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Moacyr Scliair: A Mulher que escreveu a Biblia(The Woman Who Wrote The Bible)
The Book of J is, based on translations by J and was written by Harold Bloom based on translations by David Rosenberg, Their basic view was that the early part of the Old Testament was written by someone identified as J. What was particularly revolutionary about their theory is that it was written by woman in a period, ninth century.BCE, when women could not and did not write and if, by chance they did, it would be highly unlikely that they would be given such an important work to write.
Moacyr Scliair has taken this idea and written a satire about it.
However, the book opens in the late 20th century when the unnamed narrator.explains how and why she became a past-life therapist. She has been very successful in this profession and made a name for herself when she receives a new client, the daughter of a rich father. We learn how she has fallen out with her family(an affair of the heart, of course.) and moved to the big city and got a good job there.
The woman seems to have a colourful past life, and particularly she seems to be living in Solomon’s Palace. Unfortunately, our narrator, while well-versed in various aspects of history knows little about the Bible and the biblical past. The client seems to be in Solomon’s harem and in love with the man himself, but then it seems that she is also in love with our narrator. Initially, she rejects the woman’s approaches then gradually she herself grows attracted to her. However, it all goes wrong as the woman has renewed her relationship with her previous lover and leaves town leaving behind a binder describing in some detail her life in Solomon’s harem.We then move back to the ninth century BC.
The narrator is now a ninth century woman who is the daughter of a tribal leader in Israel. One day she finds her sister looking at herself in a mirror. She had never seen such an object before and if her father knew about it, he would be furious. Nevertheless, our narrator manages to grab the mirror from her sister and look at herself in it and his horrified to find that she is in fact very ugly, unlike her attractive sister.
She falls in love with a shepherd boy who works for her father but finds out that he is having an affair with her sister. When their father finds out the boy is stoned, but not to death and then driven away.
In the tribe no-one, can read and write except for the scribe employed by the father. For some reason, it is not entirely clear why, he decides to teach our narrator to read and write and she is very happy to do so and takes great pleasure in writing stories and other items.
One day, an emissary comes to the tribe and the father learns that he has to give up his eldestdaughter to Solomon which is a great honour for him. So off she goes to Jerusalem.
She is registered by an overseer and when he makes a spelling mistake, she corrects him. He is very surprised that she can read the write, and notes it on her records.
Once she has checked in she is taken to meet Solomon. At this point Scliar is determined that the humorous aspect of his story will be paramount and very funny it is but there is no pretence of even trying to approach anything like historical story accuracy.
The first example of this is when she arrives at Solomon’s court and he is busy making what we know as the Judgement of Solomon. Not surprisingly, perhaps while the court is generally amazed at Solomon’s wisdom, our heroine takes a somewhat different view. Less surprisingly, Solomon, when she removes her veil, e is not overly impressed but he is nevertheless polite.
She is taken to the harem but does not seem to fit in with the others and eagerly awaits her turn to be summoned to the royal presence. Inevitably that does not happen. She is not the only one not called to the royal presence and she organises a mini rebellion requiring him to call all of them up in turn. In reality of course she wouldhave been executed for this but what happens here is that she is summoned to his presence. However, once he takes a look at her, he is unable to perform which upsets him as much as her. She is sent away and he seems to go on strike for a couple of weeks.
We now have another improbability in that the shepherd boy who was stoned turns up outside the harem and she cooks up a fiendish plan to overthrow Solomon, which would have certainly got her executed. A letter. She was planning to send to her father using the shepherd boy as a messenger is intercepted. However, Solomon, instead of executing her, is impressed by the writing in a letter and has her join the team of people, all men, of course writing about history of Israel the glories of his reign. They have been squabbling and produced only poor quality work. He feels she can do better.
The rest of the book is how she writes, if not the Bible, is a good chunk of the old Testament. Inevitably, it is not all smooth. An example is her view of the Adam and Eve story does not coincide with the view of the group of old men who were writing the Bible before her and which is essentially the story that we know from the current Bible. To put it bluntly there is a lot more sex in her version. Solomon makes her change it. There are various issues of that kind and.Scliar has great fun mocking it all. If you are religious, you may find this novel some what hat sacrilegious. She keeps hoping that Solomon will invite her to his bedroom, but he does not. It is not all about her writing. The shepherd boy turns up again, and he has very much changed and looks intent on causing trouble. She makes friends with a former a concubine and we learn a certain amount of gossip from her.
When, and this happens more than once , she is annoyed with Solomon she actually writes what might happen in the future to him and, indeed though of course she has to scrub this it does seem to conform with what it is in the Bible that we know.
Apart from the activities of the Shepherd boy, the main key event is the arrival of the Queen of Sheba and, of course, she gets involved there and learns a lot about the Queen of Sheba and Solomon, not least because her bedroom is next to theirs.
This is a very clever book, a very funny book and a highly inventive book. As mentioned it is course sacrilegious but all done with( relatively) good intentions. My only surprise is why it has taken so long to appear in English. In short, if you are not too religious, I would highly recommend this book.
h3>Publishing history
First published in 199 by Companhia das Letras
First English translation in 2026 by University of New Mexico Press
Translated by Heath Wing