The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (52 page)

The Book of Deuteronomy, which stands apart from the rest of the Torah in its distinct literary style and theological concerns, is attributed to an author (or a group of authors) known as D, or the Deuteronomist. According to Richard Elliott Friedman’s superb study of biblical authorship,
Who Wrote the Bible?
, the prophet Jeremiah may have been the Deuteronomist. The Book of Deuteronomy is thought to be “the book of the Law” that was rather mysteriously found in the Temple at Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah in the seventh century
B.C.E
. (2 Kings 22:8). For that reason, some scholars have suggested that Deuteronomy is a “pious fraud” that was concocted to justify the reforms of Josiah, which marked a sea change in the nature of religious dogma and practice in ancient Israel. For example, the announcement of the death of Moses, which now appears at the very end of Deuteronomy, may have been borrowed from the Book of Numbers by D in order to enhance the credibility of a book that differs significantly from the other four books of the Torah.

The Book of Deuteronomy is also regarded by scholars as the keystone of a longer biblical narrative known as the Deuteronomistic
History, which includes not only Deuteronomy itself but also the books of Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, and First and Second Kings. The authors and editors who created the Deuteronomistic History, collectively known as the Deuteronomistic Historian, are thought to have collected, combined, and edited the various stories, traditions, and histories sometime shortly before or during the Babylonian Exile.

The biblical authors whose work focuses largely on sacred law and ritual matters are collectively known as P, or the Priestly Source. All but a few passages of the Book of Leviticus are attributed to the Priestly Source, and it is likely that P was also responsible for combining the narratives of J and E into the biblical text so familiar to us today. The Priestly Source is notably lacking in playfulness—it is P’s version of the story of Creation that features an aloof and indistinct God who summons man into existence (Gen. 1:27), while J imagines God as a kind of divine sculptor who hunkers down in the mud and makes the first man with his own hands (Gen. 2:7). P devotes much attention to the minutiae of ritual observances and paraphernalia, but we find no talking animals, no dreams, and not a single angel in the biblical text attributed to the Priestly Source—and, significantly, P never once uses the Hebrew word for “mercy.”

At a relatively late stage of biblical authorship, various priests and scribes collected these many strands and fragments of biblical authorship, assembled them into a series of continuous narratives, and added their own glosses, interludes, and linkages. The gifted editors who stitched together the Bible are collectively known as R, or the Redactor, although it is likely that R, like P and D, represents the work of a school or a tradition rather than a single author or editor. The Redactor seems to put a “spin” on the older passages in service of a specific theological and political agenda. For example, the stern and sometimes brutal attitude toward intermarriage and idol worship that can be found at places in the biblical text may reflect the anxieties of the priestly redactors who
were struggling against the threat of assimilation in the unsettled period after the end of the Babylonian Exile and the return of the Israelites to Canaan.

Bible scholarship has suggested the existence of other authors whose work can be detected in the Hebrew Bible. Portions of the Second Book of Samuel and the First Book of Kings, for example, are traced to a source variously known as the Succession Narrative or the Court History of David, and the author is sometimes called the Court Historian because he may have been an official chronicler of the royal House of David and demonstrates a lively interest in promoting the legitimacy of the Davidic dynasty.

Another example is the Book of Isaiah, where the bulk of the text is traditionally regarded as the work of the prophet Isaiah, who appears to have lived in Jerusalem in the eighth century
B.C.E
., but chapters 40-66 are attributed by scholars to a different (and much later) author who is identified as Deutero-Isaiah (“second Isaiah”) and probably lived and wrote during the era of the Babylonian Exile.

Now and then, as we have seen, new and surprising candidates are nominated by enterprising scholars for authorship of important portions of the Bible. Sigmund Freud, drawing on the scholarship of his era, reported in
Moses and Monotheism
that “modern research workers think they can recognize the priest Ebjatar, a contemporary of King David,” as the Yahwist.
²
And Bible scholar Adrien Janis Bledstein proposes that the Deuteronomist may have been an otherwise obscure prophetess named Huldah who lived during the reign of King Josiah. (See chapter thirteen.)

The Bible itself refers to several intriguing works that are now lost to us, including the Book of Yashar, the Book of the Battles of Yahweh, and the Chronicles of the Kings of Judea. We can only speculate on what these books contained and why they were not preserved along with the books of the Bible and various noncanonical writings that survive as the
Apocrypha, but it is clear that the biblical authors knew and used these other sources.

The sacred texts of the Bible were probably under the guardianship of the priesthood of ancient Israel, a caste that was exclusively male. For that reason, Bible scholars have generally assumed that the Bible is a work of male authors and male editors. The Bible itself, however, offers some clues that suggest at least some of the biblical text—including the most intriguing and influential passages—were written by women.

For example, what may be the single oldest fragment in the Bible, the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5), is conventionally attributed to the prophetess Deborah, and in fact the striking role attributed to a woman in the victory of the Israelites* over their enemies suggests that it is the work of a woman writer. (See chapter thirteen.) On a vastly greater scale, however, the thread of biblical narrative attributed to J—which makes up a substantial portion of Genesis and can be found elsewhere in the Bible—may be the work of a woman, too.

The biblical author known as J writes a great deal
about
women, who are almost invariably depicted in a sympathetic, insightful way, and often in a playful light. Indeed, the matriarchs are often more dynamic than their husbands, who seem rather pallid by comparison. J displays an intimate and comfortable knowledge of “the manner of women,” as the Bible refers to menstruation, and gives us the account of how Rachel’s father searches her tent for his missing household idols—she has hidden them in the camel-saddle on which she is sitting during the search, and she dissuades her father from looking under the saddle by claiming that she is menstruating (Gen. 31:30–35). And in the story of Tamar and Judah, a courageous and resourceful woman defies the will of a patriarch in order to claim what is due to her under biblical law. (See chapter seven.) Both of these texts are cited as evidence that J may have been a woman.

