste like...

...Though a literary text may remain historical-critical scholarship's ultimate object, it approaches that object through hieroglyphic, cuneiform, dendrochronology, comparative Semitic epigraphy, historical linguistics, and a score of ancillary disciplines of daunting complexity and negligible literary charm...

...The charge has quite properly been brought against such scholarship that it too often exchanges ends and means, reducing the Bible to data for the reconstruction of the politics and history of the ancient Near East...

...Foucault and Albright represent, even now, the threat of a literary leveling...

...Yet the book of J, though fragmentary, is hardly Mr...

...More than can appear in such an enumeration, these are earned insights...

...No wonder, either, that David's queen should be so in love with her king as to take him as her model for the personality of God...

...Among the things she did not blush to check up on, during that period, was whether Abishag, David's last concubine, was still a virgin after he had begun to sleep with her (she was...

...Tamar the Adullamite, Rahab the Canaanite, Uriah the Hittite, Naaman the Aramean, Ruth the Moabite-the list of gentiles whose virtue the Old Testament flings in the face of Israel is long and shocking...

...Bloom does not deny any of this...

...He fails, in my view, because he has in The Book of J an agenda which requires the repudiation of the very insight that made his reputation in The Anxiety of Influence...

...Determined to trump the New Testament, Bloom dismisses the subject of testaments or covenant altogether...

...In 1968, Peter Ellis published the Jerusalem Bible translation of J, with commentary, as The Yahwist: The Bible's First Theologian (Fides...

...What paleo- as well as neo-historicists object to in their more humanistic or literary colleagues is that the boys tend to get their facts wrong or only half right...

...Critical scholarship of the sort that began with Richard Simon's 1678 Critical History of the Old Testament and that came to a climax with Julius Wellhausen's 1883 Prolegomena to the History of Israel was essentially just a close reading of the text in the relative absence of theological preconditions...

...The failure of nerve is Bloom's failure to see how directly his evidence suggests that his "great lady," his Gevurah, is Bathsheba...

...Now, just here, in this process of subversion and counter-subversion is where we might have expected Bloom to excel...

...While, on the one hand, he takes the key findings of critical scholarship as given, on the other, he remains uncritically devoted to the romantic ideal of the genius writer, or perhaps the neo-romantic ideal of the genius writer read by the genius critic...

...If Bloom had the nerve to honor that misreading in the same spirit in which he honors Tamar for winning "a central place in the story that she was not born into and so had to usurp for herself," then he could also recognize all the greatness that intervenes-the greatness of Moses, not to speak of Jeremiah (whom he professes to despise) and Isaiah and Job...

...There is a question here that needs more than Bloom has given it...

...And finally, once her hapless grandson Rehoboam has betrayed the Davidic legacy, who better than the dowager queen to weave regal indignation into the warp and woof of Israel's foundation myth...

...that, in sum, Bathsheba invented Yahweh...

...So much for the structural weakness...

...their affec tions go to the chosen among the chosen: "A life-long monarchist, as I read her, a distruster of priests and people alike, she had more faith in David than in Yahweh...

...Bloom cites this work in another connection but does not credit Friedman for the provocative hypothesis that Bloom has placed at the center of his own work...

...Now, as to its tone and style, twentieth-century historical-critical Bible scholarship is very remote from literary appreciation...

...And so on until text and writer (not to speak of critic) stand in a fully achieved reciprocity, creators of each other, as it were...

...Bloom mentions Cross, as he mentions Friedman, in passing, but here too he fails to acknowledge his indebtedness where it counts...

...That author is perhaps our myth, but the experience of literature partly depends on that myth...

...The latter, all professors of modern literature who have recently written on the Bible, are relative conservatives within their own field, radicals only when they set their caps against the "institutionalized misreading" of the Bible by historical-critical scholarship...

...The moment seems to me to be one of rich irony...

...Bloom, by contrast, represents the faintly antique folly of a literary exaltation...

...Solomon himself, late in life, became an Astarte worshipper, according to 1 Kings 11...

...That struggle was full-blown centuries before the rise of Christianity...

...It is entirely possible that this indomitable queen mother survived her son as well as her husband, taking herself-quite as Bloom suggests-as the model for all those "hard" women of the patriarchal narratives, not least for the two-Sarai and Rebecca-who make impolite jokes about the sexual limitations of elderly men...

...We may grant that their removal throws J into relief...

...Though Simon called his work a critical history, you cannot really write the history of a thing using only the thing itself as source...

...As we read any literary work," he writes, "we necessarily create a fiction or metaphor of its author...

...What I find ironic is that this newest generation of outre literary criticism should have so much more in common with the staid older generation of highly technical Bible criticism than it does with the likes of Bloom, Frank Kermode, and Robert Alter...

...He infers a person-ality for his "great lady" from what she has writ-ten...

...2. J and Yahweh are decidedly cool toward the stammering Moses and oddly detached, even ironic, toward the Mosaic reli gion...

