Now, you can read the texts that were edited together thousands of years ago to form the early books of the Bible. For over a century, many scholars have said that these books are made up of the following texts:
The J text was written by a member of the Judean court, which included many people from surrounding nations.
The E text was written by a one of the group of priests from the earliest Israelite religious center at Shiloh, who believed they were descended from Moses.
The P text was written by one of the group of priests in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem, who believed they were descended from Aaron.
For the first time, this edition arranges these texts in parallel columns. You can read down a column to read a text from beginning to end. You can read across columns to compare the same story in different texts.
This edition also includes an introduction showing how the texts reflect the authors' backgrounds and the events of their times.
In cases where scholars disagree, this edition assigns passages in ways that make each text as consistent and continuous as possible, allowing new insights into the Bible.
For example, this edition shows that there is a strong contrast between the J text, which has an amoral religion and an anthropomorphic God, and the E text, which has a moral religion and a much more advanced view of God In the conventional text of the Bible, the J and E texts are mixed together. In this edition, they are separated, so it is easy to see how different they are.
Both scholars and other readers will appreciate this books many insights into the texts.
Readers who are new to this theory of how the Bible was written will be fascinated to see difficult, hard-to-read and self-contradictory portions of the Bible separated into source texts that are easy to read and consistent, and they will appreciate the book's clear introduction to this theory and to the authors and their times.
Siegel has made an important contribution to Biblical scholarship and to the public's understanding of the Bible.