Monday, July 27, 2015

Book of J

Book of J Written by Harold Bloom is a very good book and you should buy it. Hardcover 1¢.

The book has a new translation of the J material by David Rosenberg, one-time editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society. Rosenberg's translation adheres to the voice of straightforward rigorous raw Hebrew without any of the stylistic slathering of King James version that makes it so adorabe but homogenizes stark differences in voices that are apparent in Hebrew.

There are a few problems with Rosenberg's translation of all that J material, other translators and biblical scholars have noticed. Sometimes it just doesn't work. The goal: convey the idea you see there in Hebrew into English. (Gen. 27:36 "Was he named Jacob, heel-clutcher ... that he might jaywalk behind me, twice?" What is Rosenberg thinking? Come on. Earlier another example falls flat, Gen. 3:20 "No, he said, now, your sides split, count on it." Another example of dodgy translation is Rosenberg's description of Leah's eyes. The Book of J translation "excuisite," however the KJV that we know, "tender-eyed," and NEB translation, "dull-eyed" and way back to Septuagint, "sickly" eyes. 

Other than those picayune details, the story is rousing and progresses at a satisfying clip. You had all this material before, in chunks and spread around, all familiar episodes, all very odd happenings each with their own separate moral to be analyzed religiously with something brilliant extracted from each, but you haven't seen them strung together like this coherently with its own unifying theme of passing the blessing through all these strange occurrences through all these off people and their various foibles, by the cleverness of biblical women, while the patriarchs are bumbling around. 

The real wonder of the Book of J is Bloom's introduction and his commentary. Bloom is entertaining to read. He knows his proposal is outrageous and must be rejected, Bloom's assault on Western tradition too great to go unchallenged. He predicts them and counters their objections. Bloom bases his thesis on Rosenberg's new translation. This comprises one hundred pages and tells the story of the passing of the blessing from generation to generation. Stitching together all of the passages lifted from biblical text referring to God as Jahweh (J) or Yahweh, the stories around them, and including the spare bits written in this same tone, this same identifiable voice, the digging sarcastic use of puns. We know such collected works as bits and pieces of one larger nearly incomprehensible and contradictory collection of books, ancients knew them as separate scrolls. Scholars look at the scrolls with these characteristics independently and consider the whole lot in the same style, using the same language the same way consistently to be the work of an author that they refer to as J.

This is distinct from another author, another voice, who refers to God with the plural Elohim. Those passages and their like are attributed to E.  

J refers to Elohim too but only as angels and not as God. 

Scholars of biblical text hear another distinct voice, the work of a priest contributor who wrote Leviticus and who they refer to as P.

Also D for the author of Deuteronomy. 

Finally, and this is where so many reviews by knowledgeable authors break down, R for redactor, a group it is believed, who re-collected, reassembled, reworked all of that previous collected wisdom of ages into a national identity that can be rallied, one to be proud of, one with relevance, a real reason for being with a solid history to be proud of. Following Babylonian slavery, enter the dreaded redactors who collectively and wisely for their precise time, rewrote their history to be more glorious with King David receiving particular attention. Deeds of various characters are syncretized into the character of David, the redactors being not 100% tidy over bundles of scrolls left trails of their deeds by omitting crucial changes of name here and there thus we see tidbits of another person with another name who faced the goliath and not David for one particular instance. It was of crucial importance  for the redactors to make a national hero of David. 

From David, the glory of Solomon's reign followed by his son Rehoboam whose reign experienced shrinking of the kingdom and of prestige. Members of the court would be unpleased with what they saw happening around them due to the leadership of a king less qualified than his father. It is believed the writing of J takes place during this period due the number of crass puns. The base reading of Hebrew allows puns on "shrink" and the name Rehoboam, "Oh how great thou art, how expansive thou art, oh Rehoboam, oh Rehoboam." Driving that point repeatedly when the kingdom is actually shrinking dramatically, the cedars of Lebanon no longer available, international trade diminishing considerably to nearly nothing, wealth and the flow of wealth decreasing worryingly. The voice seems peculiarly feminine, the use of language feminine, the caginess feminine, all the heroes and quick witted characters are women and all the biblical patriarchs are bumbling fools. Even God can be argued with, bargaining down for a search for one righteous person in a sinful city before he destroys it. God's actions are irrational, he acts on his whim. God creates Adam by playing with mud pies as children do and slaps Adam together patty-cake patty-cake quick as you can, in his image, then spends a good deal of time with creating a superior creature of Eve. The entire Eden episode is not so much eating of the fruit of knowledge, nor the tree of life, rather to show how disproportionate God's punishment and how irrational the chief patriarch. The original J is not a particularly religious work.  

