Pynchon and the Bible

[Doug Millison]

So, setting aside the notion of Pynchon as author and setting up 
instead some sort of notion of his works as socially constructed -- 
some of you have far more facility with the relevant lit-crit lingo 
here -- it might be fun to think of his fiction, if gathered together 
between the covers of a single volume, as "a product of the hopes, 
fears,
and ambitions of the kingdom of America, culminating in the reign of 
King Bush at the end of the twenty-first century CE in the Early 
Silicon Age," the sort of literary/religious/historical work that 
could be used, together with the future ruins of this "civilization", 
to recreate its history, assuming, that is, anybody will still be 
around to take the trouble.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/finkelstein-bible.html
"We will see how much of the biblical narrative is a product of the 
hopes, fears,
and ambitions of the kingdom of Judah, culminating in the reign of 
King Josiah at the end of the seventh century BCE. We will argue that 
the historical core of the Bible arose from clear political, social, 
and spiritual conditions and was shaped by the creativity and vision 
of extraordinary women and men. Much of what is commonly taken for 
granted as accurate history - the stories of the patriarchs, the 
Exodus, the conquest of Canaan, and even the saga of the glorious 
united monarchy of David and Solomon - are, rather, the creative 
expressions of a powerful religious reform movement that flourished 
in the kingdom of Judah in the Late Iron Age. Although these stories 
may have been based on certain historical kernels, they primarily 
reflect the ideology and the world-view of the writers. We will show 
how the narrative of the Bible was uniquely suited to further the 
religious reform and territorial ambitions of Judah during the 
momentous concluding decades of the seventh century BCE.
But suggesting that the most famous stories of the Bible did not 
happen as the Bible records them is far from implying that ancient 
Israel had no genuine history. In the following chapters we will 
reconstruct the history of ancient Israel on the basis of 
archaeological evidence - the only source of information on the 
biblical period that was not extensively emended, edited, or censored 
by many generations of biblical scribes."

from the first chapter of
The Bible Unearthed
Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel
and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
By ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN and NEIL ASHER SILBERMAN

(this url offers a link to the NY Times Book Review review of the book, too)
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>