I. Richard Elliott Friedman: The Hidden Book in the Bible
Long accepted by Bible scholars, the Documentary Hypothesis states that many of the books of the Old Testament are not the product of single writers working on their own, but rather came about through the efforts of editors who compiled previously written documents into the final "books" as we have them. Thus the book of Genesis as we have it was not written by one writer, but is instead a compilation of the work of different writers writing at different times and with somewhat different concerns. These earlier texts were later stitched together by editors to make up one more or less consistent text: the book of Genesis in its current form.
Of the various writers edited together to make up Genesis, Exodus and
Numbers, the most vibrant and interesting is also one of the earliest: the J
writer.
In The Hidden Book in the Bible, Richard Elliott Friedman
proposes a radical revision of our notion of the J writer's work. Friedman suggests a bold revision of the
Documentary Hypothesis, a boldness that in part lies in his mode of presentation. Rather than a scholarly work written
for peers, in which arguments are laid out in rigorous detail, The Hidden
Book in the Bible
is more a summary of Friedman's case prepared for the general reader. Friedman has opted for a directness of
argument rare in a field as burdened by history as biblical studies.
Writing sometime between
the eighth and tenth centuries BCE, the J writer produced the foundational
strand of the Bible: the strong narrative text onto which other texts were
subsequently grafted by editors. The fateful importance of the J writer's work cannot be
overstated. The books that brought
forth the three great "religions of the Book"--i.e. Judaism,
Christianity and Islam--may never have been written were it not for the uncanny
power of J. Many of the best-known
stories from the Old Testament come from J: Adam and Eve in the Garden, the
Tower of Babel, the tale of Jacob and Esau, the tale of Joseph and his brothers.
It was most likely J who set the
biblical ball rolling, editors later splicing and cutting and adding things around
J in order to fill in, mute or channel this brilliant writer's power.
Over centuries of editorial cutting and
stitching, J's original work came to be broken up and spread across three
biblical books: Genesis, Exodus and Numbers. This at least is the traditional understanding. But have we really seen J clearly? Or is it possibly the case that our
perceptions have been trammeled by the work of the German scholars that
discovered J?
Given the ingenuity of the editors that finally
stitched together what came to be the initial books of the Bible, it is sometimes
difficult to identify which textual strands belong to J and which do not. Certainly large sections of Genesis,
Exodus and Numbers are part of J: this has been scholarly consensus from the
beginning. But is any of
Deuteronomy by the J writer? Does
J extend beyond Numbers? These
questions continue to be debated.
Friedman's radical proposal in The Hidden
Book in the Bible
is that J's work extends much further than previously thought. Friedman claims to have discerned the
outline of a lengthy prose work that begins in Genesis and ends in 1 Kings. If
Friedman is right, it would be a discovery indeed. His tone throughout suggests the elation of one who has made
a major breakthrough. In his first
sentences he throws down the gauntlet as follows:
A great work lies embedded in the Bible, a creation
that we can trace to a single author.
And I believe that we can establish that it is of great antiquity: it
was composed nearly three thousand years ago--so it is indeed nothing less than
the first work of prose. Call it
the first novel if you think it is fiction, or the first history if you think
it is factual. Actually, it is a
merger of both. But, either way,
it is the first. There is no long
work of prose before this anywhere on earth, East or West, so far as I
know. We know of poetry that is
earlier, but this is the oldest prose literature: a long, beautiful, exciting
story. And the astonishing thing
is that, even though it is the earliest lengthy prose composition known to us,
it is far from a rudimentary, primitive first attempt at writing. It has the qualities we find in the
greatest literature the world has produced. Indeed, scholars of the Bible and of comparative literature
have compared individual parts of it to Shakespeare and to Homer. Those scholars were right, but they were
barely at the threshold of the full work, a composition whose unity and
brilliant connections have been hidden by the editorial and canonical process
that produced the Bible.
Friedman gives this newly discerned work the
title In the Day,
following the ancient Semitic practice of titling works according to their
first words. (The text opens:
"In the day that YHWH made earth and skies. . .") In doing so he is clearly trying to underscore
both his perception of the literary unity of the work and his confidence at
having radically modified the earlier vision of the J text. Otherwise he might have simply
continued to call this work "J," for it is in the main an emended
edition of J that he is offering.
Along with a clear explanation of the reasons
for his beliefs about In the Day, Friedman's book contains a complete translation of
the text as he identifies it, as well as notes and appendices giving some of
the philological grounds for his thesis.
The book also contains a list of all the biblical passages Friedman
judges to be part of In the Day. (I have
used Friedman's list of passages to compile an edition of In the Day in the King James translation:
see below.)
An internet search should reveal something of
the state of debate on Friedman's thesis.
As of this writing I note that many Bible scholars respectfully disagree
that J extends all the way into 1 Kings.
In my own view, Friedman's contribution does not
necessarily stand or fall on the complete acceptance of all aspects of his
thesis. Whether or not Friedman is
right that In the Day represents a single, unified work by one author, he has
accomplished much by localizing what at the very least must be considered a
tradition of writing "in the J manner." Even skeptics will acknowledge, given the linguistic and
other evidence, that we are dealing with a group of texts that are connected by
style and language. Friedman
offers us a new and more complete outline of these texts.
One possibility that has not been adequately
addressed here is that the texts Friedman has gathered might be the work of one
writer, but may belong to distinct works by that writer, perhaps written at
different periods of his or her life: perhaps several different works. Friedman briefly raises the possibility
that In the Day
might originally have been two distinct works by the J writer, but how can we be sure
this division into two is going far enough?
