The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (57 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

M
y work on
The Harlot by the Side of the Road
was inspired and sustained by several mentors and muses, first among them my wife, Ann Benjamin Kirsch, who glimpsed the promise of a book on the Bible in a talk that I gave on the story of Judah and Tamar some years ago. As I discovered when I first met Ann at the age of fourteen, all good things begin with her.

Ann and our two children, Adam Benjamin Kirsch and Jennifer Rachel Kirsch, encouraged and supported the book in countless loving ways over the years of research and writing. Jenny, for example, devised a screen-saver in honor of the project, featuring a message that subtly reminded me of my deadline every time I booted up the computer!

Adam Kirsch, the young man to whom I once read Bible stories at bedtime (see chapter one), is now all grown up, a gifted writer in his own right, and I relied on his expert assistance in completing the research for
Harlot
. Drawing on the collections of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, the New York Public Library, and the UCLA Research Library, he searched out, retrieved, and, in some cases, even translated the scholarly works that I consulted in writing this book.

Among my blessings I count my agent and guardian angel, Laurie Fox of the Linda Chester Literary Agency, a radiant being whom I cherished as a friend and admired as a fellow writer long before she offered to represent my work, and my publisher at Ballantine Books, Clare Ferraro, whose vision, energy, wisdom, and commitment I was privileged to witness as a book reviewer even before I was fortunate enough to become one of her authors.

I am deeply grateful, too, for the opportunity to work with Virginia Faber, my editor at Ballantine, whose discerning eye and deftly wielded pencil greatly enhanced the book, and the incomparable Linda Chester, who brings a unique blend of grace, savvy, and dazzle to her work as a literary agent.

Another friend of long standing who became a colleague on
Harlot
is Liz Williams, the West Coast publicity director for Ballantine, a woman of high spirits and profound spirituality, good humor and good ideas, and a tireless crusader for books and authors.

Indeed, the whole enterprise has been all the more rewarding because of the gifted and gracious people with whom I have been privileged to work, including Ellen Archer, Mark Bloomfield, Hillary Cohen, Betsy Elias, Janet Fletcher, Jim Geraghty, Kathleen Fridella, Rachel Tarlow-Gul, Alice Kesterson, Steven Oppenheim, Nate Penn, and Lewis Robinson at Ballantine; Joanna Pulcini and Gary Jaffe at the Linda Chester Literary Agency; Judith Kendra at Rider Books in London; and Linda Michaels and Teresa Cavanaugh at Linda Michaels Ltd. International Literary Agents.

Jack Miles, a colleague and good friend, encouraged my work as a book reviewer for the
Los Angeles Times
over the years and godfathered my writing on the subject of the Bible, both by his willingness to share his vast knowledge and by the shining example of his masterpiece of biblical exegesis, God: A
Biography
.

Tony Cohan, publisher of Acrobat Books, is the man of letters who put my legal writing into print by commissioning and publishing
Kirsch’s Handbook of Publishing Law
—and graciously encouraged me to climb the mountain of biblical storytelling, too.

I am blessed, too, with the friendship and colleagueship of Dennis Mitchell, my law partner and dear friend, whose encouragement and support have been essential to my work as a lawyer
and
a writer. And I
have been heartened by the daily pleasure of working with my other friends and colleagues in the practice of law—Judy Woo, Angie Yoon, Gold Lee, Stephanie Harker, Larry Zerner, Scott Baker, and Gregg Homer.

Raye Birk and Candace Barrett Birk are gifted performing artists, ardent readers, earnest seekers, and abiding friends who have listened to so many forbidden tales of the Bible over so many lively dinners with Ann and me that they will surely find
The Harlot by the Side of the Road
to be familiar terrain by now.

Jonathan Kirsch
Los Angeles
February 19, 1997

RECOMMENDED READING AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

R
ECOMMENDED
R
UEADING

 

T
he works listed in the Bibliography below are
all
of the sources that I consulted in researching and writing
The Harlot by the Side of the Road
. Special mention should be made, however, of a few works that I found to be especially useful and interesting. These are books that I recommend highly to any reader who wishes to learn more about the Bible.

The Anchor Bible Dictionary
is an accessible, comprehensive, and intriguing reference tool for any Bible reader. Even in six volumes, it is remarkably compact for a work of such ambition and accomplishment, and it includes entries by the most distinguished scholars in the field of biblical studies.

The
Encyclopaedia Judaica
is a general encyclopedia on Jewish topics, but I found it particularly helpful in teasing out some of the intricacies of Bible history and exegesis, not only in the Jewish tradition but also in Christian and Islamic sources.

Who Wrote the Bible?
by Richard Elliott Friedman is a superb introduction to recent scholarship in the field of biblical authorship. Friedman presents his research and analysis, much of it highly original,
almost like a mystery story, and he even names his own most likely suspect for the authorship of the Book of Deuteronomy.

Three books that approach God as a literary or historical figure rather than a matter of theology were crucial in my work and, in a deeper sense, helped to inspire me to write this book in the first place.

The Book of J
by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg consists of Rosenberg’s original and lyrical translation of the thread of biblical narrative attributed to the source called J, and Bloom’s provocative literary study of J, whom he imagines to be a highborn woman living and working in the royal court of Judah in distant antiquity.

God: A
Biography
by Jack Miles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning study of God as a literary character in the Bible, is no less than a modern masterpiece of biblical exegesis. Miles’s chapter on the Book of Job is the crowning achievement, but the entire work is essential for any reader who is willing to approach the Bible as a work of literature as well as theology and moral instruction.

If a single book beckoned me back to the Bible after years of sporadic and indifferent Bible reading, it was Joseph Heller’s God Knows, a comic novel in which the story of King David is told in the first person by David himself with the patter and the point of view of a stand-up comic in a burlesque house. Heller, like Harold Bloom and Jack Miles, is a contemporary author who breathes new life back into a very old book.

B
IBLIOGRAPHY

 

Bibles

 

When quoting from certain versions of the Bible, I have used abbreviations in the text to identify the source of the quote. These abbreviations are given in the list below, along with the full title and bibliographical information for the various bibles. Following the abbreviations list, there is a list of other versions of the Bible that I have consulted. Where no specific source is indicated in the text, the quotation is taken from the 1962 edition of the Jewish Publication Society’s
The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text
(JPS).

JPS	The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text . Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961.
KJV	The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments in the King James Version . Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1985.
NAB	The New American Bible . Catholic Bible Association of America. Chicago: Catholic Press, 1971.
NEB	The New English Bible with the Apocrypha . 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
New JPS	Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text . Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985.
NRSV	The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha . New Revised Standard Version. Edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
RSV	The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha . Revised Standard Version, Containing the Second Edition of the New Testament. Edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Scofield KJV	The Scofield Reference Bible . Authorized King James Version. New York: Oxford University Press, 1945.

Anderson, Francis I. and David Noel Freedman, tr., notes, and comm.
Hosea
. Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986.

Boling, Robert G., tr. and intro.
Judges
. Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.

Hertz, J. H. ed.
The Pentateuch and Haftorahs
. 2d ed. London: Soncino Press, 1981.

McCarter, P. Kyle, Jr., tr., intro., notes, and comm. II
Samuel
Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984.

The Complete Parallel Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Speiser, E. A., tr., intro., and notes.
Genesis
. Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987.