Genesis, She Wrote: What a Difference a J Makes

By Jane Mendelsohn

The Village Voice Literary Supplement, November 1990

The Book of J

Interpreted by Harold Bloom

Translated by David Rosenberg

(Grove Weidenfeld, 1990)

If, as Oscar Wilde wrote, each mode of criticism is, in its highest development simply a mood, then Harold Bloom must be the moodiest literary critic in America. From his early study of the Romantics, to his bold discussions of poetic belatedness and misprision, to his darker, more mystical applications of gnosticism and Freud, he has always been an original, treating the great works of Western literature to a taste of his highly personal style. In recent years, driven by a dread of mediocrity and a restless impatience with theoretical fashions, he has written and edited over 500 books with demonic, Ahabesque energy.

Lately, however, he’s seemed a little tired. His tone, with its bravura weakened by repetition, its hyperbole hallowed by an unmistakable malaise, has had a note of despair in it. Was he, his admirers wondered, finally slowing down? Were the consolations of literature too meager, even for him? No, not at all, judging from The Book of J, his most outrageous, most accessible work of criticism thus far; he was just in a bad mood. Reading the new book is like being around someone whose vitality rubs off on the less fortunate; you can almost see the gold dust accumulating on your hands. Never before has Bloom, so clearly and so generously, shed this much light.

The Book of J actually contains three works: David Rosenberg’s translation of those parts of the Pentateuch that have been attributed to the J Writer (most of Genesis and Exodus, parts of Numbers and Deuteronomy), Bloom’s introduction, and, following the translation, his detailed commentary. While Rosenberg has produced a superb piece of translation, it lacks, as all recent versions of the Bible do, the power of the King James; imbuing the biblical language with a playful, almost intimate voice, he succeeds in capturing a sense of authorship, removing in the process a good deal of grandeur, a loss that is easier to accept in theory than in the actual text. But in effect, Rosenberg’s work becomes a background for Bloom’s wild imagination; the book really belongs, deservedly, to Bloom and his glorious fabrication, “J.”

J is the monogram for the Yahwist, the “source” whom a trio of 19th century German scholars identified as having written the sections of the Hebrew Bible in which god is called Yahweh — as opposed to E, for the Elohist, who used variations on the term Elohim to refer to God, or P, the Priestly Author, or D, the Deuteronomist, who combined the writing of the previous three sources in what we know as the Fifth Book of Moses. Although philosophers have been questioning the sacred authorship of the Bible since Hobbes, it wasn’t until these various sources were identified that a more academic, less religious reading of the text began.

Bloom painlessly traces the complex biblical scholarship, but his interest in The Book of J is neither historical nor theological; its purely literary. Always a revisionist, he assumes the role of an art restorer, removing the layers of misreading that have accumulated over the millennia. “I want the varnish off,” he says, “because it conceals a writer of the eminence of Shakespeare of Dante, and such a writer is worth more than many creeds, many churches, many scholarly certainties.”

This writer, in Bloom’s iconoclastic imagination, turns out to be “A Gevurah (‘great lady’) of post-Solomonic court circles, herself of Davidic blood,” who began writing her great work in the 10th century B.C.E. A sophisticate who lived through the splendors and disintegration of Solomon’s literary era, she was well schooled, according to Bloom, in Near Eastern literature, which she imitated and transformed to create her own transcendent genre. She possessed comic, visionary consciousness, characterized by that uncanny irony we associate more with Kafka than with scripture. She entertained no political or religious illusions, only imaginative, literary desires. She wrote for the same reason other writers do: to capture as much life as possible. And although she created Moses, Abraham, and Yahweh himself, she had no heroes, Bloom tells us, only heroines.

Much has been said already about Bloom’s identification of J as a woman, and the superiority of the female figures in The Book of J does come across persuasively in his reading; however, it’s hardly the most original or most shocking aspect of the book. I suspect that while Bloom genuinely prefers his fiction of biblical authorship to anyone else’s, his decision to see J as a woman has to do with his larger, more radical project: to reveal the Bible as the product of one individual’s consciousness, not as Moses’s lecture notes, or as the result of some invisible, societal effort. What better way to emphasize the individuality of the author than by giving her such a distinctive biography? Never a believer in the autonomy of language, Bloom has primarily been concerned with personality and its relation to greatness in art. Through all his mood swings, from grandiosity to depression, he has attempted to bring Psyche back into reading of poetry, and Narcissus into criticism. In the book of J, he creates two unforgettable characters — Harold Bloom and J — and the result is what Wilde thought criticism should be: the only civilized form of autobiography.

