NEWS FEATURE: Scholar says single prose narrative forms core of Hebrew Bible

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ In the beginning, says Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, came”In the Day”_ a single author’s epic prose narrative that was later folded into nine books of the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis through the rise of King Solomon. Depending upon one’s perspective, the narrative was”the first novel”or the”first history,”Friedman, […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ In the beginning, says Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, came”In the Day”_ a single author’s epic prose narrative that was later folded into nine books of the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis through the rise of King Solomon.

Depending upon one’s perspective, the narrative was”the first novel”or the”first history,”Friedman, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California-San Diego, said in an interview. But, he adds, whether the narrative was divinely inspired, as Jewish, Christian and Islamic orthodoxy maintain, is outside his purview.”That’s not scholarship,”said Friedman, who as a young man studied to become a Conservative rabbi.”Scholars don’t know any more than the man in the street about divine authorship.” Either way, the”In the Day”narrative’s theological impact has been enormous, said the 52-year-old Friedman. Its concepts of right and wrong, its description of a deity that manifests in the world in both loving and angry ways, and its lessons about the consequences of human actions have”affected the course of virtually all subsequent ideas of God in Western religion,”he said.


Friedman’s claim to have found a single-author core narrative is the subject of his latest book,”The Hidden Book in the Bible: The Discovery of the First Prose Masterpiece”(HarperSanFrancisco). Despite the book’s complexity, Friedman intends it for both lay and academic readers.

The heart of Friedman’s book is his translation of the narrative, some 3,000 sentences he separated out from the Bible’s surrounding text based on linguistic and stylistic similarities and contextual threads that, he believes, likely make it one writer’s unified work.

It begins,”In the day that YHWH (God) made earth and skiesâÂ?¦,”corresponding to Genesis 2:4 of the Bible. It ends,”And the kingdom was secure in Solomon’s hand,”the Bible’s 1 Kings 2:46. Friedman calls the narrative”In the Day”in keeping with the ancient Hebrew tradition of naming books after their opening words.

Friedman, who wrote the 1987 bestseller”Who Wrote the Bible?”about possible authors of the Bible’s first five books, presents his latest effort as a breakthrough in modern Bible scholarship.”We’ve discovered the first great work of prose literature,”Friedman claimed unequivocably,”and really the first book of prose anywhere on earth.” Others in the competitive world of biblical scholarship say Friedman has largely repackaged earlier findings. At most, say the critics, Friedman has provided additional evidence toward the academic quest to identify biblical source texts.

Among the most vocal critics is John Van Seters, a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill professor of biblical literature.”There’s nothing new about (Friedman’s) proposal,”said Van Seters.”It’s been advocated in scholarship for much of this century, although as a position it has been out of favor, particularly in Europe, since the 1970s. Still, this is certainly not something new to specialists in the field.” In his book, Friedman does acknowledge past scholarship, despite also touting”In the Day”as a breakthrough. His contribution, he said, has been to wed earlier scholarship with literary criticism to bring”new attention to the Bible’s artistry”and to demonstrate that early biblical writers produced longer prose works than previously thought.

Friedman’s narrative writer is”J,”the term used by scholars to denote an unknown author from the ancient Jewish kingdom of Judah who referred to God as Jehovah, rendered YHWH by Friedman in accordance with Jewish practice.

Friedman believes J was probably an upperclass Jerusalemite, possibly female, who wrote sometime between 840 and 722 B.C., and who had intimate familiarity with the Hebrew royal court. Friedman first postulated that J may have been a woman in”Who Wrote the Bible?”because of J’s relatively sympathetic treatment of women in an era of virtually unquestioned male supremacy.


But Friedman is cautionary about J’s gender.”…It is a subtle task at best to determine the sex of an author of a 3,000-year-old work by clues within the text,”he said. Yale University literary critic Harold Bloom, author of”The Book of J,”released in 1989, went too far in his assertion that J was a woman, said Friedman.

Friedman’s dating of J’s writing is earlier by several hundred years than the thinking of many of his academic peers _ thereby earning him additional criticism from disagreeing scholars, including Van Seters.

If Friedman is correct, than the narrative was constructed prior to the exile of Judah’s population to Babylonia, which began about 600 B.C. Other scholars contend J was written during or after the exile. That’s a significant point for Friedman because of its potential implications for claims of historical political rights in the contemporary Middle East.

J”had to be someone with real sophisticated knowledge and insight into how the ancient royal family worked, someone close to the court,”Friedman said during a recent book-tour stop in Washington.”This was a person who really understands, the way Shakespeare understood in his historical plays, that what happens in the ruler’s family and in their personal life _ their adulteries, their betrayals, their sibling rivalries _ is inseparable from what happens to the nation and the destiny of a nation.” As Friedman sees it, J’s original narrative, what he calls”the crafted design of a gifted writer,”was combined by later editors with other writings _ poetry, prose and religious law. Why that was done is a subject of academic guesswork.

One probable reason was politics. Other language was probably added for theological and literary reasons, Friedman said. The end product was the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as it reads today.”We can only guess what actually happened,”he said.

At least three biblical editors added new works to the original narrative”in a process so sophisticated and complicated that it has taken us centuries to see it and unravel it,”he wrote in”The Hidden Book in the Bible.” Friedman’s unified narrative conclusion rests on his identification of words, phrases, puns and allusions that turn up repeatedly throughout what he thinks is J’s text. Those clues, he said, served as”literary devices that fine writers of every period have used to bind works together.” Curiously,”In the Day”does not include several well-known Bible sequences, such as Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and the plagues that precipitated the ancient Israelites’ departure from slavery in Egypt. It also lacks any language from the Book of Leviticus, which scholars say was probably the last of the Bible’s first five books to be written.


Friedman said the absence of non-Levitical material from the narrative does not necessarily mean the stories were not included in the narrative’s original form. The later editors may have simply preferred another telling of the Abraham-Isaac story, for example, leading them to drop any possible J version.

Still, Friedman believes”In the Day”has survived the centuries largely intact. But here again, he concluded,”we’ll probably never know what actually happened.”

DEA END RIFKIN

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