Renowned biblical sleuth and scholar Richard Elliot Friedman reveals the first work of prose literature in the world-a 3000-year-old epic hidden within the books of the Hebrew Bible. Written by a single, masterful author but obscured by ancient editors and lost for millennia, this brilliant epic of love, deception, war, and redemption is a compelling account of humankind's complex relationship with God. Friedman boldly restores this prose masterpiece-the very heart of the Bible-to the extraordinary form in which it was originally written.
Richard Elliott Friedman's The Hidden Book in the Bible may be the most important literary discovery of our century. Or it may be a load of guano. The Hidden Book, like Michael Drosnin's The Bible Code, makes the audacious claim that its author has discovered a secret structure of meaning in the holy texts of Christianity and Judaism. Bucking more than a century of biblical textual criticism, Friedman claims that one author, probably a lay person, wrote many of the most familiar stories in the Hebrew Bible (including the stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, and David) as one unified text. The Hidden Book's introduction defends this thesis with close readings of the patterns of punctuation, word choice, sentence structure, and allusion used in these stories; the remainder of the book is a reconstruction of what Friedman says is the original, foundational text at the heart of the Bible.
Unlike The Bible Code, Friedman's book abstains from making specific interpretive claims based on its findings. Yet Friedman does draw one lesson for contemporary readers from the story he has found--perhaps the only element of this book that will escape the controversy it is sure to cause. In an age of relativism, Friedman writes, "Suddenly this work comes back from nearly three thousand years ago. And it says yes, humans have the power to make judgments of what is good and bad and right and wrong. In this story, the creator of the earth does not always reveal what is good and bad, but rather the humans take the fruit that enables them to make these judgments." --Michael Joseph Gross
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
The oldest book of Prose:
The introduction to this book is worth the price of the book. How he shows a theme that travels the books of the bible and shows how they appear in almost every book, from Genesis to Kings. What I like about Friedman is that he shows how the bile fits together, even though he argues for separate authors, he has done more to show how the bible is really unified and he does it by showing how diverse it is. In his books, he shows pockets of gold, that make the bible more interesting, little bits of... more info
Strange & wonderful narrative core of the Old Testament:
This remarkable book identifies the earliest work of prose literature heretofore hidden in the Old Testament. It was extracted from Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, I & II Samuel and I Kings. Restored, translated and introduced by Friedman, the narrative does seem to be the work of one author and was probably written in the time of King Solomon. Originally a united story, it was cut up by the Bible's editors so that other narratives, laws and poetry were inserted into and... more info
Excellent scholarship; awkward translation:
Richard Friedman could probably be called the Julius Wellhausen of modern biblical studies. Like Wellhausen did a century ago, Friedman has essentially updated, expanded, and clarified the Documentary Hypothesis so as to make a book on this subject from just 30 years ago seem hopelessly outdated. P in the postexilic period? Psssshaw... While I had heard of this book before, I was naturally skeptical of its rather large claims, but after seeing the evidence for myself I agree with Friedman's conclusion-... more info
Actual Oldest Example of Human Prose:
The foremost scholar of the JEPD textual theory of the Torah, Friedman presents his scholarly notes and backgrounds, and the reconstructed text of what he understands to be the original story of the J text, thought to be the oldest narrative of the Torah, which uses Yahweh as the name of God. Freidman's analytical reconstruction differs from that of Harold Bloom, in "The Book of J." Friedman find the J Writer in much of the material up through the Davidic monarchy of united Israel. Bloom follows the... more info