What, after all, was the idea of the work--specifically of the work's
unity--according to the writers who composed the texts that make up the
Pentateuch? We can develop our
notions of what the editors thought about literary unity because we have their
productions intact in Genesis, Exodus, and so on. But how can we know what the J writer thought of literary
unity at the level of the work?
The J text has been broken up, perhaps greatly expurgated, and spread
across a handful of biblical books.
Was this J text initially a unified work, as Friedman suggests, or
various distinct prose works written on different themes? How can we know one way or another?
Friedman himself points out how modern novelists
(his examples are Hesse and Kundera) will often return to the same themes and
motifs in novel after novel. Is it
not possible that many of the narrative parallels Friedman finds across In
the Day are
examples of the J writer trying, say, in a later work something that had worked
well in an earlier one? And isn't
it possible that this later work was written a dozen or more years later? And that these were not the only
"works" by the writer in question that were finally used in the
compilation of our current Bible?
Friedman points out that the J text as it has
traditionally been understood already has cases of narrative parallels within
it (thus Jacob meets Rachel at a well and Moses meets Zipporah at a well). But this perhaps simply suggests that
the J text as it was traditionally understood is already made up of pieces taken from
distinct works.
To summarize: How can we be sure that In the
Day is not a
kind of anthology of some of the best writing taken from a handful of works by
the J writer? It's obvious that
the editors did not respect the J writer's sense of literary unity. They had their own notions of unity as
they put together what came to be the first books of the Bible. But where did the editors respect J's
unity and where did they ignore it?
Or rather: To what extent did they respect it? How much of the total of what the J writer wrote was
retained by the editors? These
questions seem unanswerable, and thus the question of the literary unity of In
the Day must
remain equally open.
II. Harold Bloom: The Book of J
For those interested in J, another book well
worth reading is Harold Bloom's The Book of J. Bloom's work presents a more traditionally delineated J, but
his ideas regarding J are anything but traditional. Bloom is not a Bible scholar, but a literary critic. His
skills as a reader and critic bring out many aspects of J that might otherwise
have gone unremarked.
Bloom doesn't see the J
writer intending to write "scripture" as most would understand that
term. Instead he reads J as a
writer out to portray the inevitable perils of man's relations with a deity
both unpredictable and impish.
This impish god, in Bloom's reading, is to a great degree J's
creation. Yahweh is thus
understood here as a literary character in a masterful literary text, and the J
writer (a point on which Friedman and others agree) is a master prose stylist.
Many have resisted Bloom's reading, often on
grounds that it dares to find irony and humor in some of the most important
stories of the Bible. But such
resistance ignores the irony of our position here beneath the gods, or
God. The irony that Bloom finds in
J is the irony of incommensurability, the strong irony that arises when
characters of immensely different stature must negotiate with each other, must
find their way in the face of the other's difference. There is no possibility of doubting that this is a fruitful
way of approaching the stories of the first books of the Bible.
According to Bloom, the J writer did not treat Yahweh
strictly as a being to be held in awe and worshipped. J's Yahweh is certainly not the transcendent God later
worshipped by Christians and Jews.
Rather, Bloom finds in J's Yahweh a sublime trickster: a God
characterized by unwieldy power and an inconsistent temper. Yahweh is more like Zeus, Hermes and
Poseidon (or all three combined) than he is like the later God the monotheistic
religions made him into.
Many of Bloom's readings are compelling; certain
of them are overstated, or repeatedly stated, as is often the case with this
writer's work. But Bloom's book is
everywhere worth reading, and contains a new translation of J by David
Rosenberg.
(Incidentally one of Bloom's more striking
theses is that the J writer was most likely a woman. In The Hidden Book in the Bible Friedman chides Bloom for
stealing this idea from an earlier work of his, Who Wrote the Bible?, where Friedman himself
suggested the possibility that a woman wrote the J text.)
III. A King James version of In the Day
The following text represents all the verses
identified by Friedman as part of In the Day. Though I originally compiled it mainly in order to read a
King James version of the "work" myself, I've decided to make it
available online to others. As
stated above, Friedman's book contains a complete translation of In the Day into modern English. My own concern, however, was to see how
the text read in my favorite translation: the King James.
This King James version is certainly not meant
to replace Friedman's book, and could not in any case. Friedman's book offers an explanation
and defense of his discovery and a reading of the unity of In the Day as he sees it. Only around half of his book is taken
up by the text of In the Day itself.
On this King James version:
1) The text is divided into two
files: file A contains roughly the J text as it has been understood
traditionally; file B contains the additional material that Friedman suggests
is also part of the text.
2) I have occasionally allowed
pieces of non-J material into the text.
These are always surrounded by brackets: [ ]. The non-J material is kept to an absolute minimum (certainly
less than three percent of the text).
I've only allowed them in when I felt they were necessary to provide some
explanation.
3) I have divided the text into
numbered "paragraphs" or blocks that correspond to my sense of the
movement of the narrative.
4) Breaks in the standard
biblical text are indicated by an asterisk: * . For example, Friedman judges Exodus 3:5 to be part of J as
well as Exodus 3:7-8. But Exodus
3:6 is not part of J and thus is not included: its absence is indicated by an
asterisk.
5) My parentheses occasionally
indicate brief commentary (as in Friedman) and very occasionally indicate an editorial
clarification.
(Note: I've noticed that Friedman's modern
English translation doesn't include Genesis 36: 31-39, although he lists these
verses as part of In the Day in his table of verses. Does he leave these verses out because they are in the form
of a genealogical list?)
Eric Mader
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Check
Friedman's book at Amazon.com
Check
Bloom's book at Amazon.com
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