There is yet more to learn about those old stories! . If you have a King James version of the Bible,  the next time you read Genesis, pay attention to how God is referred to.  Sometimes He's called "God" and sometimes He's called "The Lord".  The reason for this is that the original Hebrew text uses two different names for God, and the translators were careful to preserve this.  When the Hebrew text uses "Elohim" it is translated as "GOD".  When the Hebrew text uses "Yahweh", it is translated as "The Lord".    If you carefully read Genesis, you'll notice that when Genesis refers to God as "Yahweh", he seems to be very different than when he is refered to as "Elohim".  For example, Elohim is invisible--he never appears to anybody nor can he be seen by anybody--but Yahweh talks face-to-face with people all the time: with Abram, to Jacob, and to Moses and the 40 elders.  Elohim seems remote and regimented, whereas Yahweh comes across as mischevious and irrascible.  This has prompted some to propose the so-called "Documentary Hypothesis" which posits that Genesis was formed by editing together two or more different books, each book using a different word for God and each book presenting a different picture of who God was and what He was all about.      The book of J is the hypothasized book which used 'Yahweh" as the name of God.  Scholars try to reconstruct this book by bringing together all of the passages in the first 5 books of the Bible which refer to God as "Yahweh".  The result is startling: the same stories you've heard all your life (The tower of Babal, Joseph going to Egypt, Abram bargaining with God over Sodom and Gomorrah), when read together like this, take on a whole different level of meaning.      This book provides two things in one handy volume: it provides a reconstruction of the book of J, freshly translated by David Rosenberg, and it also provides an extended commentary by Harold Bloom, who is certainly the best reader alive today, and who is uniquely qualified to serve as a tour guide through the experience of reading J.  So to review the book I'd like to review each of these seperately.    First, Rosenberg's translation.  To illustrate just how good it is at bringing things out of the text which you ordinarly wouldn't notice, I'd like to quote from his translation of the story of the Tower of Babal: "We can bring ourselves together" they said "like stone on stone, use brick for stone: bake it until hard."  For morter they heated bitumen.    Notice how this translation brings out the parallelism between the tower of Babal and human society:  The tower is made out mud bricks bound by bitumen, and society is made out of people bound by language.  But people are also just made out of mud--recall the creation story where Yahweh breathes the breath of life into mud.  Baking the mud into bricks is symbolic of the people making themselves hard, and using bitumen for morter is symbolic of them using language and government to  organize themselves.   Rosenberg's translation makes available to us many of the puns and wordplay which other English translations unfortunately lose.    Now, to review Bloom's commentary.  Scholarly types are fond of dising Bloom for his tendency to be speculative, to use his imagination to illuminate the reading of the text.  But what they are forgetting is that J is a bunch of stories, written for us to experience!  To use an parable of Rorty's, its like a surgion describing your wife as a bunch of tissues and organs vs. describing your wife as  warm and loving, important person in your life. Yes, "warm and loving" arn't medical terms, but that doesn't make them a bad description of your wife.      Also, the very greatest literature, such as J is, will admit of more than one reading, more than one interpretation, more than one point of view.  Bloom here does us excellent service by showing us his point of view on the text, telling us how the experience of reading the text impacts him.  The author of J didn't write J just to chronicle some historical figures--the author of J wrote J so that we could read it, and by reading it, become changed into new people.  _This_ is the aspect of experiiencing J which Bloom's commentary helps along, and this is the aspect which critics of Bloom's commentary are missing the most
Output: POS