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The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible
The King James Bible stands at "the sublime summit of literature in English," sharing the honor only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom contends in the opening pages of this illuminating literary tour. Distilling the insights acquired from a significant portion of his career as a brilliant critic and teacher, he offers readers at last the book he has been writing "all my long life," a magisterial and intimately perceptive reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterpiece. Bloom calls it an "inexplicable wonder" that a rather undistinguished group of writers could bring forth such a magnificent work of literature, and he credits William Tyndale as their fountainhead. Reading the King James Bible alongside Tyndale's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the original Hebrew and Greek texts, Bloom highlights how the translators and editors improved upon—or, in some cases, diminished—the earlier versions. He invites readers to hear the baroque inventiveness in such sublime books as the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and alerts us to the echoes of the King James Bible in works from the Romantic period to the present day. Throughout, Bloom makes an impassioned and convincing case for reading the King James Bible as literature, free from dogma and with an appreciation of its enduring aesthetic value.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published September 6, 2011
52 people are currently reading
415 people want to read
About the author
Harold Bloom
1,717 books2,031 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
September 10, 2012
To say that I didn’t pay attention in Catholic Sunday school would be a severe understatement. Like most suburban boys I left the church around middle school, when a trip to see a James Bond movie with a girl was the alternative.
Only now at 27 do the cadences of the King James Bible lure me on, and only then did I become interested after those sounds were filtered through other sources: Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York, Terrence Malick’s version of the Book of Job (Tree of Life). Lastly James Agee’s appropriation of Ecclesiastes changed my inner life radically enough to where I knew it was time to make peace with some of the heritage I had left behind so gleefully, and long ago.
Harold Bloom was the final influence in my decision to start bringing the stories into my life. The literary critic writes with a passion that seems to have been squashed out of book talk. When I flew to NY to hear Bloom’s last public talk, at the New York Public Library, one of the libraries that saved a young and impoverished boy Bloom, I was thrilled with his references to Lionel Trilling and meeting Edmund Wilson (who was just as tart and funny in Bloom's account as the prose I’ve read of his). But what struck me most about the speaker was the religiosity of feeling he had when talking about living a life of literature. There were trusted guides and remembered poems. Reviled by many academics, Bloom, and his increasingly shaky hand, stayed at a table with his wife and assistant to sign every last book. There may never be another like him. So scholarly yet so nimble with a clear sentence. Bloom has been a university education for me during the times when I can afford to get away and store up the brain, for the hike into the tangled wilderness of words.
Bloom is tired, and he lets his reader know that this is an “aesthetic appreciation” of the Bible. Some of the writing rivals Shakespeare, as the schoolmasters of old well knew. He ends the book on a strange and dangling note, sorrowful at the interpreters who read Revelation literally, Rev being a book of the New Testament that does nothing for him.
The aspect of this book that interested me the most was Bloom’s sprinkling of “secular” sources, used to explain or compare the writing of the Old Testament. He does this to great effect with the book of Jacob. He gives just as much citation to German writer Thomas Mann’s version, told in "Joseph and His Brothers," as he does the King James and Geneva versions. The presupposition being that men of high ability have been capable of writing like this across all the years. This realization shocked me into the present. There are income inequality fighters in these stories, there are deceptions which God turns into blessings, a kind of turn of fortune we can easily see with our achievers today and the Idols presiding over them. You can pick up the patterns of these poems, and see today, or I did with the help of Bloom putting these stories on the level with William Blake, Moby Dick, James Agee, Thomas Mann, Shakespeare, and more.
Starting with his humbly titled book GENIUS, Bloom has been flirting with the idea that he may be some kind of prophet. I always read his voice with care. Each book I’ve read feels like it has been released, and I never find much reason to argue with that kind of writing. I just go with it, possibly because I don't have enough time, or tenure. For good or ill.
The book of Jacob is really the most interesting. One because God seems to eventually pardon familial deceit, if the deceiver later works for it. Just as in Job, God or Yahweh's position w/r/t us is very difficult to discern. Two, the mystery of it is palpable. Jacob was a regular son, not the favored son working in the field. At birth he grabbed onto the brothers heel, and proceeds through life to hang on to that boy’s identity, indeed bargaining with his brother for the namesake. Then he deceives his father, by feeding him in the dark (?) and proving he has hairy hands like his brother, Esau. The father gives the blessing,mistaking Jacob for Esau, and Jacob lives with it while the able hunter Esau is denied the blessing. Bloom highlights the dry comedy of this event as told in the KJB. The sorrowful reaction from father and Esau when they find out Jacob has made off with the blessing does now read to me like something out of a Cohen Brothers film. But... Jacob goes on to be tested. He proves to be a loving father , very rare thing, to Joseph, and he has to stand up to the unknown when he is confronted on a hill by a mysterious angel of death. He fights him and wins, I think, his future in the world. His name then becomes Israel, and his son later a king.
