the J author (was: Babel)

Herbert Stahlke hstahlke at WORLDNET.ATT.NET
Fri Nov 8 02:25:49 UTC 2002


I wonder how Bloom would respond to the work of Richard Davies (In Search of
Ancient Israel) and others of what has come to be called the Minimalist
School.  This group holds that there is no evidence, archeological or
documentary, outside the Hebrew Bible for a Davidic kingdom or for most of
the historical claims of the HB. Rather than a documentary hypothesis going
back perhaps 8 to 10 centuries before the Hasmonean Dynasty.  The
Minimalists claim that in the post-Babylonian period schools of Judaism
produced the HB.  Different schools may have sharee some of the ideologies
of the authors assumed under the documentary hypothesis, but the schools
don't line up closely with JEDP.  The Minimalists claim that the HB was
written between about 400 and 100 and did not report but rather created a
history out of which a nation could form.  It's pretty obvious what some of
the controversy over the Minimalist Hypothesis is about.  It's safe to say
that the field of biblical scholarship is deeply divided over Minimalist
claims.  However, the Minimalists pretty much moot the question of J's
gender since there would likely have been no J.

Herb Stahlke

> At 4:55 PM -0500 11/7/02, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
> >I've never heard this authorship story.  Enlighten us!  (Off-topic, I
know.
> >. . .)
>
> Harold Bloom, author, editor, and literary critic par excellence (and
> a member of the Yale faculty since time immemorial) has been arguing
> since the publication of _The Book of J_ (Grove Wiedenfeld, 1990)
> that the "J author", generally credited with writing most of the
> interesting parts of the Old Testament, including the best parts of
> the Torah (first five books), was a woman in the court of David in
> the 10th c. BC(E).  Whence Jim's "her" and "the woman who" below, I
> assume.  Bloom's move was, to put it mildly, not well received by
> traditional Biblical scholars.  Of course for Bloom these traditional
> scholars are heirs to the heritage of the "P" writer (or priestly
> redactor), i.e. the bad guy, the anti-poet.  Some see Bloom as
> attempting to disarm the legions of his feminist critics; if so, it
> didn't work.  (I sat in on a faculty seminar he gave here before the
> book was published, when he was presenting material that he ended up
> publishing as _Ruin the Sacred Truths_ (1989) and he was quite
> consistent in his references to the J author as "she" at the time.
> But maybe he was just practicing.)
>
> larry
>
> >At 02:32 PM 11/7/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >>At 2:26 PM -0500 11/7/02, James A. Landau wrote:
> >>>
> >>>Note that Abraham is supposed to have come from "Ur of the
> >>>Chaldees" which is
> >>>in Babylonia.  Also J (the woman who wrote the Adam and Eve story) when
> >>>mentioning the four rivers of Eden, feels the need to describe three of
them
> >>>but assumes her audience knows what the Euphrates is.
> >>
> >>Ah, Jim is a (Harold) Bloomian!  I wonder how many others he's
> >>convinced about J's true identity.
> >>
> >>larry
>



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