Testament, Volume 14 #4

The Many Voices of the Book of R

A few years ago, translator David Rosenberg and literary critic Harold Bloom collaborated on The Book of J, an attempt to recover one of the strands that was woven into what eventually became the first five books of the Bible--the part that Jews call the Torah. The Book of J was notable for a number of provocative suggestions on Bloom's part, including his radical although not wholly improbable conjecture that J was a woman.

I share Rosenberg and Bloom's affection for the J strand, but as an editor I have perhaps even greater admiration for another participant in the collective endeavor that the Torah represents. This is R, the Redactor. While the Roman Catholic Church offers editors the patronage of Sts. Francis de Sales from seventeenth-century Savoy and John Bosco from nineteenth-century Turin, neither of whom seems to have done much editing, I find continuing inspiration in the work of R.

When I am not editing Compass, I spend a good part of my time working on books on Canadian political economy in partnership with two other journalists. It is my job in these collaborations to take the material that the three of us have written and organize it into what we hope is a coherent text. There are a number of circumstances that simplify this task for me. First of all, we are in general agreement on the subjects we are writing about, and can meet in advance to work out a common position. Second, we can communicate while we are writing to make sure we remain on the same track. And third, computer technology makes the mechanics of moving text from one place to another fairly easy.

R had none of these advantages. He had no technology beyond parchment and a quill. The material he worked with was written by authors who were long dead and was quite diverse in focus and interest. In fact, the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman argues that one of the strands, the Priestly or "P" document, was deliberately written as an alternative to an already existing torah that had been fashioned out of the work of J and her near-contemporary E.[FN 1] (The priests who wrote P, tracing their ancestry to Aaron, would have found the E story in which Aaron directs the building of the golden calf particularly distasteful.)

But despite all these difficulties R--who Friedman and others suggest may have been Ezra, the great priest and scribe who served as religious leader of the Jews on their return from Babylonian exile--compiled one of the world's masterpieces of religious literature. Perhaps most remarkable is the extent to which the Torah has appeared, down through the ages, to be a unified text. To be sure, there are places where, as the contemporary Torah teacher Joel Lurie Grishaver has noted, "the Torah reads as if someone else has just clicked the remote and shifted channels on us." Still, the Torah was around for two thousand years before readers began to suspect that it was the work of more than one author.

Even now, after several more centuries and a great deal of enthusiastic picking apart of the text by scholars, we are generally more inclined to focus on the Torah as a whole than on the various strands. I suspect that this is a reflection less of public ignorance of the latest scholarly findings than of R's genius, for he did far more than simply hide the seams in the Torah. In bringing together the different strands, he gave the Torah a kind of unity within diversity that allowed it to encompass more than any individual text could have.

"The mixing of the sources into one text," writes Friedman, "enriched the interpretive possibilities of the Bible for all time." He especially notes the way in which the mixing of the sources produced the rich and complex view of God that emerges in the Torah: both an immanent and a transcendent God, a God of both justice and mercy. This portrait combines P's transcendent God of justice with the more personal and compassionate God of J and E. The hybrid is more satisfying, and indeed more true, than either of the elements of which it is composed.

There is an irreducible pluralism at the base of the religions that grew from this core text. God speaks to us through this text with more than one voice, and reconciling these divergent voices is our responsibility. It is a text that asks us to approach it in a spirit of posing difficult questions rather than one of looking for easy answers. It invites us to seek truth not by embracing one reality and excluding others, but by struggling with the ways in which different and sometimes contradictory realities can coexist.

This struggle was the challenge R set himself in compiling the Torah, and it is the challenge we set ourselves in reading his work. It is a highly rewarding task, and we owe the privilege of being able to undertake it to R.