The women react to events as given and by superior wit and guile and willingness to do whatever it takes they control the passing of blessing of God from son to son to son. A patriarch is tricked because the favored brother was hairy and the patriarch blind. The blessing traded by a brother for a bowl of soup for examples. 

Why do the critiques of the literary critique of Harold Bloom's Book of J go wrong at the point of discussing J the author in Rehoboam era and having lived the Solomon court and experienced the immediacy of David's nation-building heroism? Each scholar knows it all redacted but slip in critiquing  J the original as if she were writing from un-redacted space. David is myth. He's been redacted. A member of Solomon's and of Rehoboam's court would have known the real David and not the redacted David. Critiques of J must consider redacted David and Solomon and Rehoboam and J.



9 comments:

Methadras said...

Obama and Kerry should have this made mandatory reading for them who he do that to.

Trooper York said...

I think he was a Hossaroni. Just sayn'

ricpic said...

The Hebrew God is angry.

The Christian God is loving.

I mean c'mon, no contest.....if you're a realist that is.

bagoh20 said...

The Atheist God is satisfied. Things are going exactly as expected.

bagoh20 said...

The Agnostic God is excited. What will happen next?

bagoh20 said...

This is why I'm an agnostic.

Fr Martin Fox said...

Ricpic:

"The Hebrew God is angry. The Christian God is loving. I mean c'mon, no contest.....if you're a realist that is."

I disagree. Yes, that's the conventional view, but I think it results from the Hebrew milieu being far more remote to us than that of the New Testament (written in Greek), as well as a very different setting. Bad translations don't help.

Many people badly misunderstand the Bible because they think it's more accessible than it really is. Just translating it into English isn't enough; one might even say it worsens the problem, because it gives the appearance of greater accessibility than there is.

Fr Martin Fox said...

Chip:

You continually amaze me with your wide range of interests.

I haven't seen this book, but for what it's worth, I'm one of those who doesn't buy the "JEPD" hypothesis about the authorship of the Penteteuch. While the multiple-source theory tends to be more widely held, it's not universally held. I think there's an obvious flaw in the theory that no one has ever really explained.

The theory goes like this: We find unevenness in the text (of, say, Genesis), and we wonder why; we propose that the unevenness is the result of materials from different sources (dubbed "J," "E," "P" and "D") being stitched together by a "redactor" (i.e., an editor).

Problem: this doesn't really explain anything; because what it does is replace a sloppy writer with a sloppy editor. Why didn't the "redactor" notice the unevenness which the proposers of this hypothesis hang their hats on? The books of the Bible weren't cobbled together like a term paper late in the semester; these were labors of love, crafted with great care and creativity.

And all this begs the question: maybe the "unevenness" isn't accidental, but deliberate?

For example: a big part of the JEPD theory rests on someone noticing that in some parts of the Penteteuch, God is called "JHWH," and elsewhere, "Elohim" (hence "J" and "E"). The assumption is that this is evidence of two different works being stitched together. But it might also be evidence of one author/editor choosing to call God by a different name for deliberate reasons -- perhaps related to the context in which this choice is made. The two names have different connotations. Why is it so baffling to consider that one author might have good reason to use one this time, and the other, another time?

To put it another way: if the so-called unevenness can be explained without recourse to multiple authors, then there's no need for the hypothesis. Occam's Law.

Fr Martin Fox said...

And, by the way, I do know it's spelled Pentateuch, sorry.