David Rosenberg

David Rosenberg (born August 1, 1943) is an American poet, biblical translator, editor, and educator. He is best known for The Book of J (with Harold Bloom) and A Poet's Bible, which earned PEN Translation Prize in 1992. The Book of J stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for many weeks.

Biography David Rosenberg was born on August 1, 1943, in Detroit, Michigan to Herman and Shifra Rosenberg. His father worked in the popcorn business and his mother worked as a seamstress. Rosenberg is married to Rhonda Rosenberg, a public health scientist.

Professional After getting his B.A he was the personal assistant of Robert Lowell at The New School in New York City from 1961 to 1962. What was notable about the book was that Rosenberg and Bloom identify the earliest narrator of the bible as a woman.

In 2006, his translations of biblical passages helped him write Abraham: The First Historical Biography. Publishers Weekly reported the book was sold to Viking in 2001. This book puts biblical Abraham into the cultural context of ancient Sumer. "...became an ancient Hebrew religious poet writing in the rhythms of the United States." Further, he notes in his review that Harold Bloom, who co-wrote The Book of J with Rosenberg, identified J as Bathsheba. Rosenberg doesn't agree with this.

The Book of J In this work, which was a product of a collaboration with Harold Bloom, the authors focused on the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, and more specifically a source identified as the Yahwist.

In regard to Rosenberg's translation, co-author Harold Bloom said: "The main virtue I find in David Rosenberg's translation of what we have ventured to call the Book of J is that he has preserved the Yahwist's ironic tone and stance, while remembering throughout how individual her irony is." Additionally, Bloom adds "The play on J's language emerges in Rosenberg's version as it does not in Tyndale, King James, or Speiser.... As always, what we are likeliest to miss in J when we read her previous translators is given back to us by Rosenberg." The work includes commentary from Devorah Bat-David, a semi-fictional scholar in the Solomonic Library of ancient Jerusalem. Robert Taylor, from The Boston Globe said that "Rosenberg blends Devorah Bat-David's commentary on the Book of Paradise with his own remarks, framing a lucid prose poetry that conveys the sense of the story as both extremely old and intensely immediate." A contributor for Publishers Weekly said: "Rosenberg's ruminations range so widely that they are sometimes difficult to follow; alongside allusions to Kafka and Dante, he refers to the television series Touched by an Angel and devotes nearly an entire chapter to the spirituality exhibited on Oprah."

The Book of David Using the books of Samuel as his main source, Rosenberg shows King David as king, warrior, poet, and scholar. The narrator is "S", who was possibly a young man in a sexual relationship with J, from The Book of J. Jeff Ahrens of Booklist said: "He translates the results, which actually lack the events of David's life before he became king, and they entertain as much as the presentation of them fascinates." Rosenberg identifies Biblical Abraham as being written from 4 different narrators: J (from the Book of J), X, E, and P. Bryce Christensen, in a Booklist review of the title, said: "Rosenberg's explanations of how the God of Scripture and first Hebrew appeared together on the stage of history draw on both immense research and shrewd speculation." In the New York Sun, Carl Rollyson says: "Abraham is not, in Mr. Rosenberg's view, a legendary figure but a person who actually lived. He is not merely a "fiction" created by writers establishing a religion but a flesh-and-blood man who left records of himself and his culture, lost for millennia but now gradually being excavated from what once was Sumer and its surroundings." In this book, Rosenberg seeks to understand not just the subject, but the narrators as well.