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The Ironical Poet's Pentateuch
| Article
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18926 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
5,200 Words |
| Author
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James Ackerman
James Ackerman is professor of religious studies at Indiana
University; author of On Teaching the Bible as Literature
(1967) and Teaching the Old Testament in English Classes
(1973); and associate editor of Literary interpretations of
Biblical Narratives (1974), among other works. |
In ancient Israel's history there was a moment of splendor, but it was short-lived. Prior or to that moment ten generations of Israelites had wandered and gradually settled, struggling to gain a foothold in their Promised Land. King Saul, surely the Bible's most tragic character, had tried to stem the Philistine advance and had failed. Everything he touched turned to dust because, from the narrator's perspective, he was Israel's chosen. And then that moment came, with David flashing into the story like a comet from Bethlehem's horizon. Everything he touched prospered because, from the narrator's perspective, he was God's chosen.
Within one generation David transformed a defeated, scattered backwoods group of tribes into the most powerful kingdom in the Middle East. During his son Solomon's rule, Jerusalem, previously a minor city off the beaten track, became a major capital, incorporating institutions, ideologies, and life-styles that theretofore had been alien. Some biblical scholars have called this age the "Solomonic enlightenment," for it produced an elite literate culture in which court wisdom flourished. Solomon's heir, Rehoboam, grew up in a protected environment, unaware of how the rapid transformation of Israelite society--urbanization, centralization, assimilation--was playing in Peoria. At Rehoboam's accession, the empire collapsed and the kingdom was divided and plunged into civil war. The moment of splendor had vanished; David's grandson was left only with the tiny tribe of Judah to rule. Jerusalem was again off the beaten path.
It is in this setting that Harold Bloom places the "J writer," acknowledged by biblical scholars as one of the four major sources of the Torah/Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy). Although there is no longer a total consensus, most scholars would still agree with Bloom that J (given that designation because it's the first initial of German Jahve or English Yahweh--the J writer's name for God) is a product of the Solomonic era and that the other three sources were gradually redacted into it over a period of some five hundred years.
The prevailing assumption is that J--the earliest source--is the final crystallization of a long process of oral tradition. J is thus not so much an author as a preserver of Israel's ancient heritage. Furthermore, biblical scholars sometimes speak of J as a scribal school that wrote and developed the J tradition over a long period of time. Finally, we have always thought that the J narrative was ultimately rooted in Israel's pre-monarchical sacred covenant traditions. Bloom gives us another J: (a) a single great writer equaled in stature only by
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