Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman

On the whole, this strategy works well enough, although, coupled with the literalism, it does produce some flat-footed effects: ''I'm Instead of ''evil'' - and preserves the parallel syntax of the Hebrew. He aims for a simple, rough-hewn diction - ''big'' instead of ''great,'' ''bad'' Most modern translators to transform it into an everyday modern English abounding in explanatory paraphrase.

Even so, Friedman's emphatic literalism serves the Hebrew original rather better than the efforts of The English version offered here is not quite a freestanding translation, for it is framed to make visible the verbal evidence of literary unity. He conceives as a continuous J narrative, so that readers can see its literary integrity. In between these two, in the bulk of the book, he presents his own translation of what He makes this argument in an introductory essay, buttressed by more technical analytical evidence in an appendix. Locate the composition of the Torah in the Persian or Hellenistic period rather than in the early centuries of the Davidic dynasty.) ''The Hidden Book in the Bible'' proposes that J, far from being limited to Genesis,Įxodus and some brief passages in Numbers, is a long narrative work that was the original core of the Bible, tracing a grand chronological arc from creation to the death of Moses, through sections of Joshua and Judges and most of the Book (In an appendix, Friedman makes a trenchant case against certain recent scholars who have sought to discard these textual divisions and to J and E are generallyĬonsidered the oldest strands, and the extraordinary literary power of J has often been admired. Wrote the Bible?'' - the first five books of the Bible, the Torah or Pentateuch, were woven out of four distinct literary strands or ''documents,'' conventionally designated J, E, P and D. According to the documentary hypothesis - which Friedman lucidly explained in ''Who He builds on the ''documentary hypothesis'' accepted by most biblical scholars since the 19th century, but tilts it in a surprising direction. Now, in his new book, he proposes that we can detect in the Bible, hiddenĪmid the accretions and superimposed book-divisions of later editors, the earliest long prose masterwork in world literature, running from the creation story to the death of David.

To abstraction, and that this process of transcendent abstraction was then projected forward in intellectual history all the way to Nietzsche and modern physics. In ''The Hidden Face of God'' he made a vigorous theological argument that the Bible's representation of God moved progressively from anthropomorphism ''Who Wrote the Bible?'' elicited wide interest. Ichard Elliott Friedman is that rare biblical scholar who is both able to address a broad audience and willing to raise large speculative issues about the Bible. Restored, translated and introduced by Richard Elliott Friedman. Richard Elliott Friedman makes a bold claim concerning the authorship of books in the Bible.

Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman