Was Eve Cursed? - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > February 1993

Was Eve Cursed?

(or did a woman write Genesis?)

By Adrien Janis Bledstein

In a recent popular book entitled The Book of J—for a period in 1990, it was on the best-seller list—Harold Bloom argues that the biblical author known to scholars as J was a woman. J is the name scholars give to what is probably the oldest authorial strand of the Pentateuch; J stands for the Yahwist (Jahwist in German) because this strand uses the tetragrammaton yod-hay-vov-hay, YHWH or Yahweh when speaking of the Israelite deity. The Book of J was reviewed in Bible Review by a leading Bible scholara and was thereafter excoriated in a scathing full-length article by […]

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Footnotes

1.

Baruch Halpern, review of The Book of J, Bible Books, BR 07:01.

2.

“Is Everybody a Bible Expert?” BR 07:02, by Richard Elliott Friedman.

3.

Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Summit, 1987), p. 86.

4.

TeásûuÆqaÆ appears in only one other place in the Bible (Song of Songs 7:11), which may be read, “I am my beloved’s, he is attractive to me.” The woman proclaims the biblical ideal of mutual attraction.

5.

See Adrien Bledstein, “Was Habbirya a Healing Ritual Performed by a Woman in King David’s House?” Biblical Research 37 (1992), pp. 15–31.