Adam's original company?

[GrandizerII]

there are multiple relevant layers here that do need to be considered when having this debate.

Bloom was an immensely erudite reader, who had a number of eccentric ideas. He never argues for something for ideological reasons, however -- everything comes from the text, and the texts that came before.

We don't have to accept all of his conclusions to benefit from his musings. For example, he argues throughout his book that J was a woman. He has no extra-textual evidence for this, so I see no reason to accept it as is. But he gives a number of interesting reasons why he thinks so, and reading them enriches our own reading of the text. 

Obviously, he does read J's God as being an anthropomorphic entity. Sometimes more than others. Though he argues that what J is really doing is giving a theomorphic depiction of humans, especially David. 

Bloom is a literature guy and not a theology guy. But one of the lessons of literature is also important for dealing with important writers like J. Authors may be inconsistent, they may write things that are puzzling, and they may leave us unsatisfied as to what it all means. There is a tendency among some atheists to imagine that if God inspired a sacred book, he would do it in a straightforward way with no puzzles. This is imagining that God wants to write a science book instead of literature. I see no reason why this must be so. Since I am neither omnipotent nor omniscient I can't say what kind of book such an entity would leave us. But if we take J's work as literature then the puzzles and inconsistencies are a part of its value and richness, and don't mean that we can just dismiss it. I mean, we CAN dismiss it if we want -- just as we can dismiss Dante and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky if we want. But that would be our loss.

No one here (except maybe the OP) is dismissing the Bible as literature. Rather, the argument by Angrboda and others is that it’s likely J treated God as an anthropomorphic being, while other sources treated him in a more abstract sense. You appear to agree this is obviously so, albeit with nuances that need to be considered.

If you mean in general, sure some atheists don’t enjoy the Bible as literature. And frankly, I don’t blame them for doing so. Much of the Old Testament, after all, is hard for a modern day reader to relate to and the reading can get tedious.

Interestingly, J is a core reason people do find many of the passages in the Bible to be engaging read. So yes, J is a proficient storyteller. But they were not trying to puzzling by design (or at least that’s not how their works read to me). As far as I’m concerned, they were just writing down the lore that the Judahites would have already been familiar as oral traditions. It becomes deeper reading once the Compiler comes into the picture, doing the final editing and merging with other works. For the most part, it is then that you see puzzling passages and tensions throughout the Torah (and subsequently the rest of the Tanakh).

[Belacqua]

Rather, the argument by Angrboda and others is that it’s likely J treated God as an anthropomorphic being, while other sources treated him in a more abstract sense. You appear to agree this is obviously so, albeit with nuances that need to be considered.

Yeah, there's no question that J presents God as anthropomorphically. To what extent he saw this as literally true, and to what extent it's a literary device is something that people have debated.

they were just writing down the lore that the Judahites would have already been familiar as oral traditions.

I think we don't want to go overboard with this theory. I see no reason to think that J was merely going around writing down oral traditions. Like he'd go to a small town and say "Hey, got any stories for me?" The image of him as some kind of ancient Hebrew Alan Lomax doesn't seem likely.

It seems much more likely to me that he had a goal in mind. A writer may assemble older narratives, editing and arranging, with the purpose of proving some theory or creating some meaningful message about history. We don't know which stories he left out, after all. There is enough of a through-line to his work that some strong Hebrew readers (less eccentric than Bloom) have offered serious suggestions about what he wanted. 

The later redactors are likely to have mixed up J's message, or to have blunted it with portions that he would have found distracting. But that doesn't mean he didn't have a goal in mind when he was writing. Most writers do, and ancient writers tended to be propagandists.

[GrandizerII]

Rather, the argument by Angrboda and others is that it’s likely J treated God as an anthropomorphic being, while other sources treated him in a more abstract sense. You appear to agree this is obviously so, albeit with nuances that need to be considered.

Yeah, there's no question that J presents God as anthropomorphically. To what extent he saw this as literally true, and to what extent it's a literary device is something that people have debated.

they were just writing down the lore that the Judahites would have already been familiar as oral traditions.

I think we don't want to go overboard with this theory. I see no reason to think that J was merely going around writing down oral traditions. Like he'd go to a small town and say "Hey, got any stories for me?" The image of him as some kind of ancient Hebrew Alan Lomax doesn't seem likely.

It seems much more likely to me that he had a goal in mind. A writer may assemble older narratives, editing and arranging, with the purpose of proving some theory or creating some meaningful message about history. We don't know which stories he left out, after all. There is enough of a through-line to his work that some strong Hebrew readers (less eccentric than Bloom) have offered serious suggestions about what he wanted. 

The later redactors are likely to have mixed up J's message, or to have blunted it with portions that he would have found distracting. But that doesn't mean he didn't have a goal in mind when he was writing. Most writers do, and ancient writers tended to be propagandists.

True, that “just” was unwarranted. I agree he/she/they didn’t just collect but wrote with purpose.

I am curious now why Bloom believes J is a woman, let alone one individual, so looking that one up now.

[The Grand Nudger]

The authors of j weren't as embarrassed by anthropomorphic deities as Bel is. It was normal. It would not have been the case, then, as it is today to Bel, that a person telling such a story was seen to be telling a more ignorant or simpler story. None of this matters very much to whether we can understand exactly the sort of embarrassing, more ignorant, and simpler story j wanted to tell..because just like p, it's the redactors who shaped our current apprehension through their selection of each communities stories as a later foundational myth...which people also..then (and still now) believe. We can only wonder why those redactors felt they could not jettison either source. Why they felt the need to include side by sides and analog passages that differed not just in style, but in content and detail. Should we repeat this exercise and wonder whether they might just be book fans? That it's not that they were compelled by a genuine belief in the contents that they made such a decision.