The argument is persuasively made in
The Book of J
by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg. Bloom discerns a woman’s sensibilities at work in the biblical narrative attributed to J, whom he characterizes as
the original Jewish mother. “J’s attitude toward Yahweh,” he writes, “resembles nothing so much as a mothers somewhat wary but still proudly amused stance toward a favorite son.”
³
Ironically, Bloom’s conclusions have been criticized by some feminist commentators as being sexist, and yet Bloom makes a provocative and intriguing case for the notion that “J is a
Gevurah
(‘great lady’) of post-Solomonic court circles, herself of Davidic blood, who began writing her great work in the later years of Solomon, in close rapport and exchanging influences with her good friend the Court Historian, who wrote most of what we now call 2 Samuel.”
⁴

Although the oldest fragments of the Bible were first composed in the form of songs and poems as early as the second millenium
B.C.E
., the oldest
written
copies of the Bible are much more recent. Indeed, until the mid-twentieth century, the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible dated back to the ninth and tenth centuries of the modern era, and the oldest copy of a complete Christian Bible was only a few hundred years older. Then, with the discovery of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls at a place called Qumran near the Dead Sea in 1947, Bible scholars suddenly found themselves in possession of biblical manuscripts that date all the way back to the second century
B.C.E
. or so.

According to a beloved story that has attached itself to the Dead Sea Scrolls, a young Bedouin shepherd was idly casting pebbles into a desert cave when he heard a “plink” and the sound of breaking pottery. Inside the cave—and, as it turned out, several other caves nearby—was a cache of ancient ceramic jars containing the remains of the sacred library of a Jewish sect known as the Essenes. These writings are the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Only one complete book of the Bible, the Book of Isaiah, was found intact at Qumran. However, fragments of
every
book of the Hebrew Bible except the Book of Esther were also found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Significantly, the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate how
little
the text of the Bible has changed over the last two thousand years or so. Although some words and phrases of the manuscript fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls vary from the text of the Bible as we know
it today, the differences are small in number and modest in significance. In fact, the text of the Book of Isaiah as preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls is substantially identical to what we find in modern Bibles.

One of the most intriguing pieces of evidence suggesting multiple sources of the Bible is the simple fact that there are so many versions—or “witnesses,” as Bible critics put it—of the ancient biblical text. Although some scholars imagine that all of the many versions of the Bible derive from a single original text—a so-called Ur-text—no such work has actually been found. Rather, it seems more likely that a great many versions of the sacred texts proliferated in the ancient world and found different expressions among the various peoples and cultures who preserved them and passed them along from generation to generation. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that more than one version of the Bible has survived over the centuries. The texts discussed below remain in common use around the world.

Jewish tradition regards the so-called Masoretic Text as the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible. “Masorete” is derived from an Aramaic word that means “tradition,” and the Masoretes were rabbinical scholars and scribes who dedicated themselves to preserving the integrity of the biblical text by adopting a single standard version to be used in making copies of the Bible. Starting sometime around 500 CE., and continuing for a period of five centuries or so, the Masoretes corrected what they regarded as scribal errors, standardized the words and phrases of the text itself, indicated the correct pronunciation of the biblical Hebrew, and thus established the definitive version of the Bible for Jewish usage.

The Masoretes adopted a system of symbols to indicate the vowelization of the Hebrew words in the Bible, since the Hebrew language is written in consonants only, and they also introduced the practice of dividing the biblical text into verses; both of these innovations have become indispensable for Bible readers and scholars. (The division of
the text into chapters, however, was introduced in the thirteenth century by an English bishop who finally made it possible to quote the Bible by “chapter and verse” for the first time in its long history.)

The Bible that I have used in this book, except where otherwise indicated, is an early twentieth-century English translation of the Masoretic Text. From time to time, I have cited other versions of the Bible, generally for the purpose of pointing out the differences—sometimes slight but often significant in meaning—between the Masoretic Text and the other “witnesses” of the biblical text described below.

The Bible was originally written in classical Hebrew, although a few passages are rendered in an ancient sister-language called Aramaic. But the early and repeated dispersions of the Jewish people from the Holy Land resulted in the growth of large expatriate communities where Greek and other tongues were spoken in place of Hebrew as the language of daily life. For that reason, translations of the Hebrew text became crucial to the preservation of the Bible, both in Jewish and in Christian usage.

The most important and influential translation of the Hebrew Bible is a Greek version called the Septuagint. The name is derived from a Latin word that means “seventy,” and it refers to the tradition that seventy rabbinical scholars participated in the making of the translation. For that reason, the Septuagint is often identified in scholarly writing as LXX. A story is told that all of the rabbis worked separately but miraculously arrived at precisely the same translation!

The earliest portions of the Septuagint date back to the third century
B.C.E
., when the translation was first undertaken for use by the growing Jewish expatriate community in Alexandria and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world. However, the Septuagint was also favored by early Christians, who adopted Greek as the language of their sacred writings, and thus most of the quotations from the Hebrew Bible that appear in the New Testament are taken from the Septuagint rather than the underlying Hebrew text. For that reason, too, the Septuagint was used as the basis for several Christian translations of the Bible into Latin and other languages. Since the Septuagint adopted a different order of books than the one used in the Masoretic Text, and included
several of the apocryphal books, these elements found their way into Christian Bibles.