Still, the question remains: Why do people find the notion of a female biblical author so surprising? Presumably because the characterizations of woman in the Bible — Eve’s irrepressible appetite, Sarah’s cruelty, Tamar’s prostitution — have emphasized weakness and shame. Yet, as Bloom’s meticulous, inventive interpretations reveal, if read without any concern for the conflict between the spirit and he flesh, but instead with an attention to irony, wordplay, and human psychology, J’s stories have nothing to do with sin. An amalgamation of fairy tale, comic strip, tragedy, and romance, the narrative that begins with the creation of man and woman and ends with the burial of Moses by Yahweh can best be described as an adventure story, a quest on the part of human beings to gain “the Blessing” and a kind of divine Star Search sponsored by Yahweh to find the appropriate recipient for his favors.

Bloom defines the Blessing — the one Jacob wrestles for, the one Moses passes on the his people — as “more life,” and he recognizes that the characters in J’s writing most naturally endowed with the gift of life with that toughness which challenges the limits of human existence, are woman:

I can begin to see in J’s matriarchs the origins of the Protestant will whose heroines dominate British and American fiction: Clarissa Harlowe, Austen’s protagonists, Hester Prynne, the moral visionaries among the women of George Eliot and Henry James.

Of course, J didn’t have to be a woman to write powerful female characters, but in recovering the heroism of J’s heroines, Bloom returns a piece of literature, like the scrap of a shroud, to women.

He does this trough close, careful readings of the text. Examining the opening episodes of Genesis, he finds an Eden in which Yahweh’s instruction not to eat from the Tree of Good and Evil turns out to be less a taboo than a piece of sound advice: “Dividing consciousness is the knowledge of death; I do not hear threat or punishment in this, but rather a statement of the reality principle, or the way things are.” Bloom reads the story as if it were a description, not an explanation. This subtle shift of emphasis enables him to turn the Fall into a fable concerning the death of childhood. Commenting on Genesis 3:22, in which Yahweh says that once his creatures possess a knowledge of good and evil there’s not much to stop them from eating from the Tree of Life, Bloom deduces that Adam and Eve must have been mortal from the very first. They had, therefore, nowhere to fall from; their expulsion from paradise, as Kafka has mentioned, was merely a preventative measure. Although Adam and Eve suffer terribly in J, their story, Bloom says, is essentially a children’s tale with an unhappy ending.

The Book of J abounds with such original, gloriously specious reasoning. Not only does Bloom reinterpret almost every major episode in the Hebrew Bible, but he hypothesizes the existence of other, long-lost fragments. Noting J’s strange omission of Abraham’s and Sarah’s deaths, he suggests that “As for Abram, the shock of Sarai’s death, added to his own anguish and subsequent joy when Isaac was spared, was probably shown by J as the cause of death.” Having repeatedly compared J to Shakespeare, bloom seems here to simply conflate the two writers. His version of Abraham’s demise appears to be transposed directly from the scene in King Lear in which Gloucester’s heart bursts “smilingly” when his son is revealed to him. At times like this, it’s as if Bloom had convinced himself that J and Shakespeare were one and the same, as if, while insisting on the individuality of the author, he really did believe in some marvelous deity of the sublime, a transmogrified genius who reappears every millennium or so…

Which brings us back to that nagging question of divinity. When I was a child, my father asked me if I believed in Santa Claus, and I said no, that he was only a fictional character, just like George Washington, the tooth fairy, and God. A little confused and prematurely skeptical, I had, at least, a gut feeling. I imagine that other people who read The Book of J will recognize some of their own childhood suppositions tossed back to them. It’s what reading a great book is supposed to feel like: alienating, majestic, and oddly familiar all at once. Certainly, The Book of J qualifies as a great book. In it, Bloom wrestles with the Angel of Literature, and walks away with the Blessing.