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but, as Jean Astruc first demonstrated in 1753, we can trace their signatures and idiosyncratic constructions throughout the individual books. In effect, the Bible’s text can bring us back to its putative authors.
    The theory stems from a cluster of inconsistencies in the Book of Genesis. At times, God is referred to as “Yahweh,” and at others, as “Elohim.” Moreover, in chapters 1 and 2, the same event—the Creation of Adam and Eve—is narrated twice; at Genesis 1:26–27 and at Genesis 2:7, 21–23. In chapter 1, we are told “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” In chapter 2, we are told of Adam being fashioned out of dust and breath, and Eve from Adam’s rib. There are further curious anomalies. In chapter 1, God makes the birds and sea creatures on the fifth day, and the land animals on the sixth, prior to Adam. In chapter 2, verse 19, God creates animals
after
Adam.
    The documentary hypothesis suggests that there were originally two books of Genesis, one by “J”—the Yahwist, the writer who calls God Yahweh—and another by “E”—the Elohist, who refers to Elohim. These “urtexts” were synthesized into one version, with both contradictory sections aspicked together. “J,” for example, is fond of puns: it is to him that the etymology of “Adam,” meaning red earth, belongs. “J” also is keen to give explanations for how things came about and why names are attached to particular places. “E” is altogether more cryptic, an older version, perhaps especially considering his name for God is unaccountably in the plural.
    To “J” and “E” were added the Deuteronomist (“D”) and the Priestly Author (“P”). “D” had a clear ideological theology: that God punished Israel for its intransigence and for straying from the Law, and that the history of the Jewish people was a moral lesson in the consequences of disobedience. The Priestly Author was a liturgist and ecclesiast, defining the ramifications of the Law, the categories of clean and unclean, the role of the Levites, and the authority of the Torah. “D” understood the reasons for the Exile; “P” reaffirmed the centrality of the Temple.
    It’s a neat quartet, and an attractive theory. Unfortunately, it is only a theory. As much as one can almost hallucinate the differing qualities of “D,” “E,” “J,” and “P,” they are virtual authors at best, makeshift theories of possible writers. All of them collapse, especially at the advance of the fifth single-letter function: enter “R,” the Redactor.
    â€œR” was the genius who spliced together “J” and “E” to give us the Old Testament. Only, “R” was never singular; “R” is a veritable host of textual editors, a dynasty of tinkerers, eliders, alterers, correctors, amenders, and tidiers. A redactor, from the Latin
redigere, redactum,
is one who brings back. In effect, their shaping and framing never did recapture an aboriginal lost text, but tessellated a heap of fragments. The sublime Isaiah—or all three different writers who were merged together under that name—is jimmied next to a satire on the attitude of prophets (the Book of Jonah); the earnest claim that the good man has never been seen without sustenance, in the Book of Proverbs, is countered by the sadistic, inexplicable punishment of the good man Job (although admittedly, he does get fourteen thousand sheep in compensation). As a theologian friend once said to me, in utter exasperation, “It’s all just redacted to buggery.”
    A sepulchre of possible authors, a catafalque of contradictory texts: the Bible is a library, but one in ruins.

Sappho
    {
sixth century
B.C.E.}
    THE GREEK LYRICAL poet Sappho of Lesbos