The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible
Page 41
31. Niditch, 45-46, 52.
32. Niditch, 47.
33. Bronner, 89.
34. Niditch, 47-50.
35. Bledstein, 41-42, fn. 4.
36. Lindars, 174.
37. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909-1938), vol. 4, 198, fn. 85.
38. Niditch, 45. (Emphasis added.)
39. Yairah Amit, “Literature in the Service of Politics,” in Politics and Theopolitics in the Bible and Postbiblical Literature, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow, Yair Hoffman, and Benjamin Uffenheimer (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1994), 28.
40. Amit, 31.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1. Jared J. Jackson, “David’s Throne,” Canadian Journal of Theology 11, no. 3 (1965): 183.
2. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 51.
3. Leonhard Rost, The Succession to the Throne of David (Sheffield, England: Almond Press, 1982), 104.
4. David M. Howard, Jr., “David,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6 vols., ed. David Noel Freedman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 2, 41.
5. Martin Noth, The Old Testament World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 376-81.
6. Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 40-41.
7. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, ed., The David Myth in Western Literature (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1980), 4.
8. Joseph Heller, God Knows (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 5-6.
9. David M. Howard, Jr., “David (Person),” ABD, vol. II, 44.
10. J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, vol. 1 (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1981), 103.
11. Charles Conroy, Absalom, Absalom! Analecta Biblica (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1978), 17-18, fn. 3.
12. Conroy, 17-18, fn. 3.
13. Susan Niditch, “The ‘Sodomite’ Theme in Judges 19-20,” Catholic Bible Quarterly 44, no. 3 (July 1982): 370.
14. George Ridout, “The Rape of Tamar,” in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Jared J. Jackson and Martin Kessler (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1974), 77.
15. John H. Otwell, And Sarah Laughed (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), 23.
16. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 53.
17. P. Kyle McCarter, tr., intro., notes, and comm., II Samuel, Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), 322.
18. Trible, 58, n. 16.
19. McCarter, 322.
20. Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes, “Tamar and the Limits of Patriarchy,” in Anti-Covenant, ed. Mieke Bal (Sheffield, England: Almond Press, 1989), 140, citing a translation by Jonneke Bekkenkamp.
21. McCarter, 322.
22. Dijk-Hemmes, 140-41.
23. Jackson, 189.
24. McCarter, 405.
25. McCarter, 410.
26. John J. Davis, The Birth of a Kingdom (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1970), 149.
27. Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909-1938), vol. 4, 118.
28. Frontain and Wojcik, 5.
29. J. Cheryl Exum, 1993, 174-75.
30. Stephen L. Harris, Understanding the Bible, 2d ed. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1985), 94.
31. Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 110.
32. David M. Gunn, “In Security: The David of Biblical Narrative,” in Signs and Wonders, ed J. Cheryl Exum (n.p.: Society of Biblical Literature, 1989), 143, fn. 6.
33. Friedman, 102.
34. David M. Gunn, “Joshua and Judges,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 1987, 119.
35. Jackson, 185.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1. Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Penguin Classics (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), 256.
2. Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 6-7.
3. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 21.
4. As rendered in English in Sidney Greenberg and Jonathan D. Levine, ed., The New Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Mahzor Haddash) (Bridgeport, Conn.: Prayer Book Press, 1978), 557.
5. Salman Rushdie, “The Book Burning,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 3, March 2, 1989, 26.
6. Geza, Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961), 7.
7. Vermes, 2-3, citing G. F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era.
8. Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 11.
9. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “If You Could Ask One Question about Life, What Would the Answer Be? ‘Yes,’” Esquire 82, no. 6 (December 1974): 95 et seq. Copyright © 1974 Isaac Bashevis Singer.
10. Singer, 95 et seq.
11. Singer, 95. et seq.
APPENDIX
1. Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 21.
2. Freud, 50.
3. Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 26.
4. Bloom and Rosenberg, 19.
5. Stephen L. Harris, Understanding the Bible, 2d. ed. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1985), 89.
6. Scofield KJV.
7. NEB.
8. New JPS.
9. Friedman, 27.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My work on The Harlot by the Side of the Road was inspired and sustained by several mentors and muses, first among them my wife, Ann Benjamin Kirsch, who glimpsed the promise of a book on the Bible in a talk that I gave on the story of Judah and Tamar some years ago. As I discovered when I first met Ann at the age of fourteen, all good things begin with her.
