The Sources of Biblical Narrative – Tzemah Yoreh
Tzemah Yoreh was the youngest PhD in the history of Hebrew University’s Faculty of Humanities and is currently a Professor of Bible at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. You can find out more about his work at www.biblecriticism.com.
Every composition of a book is in a way the autobiography of the author, even if the book is not really a book but a website and the work in question is the most technical of scholarly treatises. The author’s life story is hidden in invisible nuggets between the words, only discerned by the most astute readers. If the book puts forth a daring new hypothesis, as this one does, then it stands to reason that the voyage of discovery involved momentous events in the author’s own life, even if they were mainly cerebral. In this short forward, I wish to share with the reader a precious nugget in my voyage of discovery.
When I was 21 I killed Isaac. Oh not literally, I didn’t invent a time machine – that would have been really exciting. I discovered that the original Genesis narrative told a story in which the angel did not stop the knife from coming down but let it cut through Isaac’s tender flesh, severing his head and the narratival continuity between Abraham and Jacob. I sat the traditional seven days of mourning for Isaac who was no longer my father, and for Abraham whom I had disowned, and then gave a lecture / eulogy on it at the World Congress of Jewish Studies. Read more
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