Text without Context: On Bloom's Misreading of J

Abstract

Eden for a piece he was preparing on the air war in Iraq and its affect on antiquities sites. I was impressed that he was checking out his story with someone who is supposed to know something about the Bible and about archaeological remains. And I was even more impressed when, after a forty-five-minute conversation about the imagery of paradisiacal gardens and the trans-historical complexities of early biblical traditions, he scratched the story. A consummate master of his own profession, he recognized that his interest in Eden meant stepping into the difficult terrain of another dis cipline; he wisely backed away. Not so Rosenberg and Bloom. They have been unwilling to recognize that the Bible is not user friendly. Though they would distance themselves from believers who hold that scripture is the revealed word of God, they share with the faithful the notion that the Bible is accessible to all who would leaf through its pages. Because biblical allusions, characters, and language are so much a part of contemporary western culture, it seems that the holy text itself is of this time. Well, in some ways it is. Yet it is also radically distant and other, a product of a time and a place so removed from our own world that we would suffer severe culture shock were we to