Ann and our two children, Adam Benjamin Kirsch and Jennifer Rachel Kirsch, encouraged and supported the book in countless loving ways over the years of research and writing. Jenny, for example, devised a screen-saver in honor of the project, featuring a message that subtly reminded me of my deadline every time I booted up the computer!
Adam Kirsch, the young man to whom I once read Bible stories at bedtime (see chapter one), is now all grown up, a gifted writer in his own right, and I relied on his expert assistance in completing the research for Harlot. Drawing on the collections of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, the New York Public Library, and the UCLA Research Library, he searched out, retrieved, and, in some cases, even translated the scholarly works that I consulted in writing this book.
Among my blessings I count my agent and guardian angel, Laurie Fox of the Linda Chester Literary Agency, a radiant being whom I cherished as a friend and admired as a fellow writer long before she offered to represent my work, and my publisher at Ballantine Books, Clare Ferraro, whose vision, energy, wisdom, and commitment I was privileged to witness as a book reviewer even before I was fortunate enough to become one of her authors.
I am deeply grateful, too, for the opportunity to work with Virginia Faber, my editor at Ballantine, whose discerning eye and deftly wielded pencil greatly enhanced the book, and the incomparable Linda Chester, who brings a unique blend of grace, savvy, and dazzle to her work as a literary agent.
Another friend of long standing who became a colleague on Harlot is Liz Williams, the West Coast publicity director for Ballantine, a woman of high spirits and profound spirituality, good humor and good ideas, and a tireless crusader for books and authors.
Indeed, the whole enterprise has been all the more rewarding because of the gifted and gracious people with whom I have been privileged to work, including Ellen Archer, Mark Bloomfield, Hillary Cohen, Betsy Elias, Janet Fletcher, Jim Geraghty, Kathleen Fridella, Rachel Tarlow-Gul, Alice Kesterson, Steven Oppenheim, Nate Penn, and Lewis Robinson at Ballantine; Joanna Pulcini and Gary Jaffe at the Linda Chester Literar
y Agency; Judith Kendra at Rider Books in London; and Linda Michaels and Teresa Cavanaugh at Linda Michaels Ltd. International Literary Agents.
Jack Miles, a colleague and good friend, encouraged my work as a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times over the years and godfathered my writing on the subject of the Bible, both by his willingness to share his vast knowledge and by the shining example of his masterpiece of biblical exegesis, God: A Biography.
Tony Cohan, publisher of Acrobat Books, is the man of letters who put my legal writing into print by commissioning and publishing Kirsch’s Handbook of Publishing Law—and graciously encouraged me to climb the mountain of biblical storytelling, too.
I am blessed, too, with the friendship and colleagueship of Dennis Mitchell, my law partner and dear friend, whose encouragement and support have been essential to my work as a lawyer and a writer. And I have been heartened by the daily pleasure of working with my other friends and colleagues in the practice of law—Judy Woo, Angie Yoon, Gold Lee, Stephanie Harker, Larry Zerner, Scott Baker, and Gregg Homer.
Raye Birk and Candace Barrett Birk are gifted performing artists, ardent readers, earnest seekers, and abiding friends who have listened to so many forbidden tales of the Bible over so many lively dinners with Ann and me that they will surely find The Harlot by the Side of the Road to be familiar terrain by now.
Jonathan Kirsch
Los Angeles
February 19, 1997
RECOMMENDED READING AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
RECOMMENDED RUEADING
The works listed in the Bibliography below are all of the sources that I consulted in researching and writing The Harlot by the Side of the Road. Special mention should be made, however, of a few works that I found to be especially useful and interesting. These are books that I recommend highly to any reader who wishes to learn more about the Bible.
The Anchor Bible Dictionary is an accessible, comprehensive, and intriguing reference tool for any Bible reader. Even in six volumes, it is remarkably compact for a work of such ambition and accomplishment, and it includes entries by the most distinguished scholars in the field of biblical studies.
The Encyclopaedia Judaica is a general encyclopedia on Jewish topics, but I found it particularly helpful in teasing out some of the intricacies of Bible history and exegesis, not only in the Jewish tradition but also in Christian and Islamic sources.
