The Book of Lost Books Read Online Free PDF

for King Amphidamas, and placed the prize (a tripod) on Mount Helicon, where he first started to write, on returning home. In
Works and Days
Hesiod does not tell us the title of his award-winning entry, and, since such works as
The Preceptsof Chiron, The Astronomy, The Marriage of Ceyx, Melampodia,
Aegimius, Idaean Dactyls,
and
The List of Heroines
have all proven vulnerable to the corrosion of passing time, at least one academic has made a virtue of necessity and argued that Hesiod must have been reciting the
Theogony.
    But against whom was he vying in this competition? At the beginning of
Works and Days,
when surveying the effects of the goddess Strife, Hesiod conjectures that there must be two goddesses; since some forms of striving, such as warfare, are pernicious, and others, such as the healthy competition between tradesmen, farmers, and even poets, are wholly beneficial. The ancients took this as a cue to link Hesiod (whoever he was) with the only other great early poet, Homer (whoever he was).
    Another poem, called
The Contest of Homer and Hesiod,
is sometimes ascribed to Hesiod, even though the version that we have dates from nearly a millennium later. In it, Homer trounces Hesiod in every bout, and at one point seems to exasperate him into speaking nonsense. In the final round, they each read from “their” greatest works:
The Iliad
and
Works and Days.
The judges eventually give the victory (surprise, surprise! It’s a tripod!) to Hesiod, since the man who praises peace is better than the man who glorifies war. Blatantly apocryphal and clearly anachronistic, it is still the story that would be most charming, if true.

The Yahwist, the Elohist, the
Deuteronomist, the Priestly
Author, and the Redactor
    {
c. sixth century
B.C.E.}
    THE BIBLE IS frequently described as a library rather than a book: it is also a mausoleum of writers, a vast graveyard of authors. Who wrote the Bible? The orthodox answer is, assuredly, God; but even the most inflexible traditionalist does not believe that the Infinite condescended to ink. Through prophecy, inspiration, and occasionally blatant dictation, God speaks but Man writes. God does have books—in particular, one which He is inordinately fond of editing. As He says to Moses, “Whoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book.” But the books of the Bible as we have them are by God by proxy at best.
    With the books of prophecy, it seemed logical to assign them to the prophets themselves as nominal authors. We are exhorted to “Hear the Word of the Lord,” regurgitated through human agency, as in the case of Ezekiel, whom God forced to swallow a scroll containing His message. The prophets sometimes employed their God’s method of production: Jeremiah entrusted the actual transcription of his prophecies, which threatened the impending Babylonian conquest, to Baruch, who had to make multiple copies since the king, Jehoiakim, kept on burning the offending prophecies.
    Jeremiah raged against false prophets, who were predicting an opposite outcome. Naturally enough, when Babylon did conquer Israel, the words of the worthless prophets were lost, and the correct foretellings of Jeremiah acquired the authenticity of oracular revelation. The scribes who collected the prophets were not above sleight of hand in this matter: the Book of Isaiah collates the words of an eighth-century B.C.E. prophet with the words of another, unknown prophet who lived two centuries after Isaiah’s death. Hindsight makes exceptionally good foresight.
    Then there are the five first books, the Pentateuch, which contain the laws given to Moses and the prehistorical origin of the world. Tradition ascribed these books to Moses himself, which seems unlikely, given that they also contain an account of Moses’ death, and his burial by God, “no man knows where.”
    Though apologists and ideologues are keen to present the scriptural texts as a unity (the Gideon