The Book of J was published by Grove Weidenfeld in 1990 and is one of Bloom’s most audacious works — a literary reading of the oldest textual strand of the Hebrew Bible (identified by nineteenth-century scholars as “J” for the Jahwist, who uses the name YHWH for God). Bloom’s two provocative claims are: first, that J was a specific individual author — a woman writing at the court of Solomon or his successor Rehoboam around 950 BCE; and second, that her text is a work of literary genius rather than a religious document, and should be read as one reads Homer or Shakespeare.
The book includes David Rosenberg’s fresh translations of the J passages — extracted from Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers — alongside Bloom’s extended commentary. Bloom’s J is witty, ironic, and subversive: her YHWH is a complicated character (not the God of later theology but a literary creation as complex as Shakespeare’s Lear), and her humans are vivid, contradictory, and alive. The claim that J was a woman is speculative (Bloom admits it cannot be proven) but is argued with characteristic bravura.
The book was controversial among both religious scholars (who objected to treating scripture as secular literature) and biblical scholars (who found Bloom’s source criticism naive and his attribution to a female author unfounded). But as a piece of literary criticism — a reading of ancient texts that makes them live on the page as literature rather than theology — the book is brilliant, and it influenced subsequent literary approaches to the Bible.
Collecting The Book of J
First edition (Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1990): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Signed copies: $50–$125