Letters

摘要

Your obituary for Harold Bloom noted that his list of great writers in "The Western Canon" was "almost all male" (October 26th). In that same book, Bloom also credited the earliest source of the Bible to a woman. "The Book of J", which Bloom wrote before "The Western Canon", embraced the documentary hypothesis, which holds that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, were written primarily by four authors, conventionally referred to as J, E, P and D. Those works were later edited, probably by Ezra the Scribe around 444BC, into the single narrative we have today.