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Loading... The Book of Jby Harold Bloom
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A worthy attempt to look at part of the early Bible as a literary, as opposed to a religious, work. However, it depends a bit too much on Bloom's evocation of his authority as a critic to assert that it's a work of literary genius, rather than depending on his ability to let us see what he does. Mostly, it uses the standard device that critics use when they trust an author; any apparent infelicities become evidence of irony rather than actual problems. Still, useful as a way to jolt some newness into this text. (  ) rpuchalsky | Jul 6, 2008 |  Regardless of how one feels about the revelatory truth of the first few stories of the Bible, it is clear to everyone that oral tradition long predated the written text. Modern scholarship seems to point to one "author" coded as J who assembled the first five books (Pentateuch) into a form most similar to the current one. In this book, Bloom analyzes the core story of these books as a literary creation, with J an author with a slant to convey and a background of--he posits--her own to help mold how the events of the text are presented. There can be no simple journalistic reporting of the legends without a human bias, and Bloom seeks to explore the nature and origins of that bias. A fascinating read, even if I don't have the background to judge the worth of his scholarship. caffron | Jul 13, 2007 | The Book of Genesis was not written by a single author; rather, writings by several authors were woven together by a later editor, or redactor, to produce the book that was eventually canonized as the first book of the Bible. The author of the earliest strand, written approximately 950 BCE, refers to God as YHVH. (The pronunciation of this so-called Tetragrammaton has been lost, but it is usually spoken today as Yahweh.) Because of the name this writer used for God, this author is referred to as the Yahwist, or J. Bloom's thesis is that J was a woman. Most biblical scholars consider that highly unlikely, but the theory has not been definitively debunked, so the question is still open. But even apart from which sex J was, the book is still very useful for its insights into the writings and character of the Yahwist. (  ) sunnydale | Mar 17, 2007 | BTRIPP | Nov 24, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:17 -0400)
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