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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > April 1991

Is Everybody a Bible Expert?

Not the authors of the Book of J

By Richard Elliott Friedman

It is a strange fact that we biblical scholars always seem to meet people who are surprised that we really know things about the Bible. They assume that the study of the Bible is a matter of opinions and interpretations, with few verifiable facts one way or another. Even though the archaeological revolution is about a century old, even though the advances in language, text and history are reported in thousands of books of introduction, history and commentary, people just do not conceive of biblical scholars as having the kind of expertise that professionals in medicine or law—or even […]

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Footnotes

1.

Grace Schulman wrote, “Bloom’s vision that the J author was a privileged and erudite woman is startling but convincing.…” Northrop Frye wrote, “The Book of J clearly highlights one of the major problems in Western culture: the fact that the Jehovah [sic] of the Old Testament is not a theological god at all but an intensely human character as violent and unpredictable as King Lear.” And Richard Howard wrote, “To read Bloom here is to become, a while, incandescent.”