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The Human Form Divine
| Article
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18925 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
2,993 Words |
| Author
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David Damrosch
David Damrosch teaches comparative literature at Columbia
University and is the author of The Narrative Covenant:
Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature,
which is being reissued in paperback this spring. |
In The Book of J, Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg make a powerful case for a paradoxical claim: that we can best understand the essence of biblical narrative by setting most of it aside. They translate and discuss the earliest major strand of biblical narrative, the so-called Yahwistic or J material, and find in this source the essence of the Bible's power. In their view, this power has long been overlaid and even muffled by the ensuing centuries of Jewish and Christian additions, revisions, and interpretations. In Bloom's provocative commentary, the author of The Book of J is revealed--or created--as an ironic, secular poet of the highest order, at once more archaic than the ancients and more modern than Kafka. This author is also a woman, and her book has no heroes, including God himself, but only heroines.
Remarkable claims! They are so striking, indeed, that they may distract us from the real importance of the project as a whole. Above and beyond the particulars of interpretation, Rosenberg and Bloom have done us an immense service in bringing the Yahwistic material together in a coherent whole. For the first time, this material can readily be read consecutively, freed from the later additions by which it is surrounded in the canonical text: the long narrative, legal, and cultic passages added over the centuries by the later writers known to scholars as Elohists, Deuteronomists, Priestly writers, and final Redactors.
The Torah (or Pentateuch) as we have it is really a polyphony of differing voices. This polyphony is rich indeed, even when an individual voice seems a little dry, as is usually the case--for example, in Leviticus. Even so, there is a particular pleasure in separating out the Yahwistic material, which contains not only many of the best stories in Genesis and Exodus but also our fullest picture of early Hebrew life. For the past two hundred years, biblical scholars have devoted countless hours to identifying the separate strands of biblical narrative, and yet, until Bloom and Rosenberg, literary studies have only rarely taken advantage of this information.
In part, this is because the biblical scholars themselves have tended to play down or even ignore the literary power of the separate materials they have explored. Interested instead in reconstructing the religious, political, or social facts "behind" the text before us, they have often scanted the literary effects employed in the telling of the tales. For the historians, in fact, the cruder the Yahwist or Yahwists might be, the better: all the closer to the primitive origins of early Israelite religion and
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