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman is a superb introduction to recent scholarship in the field of biblical authorship. Friedman presents his research and analysis, much of it highly original, almost like a mystery story, and he even names his own most likely suspect for the authorship of the Book of Deuteronomy.
Three books that approach God as a literary or historical figure rather than a matter of theology were crucial in my work and, in a deeper sense, helped to inspire me to write this book in the first place.
The Book of J by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg consists of Rosenberg’s original and lyrical translation of the thread of biblical narrative attributed to the source called J, and Bloom’s provocative literary study of J, whom he imagines to be a highborn woman living and working in the royal court of Judah in distant antiquity.
God: A Biography by Jack Miles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning study of God as a literary character in the Bible, is no less than a modern masterpiece of biblical exegesis. Miles’s chapter on the Book of Job is the crowning achievement, but the entire work is essential for any reader who is willing to approach the Bible as a work of literature as well as theology and moral instruction.
If a single book beckoned me back to the Bible after years of sporadic and indifferent Bible reading, it was Joseph Heller’s God Knows, a comic novel in which the story of King David is told in the first person by David himself with the patter and the point of view of a stand-up comic in a burlesque house. Heller, like Harold Bloom and Jack Miles, is a contemporary author who breathes new life back into a very old book.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bibles
When quoting from certain versions of the Bible, I have used abbreviations in the text to identify the source of the quote. These abbreviations are given in the list below, along with the full title and bibliographical information for the various bibles. Following the abbreviations list, there is a list of other versions of the Bible that I have consulted. Where no specific source is indicated in the text, the quotation is taken from the 1962 edition of the Jewish Publication Society’s The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (JPS).
JPS The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961.
KJV The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments in the King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1985.
NAB The New American Bible. Catholic Bible Association of America. Chicago: Catholic Press, 1971.
NEB The New English Bible with the Apocrypha. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
New JPS Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985.
NRSV The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. New Revised Standard Version. Edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
RSV The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. Revised Standard Version, Containing the Second Edition of the New Testament. Edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Scofield KJV The Scofield Reference Bible. Authorized King James Version. New York: Oxford University Press, 1945.
Anderson, Francis I. and David Noel Freedman, tr., notes, and comm. Hosea. Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986.
Boling, Robert G., tr. and intro. Judges. Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.
Hertz, J. H. ed. The Pentateuch and Haftorahs. 2d ed. London: Soncino Press, 1981.
McCarter, P. Kyle, Jr., tr., intro., notes, and comm. II Samuel Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984.
The Complete Parallel Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Speiser, E. A., tr., intro., and notes. Genesis. Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987.
General Reference Works
Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, New York: Abingdon Press, 1962.
Botterweck, G. Johannes, and Helmer Ringgren, eds. The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977.
Browning, W. R. F. A Dictionary of the Bible, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Freedman, David Noel. gen. ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Vols. 1-6. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Housman, M. Th. et al., eds. E. J. Brill’s First Encyclopaedia of Islam, J9I3-J936. Vols. 2, 5, and 7. Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1987.
Encyclopaedia Judaica. Vols. 1-17. corrected ed. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, Ltd., n.d.
Books
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
Alter, Robert, and Frank Kermode, eds. The Literary Guide to the Bible. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987.
Amit, Yairah. “Literature in the Service of Politics: Studies in Judges 19-21.” In Politics and Theopolitics in the Bible and Postbiblical Literature, edited by Henning Graf Reventlow, Yair Hoffman, and Benjamin Uffenheimer, pp. 28-40. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, supplement series 171, Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1994.
Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Atkinson, Clarissa W., Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret Miles, eds. Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Images and Social Reality. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.
Aycock, D. Alan. “The Fate of Lot’s Wife: Structural Mediation in Biblical Mythology.” In Structuralist Interpretati
ons of Biblical Myth, edited by Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock, 113-19.
Baker, Cynthia. “Pseudo-Philo and the Transformation of Jephthah’s Daughter.” In Anti-Covenant, edited by Mieke Bal, 195-209.
Bal, Mieke. ed. Anti-Covenant: Counter-reading Women’s Lives in the Hebrew Bible. Sheffield, England: Almond Press, 1989.
Barnavi, Eli, gen. ed. A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People: From the Time of the Patriarchs to the Present. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Begin, Menachem. The Revolt, (orig. 1951) rev. ed. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1977.