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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > Winter 2005

Genesis and the Cathedrals

Like a French cathedral, Genesis was built over time.

By Ronald S. Hendel

One of the most important characters of Victor Hugo’s great novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is the old Notre Dame Cathedral itself. Hugo calls it “a vast symphony in stone,” composed of many exquisite elements derived from different historical periods, from Roman to Gothic. He compares it to a chimera, the mythic creature made from the parts of various animals: “This central and generative church is a kind of chimera among the old churches of Paris; it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the trunk of a third, something of all.” Yet in spite of its […]

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Endnotes

1.

Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (Boston: Colonial Press, 1910; trans. of second French edition, 1832), book 3, ch. 1.

2.

See Richard E. Friedman, See Richard E. Friedman, “;Taking the Biblical Text Apart,” BR 21:04; and his book, Who Wrote the Bible? (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987).

3.

Genesis is part of “the Book of the Torah of Moses,” as indicated by the references to the stories of Creation and Abraham in Nehemiah 9:6–8.

4.

J for the “Yahwist,” E for the “Elohist,” P for the “Priestly source,” R for the “Redactor” (or editor) and “other” for passages that cannot be identified (e.g., Genesis 14).

5.

Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, book 5, ch. 2.