The Randy Redactor

I’ve made it my life’s work to excavate the foundations of biblical storytelling, to tell stories that were once there and are there no more. As I was doing this, I noticed something very curious, there were a cluster of stories in plain sight that were studiously ignored by biblical readers, and yet they were even more subversive than the stories I worked so hard to dig up. In a new book that I have begun to write I will tell you these stories, and explain how they made it into the biblical text.

Here is my planned preface:

There used to be a story in the Torah of a woman who had sexual relations with God himself, of demigods who walked the earth, of men enjoying themselves with talking animals, and of magicians so powerful they could command God.

They are no longer there. Or rather they are there but they are deliberately misunderstood.

In the first three books of this series I dedicate myself to excavation. To uncovering juicy stories that were buried under layers of pietistic or ‘frum’ biblical redaction so that they could form the basis of a religion. In this book I do something different, I look at stories hidden in plain sight of the readers, stories which are ignored because their true meaning would be shocking. The implications of this final layer of storytelling are far-reaching. This storyteller came after the pious priests and the zealous Deuteronomists, and was unhappy with what he found. I have spoken in previous work about how the ‘bloody priests’ ruined the bible, by neutering the subversive theologies of his predecessor, and making the Torah acceptable to their conservative heirs who perpetuated their vision. I am personally resentful towards those priests because they made the Bible less interesting, but this is tempered by a well of deep gratitude, without them the Bible would have been an interesting text, but not the basis of a religion. I was certainly not the first person to be dissatisfied. In the tumultuous days at the end of the Persian Empire, as the Torah was becoming a foundational holy text, but was not quite there yet, one last author had an opportunity to add his two cents, but it was only two cents. This was already at a time, when it was becoming progressively more difficult to add significant swathes of text, so this author contented himself with adding short stories at the edges.

But oh my the stories he added!

They make fun of God and biblical heroes and are very clearly non-monotheistic. This author has made me re-evaluate the past. If this author was in a position to add these texts there must have been a tolerance in ancient Judea that we don’t normally associate with our conservative antecedents, and that fills me with hope.

Why did this final Redactor create so many problems for the pious, and so many delicious moments for us. Read this book which I will probably publish sometime next year and discover!