[Belacqua]

I am curious now why Bloom believes J is a woman, let alone one individual, so looking that one up now.

I don't think his reason is particularly persuasive, but it is interesting. 

Mainly he thinks J is female because the female characters in J's writing are depicted with more respect and more nuance than is usual for that era. It's something I wouldn't have thought of on my own, so it's a fun thing to keep in mind. 

Bloom has further decided that J was a woman, first arguing playfully that this assumption is no more and no less a fiction than the assumption that J was a man, and then, more positively, by adducing evidence for her feminine preferences. Thus J's most striking characters are women; her males are often childish. Even her Yahweh behaves like a headstrong, petulant boy, and is treated with a maternal indulgence tempered by irony. This hypothesis is advanced with the learning and ingenuity, the charm and the cheek, that characterize Bloom at his brilliant best. I can only hope that it will not cause such a stir that the rest of this fascinating book gets inadequate attention.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes....oom-j.html

[The Grand Nudger]

Good lord. Far from any dispute between conservative and secular views....this is a fantasists view of an author in a court that never was.

[GrandizerII]

I am curious now why Bloom believes J is a woman, let alone one individual, so looking that one up now.

I don't think his reason is particularly persuasive, but it is interesting. 

Mainly he thinks J is female because the female characters in J's writing are depicted with more respect and more nuance than is usual for that era. It's something I wouldn't have thought of on my own, so it's a fun thing to keep in mind. 

Bloom has further decided that J was a woman, first arguing playfully that this assumption is no more and no less a fiction than the assumption that J was a man, and then, more positively, by adducing evidence for her feminine preferences. Thus J's most striking characters are women; her males are often childish. Even her Yahweh behaves like a headstrong, petulant boy, and is treated with a maternal indulgence tempered by irony. This hypothesis is advanced with the learning and ingenuity, the charm and the cheek, that characterize Bloom at his brilliant best. I can only hope that it will not cause such a stir that the rest of this fascinating book gets inadequate attention.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes....oom-j.html

Interesting. It’s possible, but too speculative. Though maybe not as much as that other author who was of the belief that J had sexual relations with S (the author of Samuel).

I personally don’t think J was just one person. And although they wrote with an agenda in mind, taking some liberty with the stories to suit their narrative, I think ascertaining whether they themselves believed these stories to be 100% literally true is not possible. I suspect they believed these stories to contain “historical” truths but with some caveats.

This is why I advised earlier to think about the multiple layers here. Because often times, when people are asking if the authors of Genesis believed these stories to be literally true, they are really asking if these stories were initially intended to be true when they were first told, before J (and E and whoever else) ever put them down in writing. I think the answer is almost definitely yes. As for J, who knows to what extent.

The Compiler, on the other hand, shows strong investment in telling the full story by preserving various works and putting them all together with all the editing needed. But they didn’t seem too concerned about the kinds of things we here tend to have debates about. Their goals were more to clarify who the people of Israel are, and the God that they are to worship, to emphasise the following of that God’s law, to remind them of their past sins and inspire them to be righteous for a prosperous future. Their edits were often more to address serious theological tensions or to do some prophetic apologetics rather than to fix contradictions that they would’ve been able to just reframe with further priestly teaching (if they even cared to).

[Belacqua]

maybe not as much as that other author who was of the belief that J had sexual relations with S (the author of Samuel).

Wow, I'd never heard this one. Some people have really detailed imaginations. 

And I agree with you that Bloom's theory is extremely speculative. I doubt that any serious person has read his book and said, "OK, I'm convinced." 

Maybe what he's doing is nothing like modern historical analysis. But it does resemble what a number of the Bible's authors were doing. They take sketchy historical tales, maybe written with political intent and maybe not, and imaginatively fill in the gaps. Then if their retelling is persuasive enough their version becomes the official narrative. Bloom often wrote about "strong poets" whose work manages to change the work of writers who came before -- for example, people who read the Bible in English after Milton read it in a different way than people who read it before. Bloom's depiction of J isn't this strong, but by adding this narrative to our collective interpretive tool-kit he has enriched our reading. If he attempted to teach about J by acting like J, this would be in keeping with methods that he perceived in other writers. 

He thinks that the contradictions in the Hebrew Bible tell us something important about the unknowability of God, and that this was intentional on the part of at least some of the authors. But it may be that this is a post-Blake reading, and wouldn't have occurred to ancient Hebrews. I don't know. 

Also we should keep in mind that like all of the really good critics he had a deep grasp of the varieties of literary irony -- of saying something important in words that appear to mean something else. I wouldn't be surprised if -- feet to the fire -- he would admit that his theory isn't meant to be taken altogether literally. 

You are certainly correct about layers, and about how narratives may be put to different uses when presented differently, even if the words are substantially unchanged. 

I always say that the Bible is a great book in large part because of all the things that have been said about it after it was written. It is the text plus Origen, plus Augustine, plus Dürer's woodcuts, plus many more. We can't read the Bible in ignorance of those things (even though the fundamentalists try, they can't). So the layers become crucial to the story, and a large part of the fun.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's not "extremely speculative" - it's fantasy fiction. There was no court of king solomon for a secular female author in the tenth century bce to have been writing in. This is da vinci code level shit Bel. Do we need to read da vinci code to understand magic book? The authors of magic book wrote about, believed in, and organized their entire society around an anthropomorphic and knowable god. That this is distasteful to you as a contemporary enjoyer of fan fiction has absolutely no value whatsoever in understanding the originating communities.