Word: pentateuchal
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...Paterson, New Jersey, D.W. Griffith is directing a film titled The Call to Arms. Just at the moment the leading lady, Mary Pickford, faints from the unseasonable heat, a few blocks away Presbyterian minister Clarence Arthur Wilmot loses his belief in the Divinity: "the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entirely misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there...
...wrote the Pentateuch, the all-important first five books of the Bible? According to ancient Jewish tradition, Moses did. Modern Bible critics hold, however, that various authors long after Moses' time wrote accounts that were later amalgamated into the biblical books. In the latest twist on this "documentary hypothesis," eminent Yale University literary critic Harold Bloom argues that the most memorable sections of Genesis and Exodus, plus bits of Numbers and Deuteronomy, were the work of an anonymous woman...
...rhetoric" only to that of Shakespeare and a few other writers. Bloom's case is laid out in The Book of J (Grove Weidenfeld; $21.95), on sale this week. "J" (for Jahwist or Yahwist) is the label scholars give to one of the hypothetical documents from which the Pentateuch was compiled and to its author or authors. Bloom's commentary appears with a new translation of J passages by David Rosenberg, former chief editor of the Jewish Publication Society...
Bloom admits that a feminine J is supposition. Among his arguments: Genesis contains the only known account from the ancient Middle East of the creation of woman -- six times as long as the story of Adam's advent from a "mud pie." Furthermore, the women of the Pentateuch (Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Tamar, Zipporah) are strong; none of the men (Abraham, Jacob, Moses) are particularly good looking. Circumstantial evidence, but in an era of enhanced interest in feminist creativity, it is not very hypothetical to assume that Bloom's work will draw a wide and interested audience...
Jewish tradition holds that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Conservative Christians agree. But 19th century Protestant critics emphasized the Pentateuch's diversity rather than its unity. They deemed it a scissors-and-paste job on materials from different centuries by four anonymous authors: the Jahwist ("J"), Elohist ("E"), Priestly writer ("P") and Deuteronomist ("D"). Though traditionalists rejected it, this J.E.P.D. theory hardened into liberal orthodoxy...