The Hidden Book In the Bible - Softcover

Friedman, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965685713 ISBN 13: 9780965685719

Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998

Synopsis

Renowned biblical sleuth and scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, author of Who Wrote the Bible?, reveals for the first time his most startling and revolutionary discovery: embedded within the Bible is a continuous narrative that had been sliced apart by ancient editors who interlaced it with other stories, laws, and poetry. It is a singular work of genius, the core of the Bible. Across three millennia, this great work of prose comes back to us--pieced together as it was originally meant to be read--in a fresh and powerful translation.

About this title

Review:

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

About the Author:

RICHARD ELLIOTT FRIEDMAN is one of the premier bible scholars in the country. He earned his doctorate at Harvard and was a visiting fellow at Oxford and Cambridge, a Senior Fellow of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Haifa. He is the Ann & Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia and the Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Commentary on the Torah, The Disappearance of God, The Hidden Book in the Bible, The Bible with Sources Revealed, The Bible Now, The Exile and Biblical Narrative, the bestselling Who Wrote the Bible?, and most recently, The Exodus. He was an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and was elected to membership in The Biblical Colloquium. His books have been translated into Hebrew, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, Korean, and French. He was a consultant for the Dreamworks film The Prince of Egypt, for Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers, and for NBC, A&E, PBS, and Nova.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0965685713
• ISBN 13: 9780965685719
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 402