...A true literary radical like Michel Foucault, mucking about in the Bibliotheque Nationale, has more in common with a classic Orientalist like William Foxwell Albright, squinting at a squiggle on a scrap of parchment, than he does with an aesthete like Bloom...

...A high price to pay for tweaking the beard of the Apostle Paul...

...The proof of this pudding, to return to the question of Bloom's originality, must be in the eating...

...And yet there is, even on Bloom's own aesthetic and free-wheeling terms, a structural weakness in this work and even, as noted, a failure of nerve...

...Not until deep in the translator's first appendix do we learn that the authors have relied on Martin Noth, a German scholar whose major work is now two generations old, for their determination of just which portions of the Pentateuch should be regarded as part of J. Bloom's main claim to originality, however, is not the isolation of J but the discovery or invention of "the author J," to whom he devotes the first sixty pages of this book...

...This quarrel is the perfect subject for a critic with Bloom's gifts...

...Among all these women, it is, please note, Tamar whom J and Yahweh love best...

...Not quite: The Book of J is a work of modest, if finally truncated, originality...

...The letter stands for Jahve, the German spelling of the reconstructed Hebrew god-name later respelled in English as Yahweh...

...I will go further and observe that Tamar, despite her brief appearance in only a single chapter, Genesis 38, is the most memorable character in the book of J...

...If Bathsheba is Bloom's J, we need not wonder that her sympathies tend so powerfully toward Tamar, that earlier gentile who forced her way into Israel's destiny...

...Nor is this Bloom's only unacknowledged debt...

...but if we are in the realm of the boisterous rather than the serious, fictionalizing her is certainly a better bet than fictionalizing a German abbreviation...

...They are aristocrats, in a word...

...This method leads Bloom to four principal assertions: 1. J and her character Yahweh are both in love with David...

...No other nation has so calculatedly undermined its own national myth...

...The folk tale, the folk song seem to be, for him, metaphysical impossibilities...

...Then, allowing the inference to feed his imagination, he reads the text again seeking what he might at first have missed...

...In another Pentateuchal source, man is created in the image and likeness of God...

...J, he says, responds to "vitalism" and "impish" anarchy, not to covenant and stifling order: "Her Yahweh moves her at the rare moments when he is Davidic...

...Summit, 1987...

...It all fits...

...Bloom's method is circular and unabashedly sub-jective but, in my view, legitimate and, on occa-sion, brilliantly brought off...

...Bloom's charge that the gentiles, with their New Testament, make a hostage of the Hebrew Bible is true but deserves to be handled as something more than a side-of-the-mouth slur...

...Or that this foreign woman should look with such studied coolness on Moses and on the fiercer, more moralistic stand of Yahweh-worship that he represented...

...David Rosenberg's creation or my own...

...3. The theomorphic David aside, J and Yahweh respond more to vigorous women than to even the most vigorous men...

...True, but perhaps all too true...

...In Bloom's J, Yahweh is created in the image and likeness of Israel's exuberant founding monarch...

...Looked at one way, J without the rest of the Pentateuch is clean and masterful narrative...

...The result, nonetheless, has impressive internal coherence...

...An Adullamite married in turn to two of Judah's sons, both of whom die, Tamar seduces her father-in-law not just to avoid childlessness but also to claim a part in Israel's blessing and destiny...

...The wife of a Hittite and almost certainly a Hittite or Canaanite herself, Bathsheba-as a nubile young woman-seduced the much older David even as Tamar, the Adullamite, seduced the older Judah...

...The Book of J, Bloom's commentary on David Rosenberg's punning, experimental translation of portions of the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers is both less and more than it seems (The Book of J, translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg, interpreted by Harold Bloom, Grove Weidenfeld: $21.95, 340 pp...

...But are they so in fact...

...The New Testament is, of course, the strongest, most outrageously successful misreading in history...

...The inconvenient truth is that nothing in biblical interpretation is more thoroughly "institutionalized" than the notion that the Bible-and in particular the Pentateuch-is an edited work...

...The use of the letter / as the scholarly tag for the oldest of the four documents that after editing became the Pentateuch is a century old...

...What else does it do...

...What is there, in principle, to prevent Israel's masterpiece from becoming, as Bloom bitterly puts it, "the Protestant Bible, in which the Hebrew Scriptures dwindle down to that captive prize of the gentiles, the Old Testament...

...All successors, beginning with Moses himself, are to be seen as weak misreaders, mere cor-rupters...

...As we read in 1 Kings, Bathsheba was deeply involved in the court intrigues that brought her son, Solomon, to the throne...

...If he is not the leading literary critic of the day, he may be at least the leading diagnostician of literary strategy...

...looked at another way, it is just "Bible stories" for children...

...Lay readers may be excused if they take away from that paragraph the mistaken impression that what Bloom calls the book of J, though not his creation, is at least his discovery, a discovery reversing "twenty-five hundred years of institutionalized misreading...

...For J, we have a choice of myths, and I boisterously prefer mine to that of the biblical scholars...

...no evidence can count in their favor...

...Her career begins with lust in the dawn of Davidic glory and ends with ambition in its twilight...