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(23) The Book of J is a translation by David Rosenberg of selected parts of the Torah, accompanied by analysis and commentary by Harold Bloom. The generally accepted theory of Torah authorship, if you're unaware, is that the Torah is a compilation of several texts, referred to as the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly sources, spliced together (often line-by-line) by the Redactor. The Deuteronomist source is confined to the Book of Deuteronomy, the Priestly source appears in Genesis and Exodus but mostly Leviticus, and the Elohist is found in Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers. Bloom and Rosenberg are concerned solely with the Jahwist source, which appears throughout Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers and is more or less the narrative parts of the Torah—the stories of Adam's rib and Noah's ark, Jacob and Esau and Rachel and Leah, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, etc—not the lists of laws and genealogies and the construction details of the Ark of the Covenant.
Bloom theorizes that the Jahwist author, identified as J, is a woman who was part of the court of Rehoboam, son of Solomon and king of Judah. His strongest argument for J's gender is that J's female characters are much more often without flaw than J's male characters, which is hardly solid evidence, but there isn't exactly solid evidence for J being male either.
Bloom is very fond of comparing J and J's characters with Shakespeare and Shakespeare's characters. For example, neither J nor Shakespeare is overly concerned with separating fable from history. Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485 by John Julius Norwich goes into great detail on how Shakespeare alters history to suit his dramatic purposes; how much of what J describes is historical truth is harder to determine, because J wrote at least a few hundred years after the latest events she describes and J is the earliest of the Torah sources, but only so much of her narrative is compliant with the laws of physics. And the King James Bible and Shakespeare's plays are without doubt the greatest influences on English literature; Bloom contends that J is such a superb author that her work, even if stripped of the reverence with which the Jewish, Christian, and Christian-influenced worlds treat the Torah, would retain that position alongside Shakespeare. (He says nothing about whether the rest of the Bible would be up there too, but he does not in this book care about anything past the end of Numbers that doesn't relate to his theories about who J was and who she was influenced by, he mentions several times that the Elohist source seems to be a revision of the Jahwist, and as for the Priestly and Deuteronomist—the legal code of a society is important, yes, but great literature? Not so much.)
If you're interested enough in the Torah to care about who wrote it, this is a must-read; ditto if you're interested in the history of Western literature.
Bloom theorizes that the Jahwist author, identified as J, is a woman who was part of the court of Rehoboam, son of Solomon and king of Judah. His strongest argument for J's gender is that J's female characters are much more often without flaw than J's male characters, which is hardly solid evidence, but there isn't exactly solid evidence for J being male either.
Bloom is very fond of comparing J and J's characters with Shakespeare and Shakespeare's characters. For example, neither J nor Shakespeare is overly concerned with separating fable from history. Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485 by John Julius Norwich goes into great detail on how Shakespeare alters history to suit his dramatic purposes; how much of what J describes is historical truth is harder to determine, because J wrote at least a few hundred years after the latest events she describes and J is the earliest of the Torah sources, but only so much of her narrative is compliant with the laws of physics. And the King James Bible and Shakespeare's plays are without doubt the greatest influences on English literature; Bloom contends that J is such a superb author that her work, even if stripped of the reverence with which the Jewish, Christian, and Christian-influenced worlds treat the Torah, would retain that position alongside Shakespeare. (He says nothing about whether the rest of the Bible would be up there too, but he does not in this book care about anything past the end of Numbers that doesn't relate to his theories about who J was and who she was influenced by, he mentions several times that the Elohist source seems to be a revision of the Jahwist, and as for the Priestly and Deuteronomist—the legal code of a society is important, yes, but great literature? Not so much.)
If you're interested enough in the Torah to care about who wrote it, this is a must-read; ditto if you're interested in the history of Western literature.