The Book of J (edition 2004)

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Here’s another of my favorites, published back in 1990. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s a must read, for the sheer pleasure of it.

Most scholars now accept that the Torah was written by at least four different authors. The first strand of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers was written by an author that scholars call “J,” who lived in the tenth century BC. This is your chance to read J’s story as it was written, extracted and reassembled from the Bible. Bloom admires J on the level of Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, and wonders if J wasn’t a woman. J’s story abounds in unforgettable characters and subtle irony, including a God (Yahweh) whose personality is unmatched by any later writers.

In the first half of the book, the text of J is translated brilliantly by Rosenberg, who brings the scripture to life. Then, Bloom takes the reins and provides commentary in the second half. If you have never read any of Bloom’s writings, you’re in for a treat. Wry and fresh, Bloom is one of my favorite authors.

J, as Bloom points out multiple times, is no moralist. Sin is not one of J’s concepts, but contempt is. Irony is. J will stoop to puns and rise to heroism if it helps portray her characters. You’ll forget you’re reading the Bible as you get lost in the storytelling, I promise. I can’t think of enough good adjectives to describe this one. ( )

Rosenberg's translation of the Yahwist texts is eminently readable; this is the first time I've read biblical source material and found it to both be a good, compelling read and a cohesive, sensible story. This would net four- or five-stars, but Bloom's analysis is dry, rambling, repetitive. He immediately asserts that his image of "J" (author of the Yahwist texts) is a fiction, but that fiction isn't very well defended. Plus, the essay style isn't wholly effective: after reading the core text in a day, I had to keep referring back to it to figure out what Bloom was talking about. I think this would have worked better as an annotated text. ( )

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. ( )

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.