“Overdetermined”—a Freudianism and one of the many fixed epithets in Harold Bloom’s imposing lexicon—is a term that in other circumstances this distinguished literary critic might have fairly applied to the epiphany he unveils in The Book of J: that the author of the oldest stories in the Hebrew Bible was a woman. Overdetermined, and—another Bloomism—belated into the bargain, for the idea smacks not so much of an original interpretative breakthrough as of an attempt, by means of a creative if weak misreading (still another Bloom trademark), to absorb and thence to escape a bedeviling anxiety of influence (ditto). But this is a tale which bears telling in parts.

While the great war in the universities against the value and viability of our culture proceeds as it proceeds, in a corner of one traditional redoubt of humanistic study, as in a ghetto under implacable siege, there has been an amazingly vigorous flush of creativity. The corner is occupied by the Bible. In the field of the humanities it is hard to think of an area where so much fresh critical intelligence has been so fruitfully employed as in the recent effort to understand and interpret the Bible as, precisely, a foundational work of Western consciousness.

That is, of Western literary consciousness. Whether or not individual scholars have been touched personally by the recent (and very qualified) relegitimation of religion in the intellectual culture at large, their work has been aimed wholly at a deeper apprehension not of