THE BOOK OF J - DAVID ROSENBERG & HAROLD BLOOM

The Harold Bloom death rereads continue apace. This time, perhaps his second most famous, the Book of J. Well, it isn’t really a Bloom book, it’s rather a new translation of the J writer sections of the Torah from the Hebrew scholar David Rosenberg. Bloom provided commentary before and after. Full disclosure, I skimmed some of the essays at the end of the book. It’s a lot and, in true Bloom fashion, it’s mostly comparing characters to Shakespeare. But you get great Bloomism too, like he’s convinced the J is a woman. Actually, he goes far enough to name a specific woman in Solomon’s court. He also claims that YHWH is an all time great literary character, in a vein that includes King Lear and Freud’s Superego. Tho, I will say that treating YHWH as a character in a story makes more sense than thinking of him as a peerless god. He changes his mind, people argue with him, his motivations are frequently unclear, he never seems too interested in “teaching lessons” in a manner we typically think of as Godly. As a child, I always found Old Testament God off-putting and repellent. And for good reason, Ol’ Testament God is a real bummer. Bloom helpfully points out that part of this is because YHWHism replaces many gods, who represent different ideas and viewpoints, with a single God that is supposed to be everything. This changes the cosmic relationship of man to God(s). When there are many gods, mankind’s place is to navigate these (literally) timeless obligations and alliances and really think about which gods they want to worship and in what way. Monotheism proposes that God is a parent, you are a child, and that’s that on that. I’ve never found this set-up very satisfying. YHWH is more interesting when he’s one of several gods with his own personality and quarks. By the time he’s in the “real” bible he’s flat, boring and cruel. 7 Sky-Gods