The fight has as much force as any we would see in a movie, as the inner thigh of Jacob has been wounded by the mystery personage. He goes off limping, not forgetting that night under the moon.
I had this book on me when I ran into a 60 year old acquaintance. He’s more into history and is mostly focused on his lawyering work anyway. He admired the book and turned to the quote that has followed him around since he was young. This passage is usually cherished by those who have been dealt the blow of experience in some manner.
“And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”
Isaiah 32:2
Bloom chooses this epigraph carefully, slyly, knowing of the competitive land in which he writes.
Anyway, Bloom’s star is fading, but that mind is just as active, and able to connect many north stars still. Here he presents, again, some of the best and challenging that has been said and thought in the language.
Only now at 27 do the cadences of the King James Bible lure me on, and only then did I become interested after those sounds were filtered through other sources: Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York, Terrence Malick’s version of the Book of Job (Tree of Life). Lastly James Agee’s appropriation of Ecclesiastes changed my inner life radically enough to where I knew it was time to make peace with some of the heritage I had left behind so gleefully, and long ago.
Harold Bloom was the final influence in my decision to start bringing the stories into my life. The literary critic writes with a passion that seems to have been squashed out of book talk. When I flew to NY to hear Bloom’s last public talk, at the New York Public Library, one of the libraries that saved a young and impoverished boy Bloom, I was thrilled with his references to Lionel Trilling and meeting Edmund Wilson (who was just as tart and funny in Bloom's account as the prose I’ve read of his). But what struck me most about the speaker was the religiosity of feeling he had when talking about living a life of literature. There were trusted guides and remembered poems. Reviled by many academics, Bloom, and his increasingly shaky hand, stayed at a table with his wife and assistant to sign every last book. There may never be another like him. So scholarly yet so nimble with a clear sentence. Bloom has been a university education for me during the times when I can afford to get away and store up the brain, for the hike into the tangled wilderness of words.
Bloom is tired, and he lets his reader know that this is an “aesthetic appreciation” of the Bible. Some of the writing rivals Shakespeare, as the schoolmasters of old well knew. He ends the book on a strange and dangling note, sorrowful at the interpreters who read Revelation literally, Rev being a book of the New Testament that does nothing for him.
The aspect of this book that interested me the most was Bloom’s sprinkling of “secular” sources, used to explain or compare the writing of the Old Testament. He does this to great effect with the book of Jacob. He gives just as much citation to German writer Thomas Mann’s version, told in "Joseph and His Brothers," as he does the King James and Geneva versions. The presupposition being that men of high ability have been capable of writing like this across all the years. This realization shocked me into the present. There are income inequality fighters in these stories, there are deceptions which God turns into blessings, a kind of turn of fortune we can easily see with our achievers today and the Idols presiding over them. You can pick up the patterns of these poems, and see today, or I did with the help of Bloom putting these stories on the level with William Blake, Moby Dick, James Agee, Thomas Mann, Shakespeare, and more.
Starting with his humbly titled book GENIUS, Bloom has been flirting with the idea that he may be some kind of prophet. I always read his voice with care. Each book I’ve read feels like it has been released, and I never find much reason to argue with that kind of writing. I just go with it, possibly because I don't have enough time, or tenure. For good or ill.
The book of Jacob is really the most interesting. One because God seems to eventually pardon familial deceit, if the deceiver later works for it. Just as in Job, God or Yahweh's position w/r/t us is very difficult to discern. Two, the mystery of it is palpable. Jacob was a regular son, not the favored son working in the field. At birth he grabbed onto the brothers heel, and proceeds through life to hang on to that boy’s identity, indeed bargaining with his brother for the namesake. Then he deceives his father, by feeding him in the dark (?) and proving he has hairy hands like his brother, Esau. The father gives the blessing,mistaking Jacob for Esau, and Jacob lives with it while the able hunter Esau is denied the blessing. Bloom highlights the dry comedy of this event as told in the KJB. The sorrowful reaction from father and Esau when they find out Jacob has made off with the blessing does now read to me like something out of a Cohen Brothers film. But... Jacob goes on to be tested. He proves to be a loving father , very rare thing, to Joseph, and he has to stand up to the unknown when he is confronted on a hill by a mysterious angel of death. He fights him and wins, I think, his future in the world. His name then becomes Israel, and his son later a king.
The fight has as much force as any we would see in a movie, as the inner thigh of Jacob has been wounded by the mystery personage. He goes off limping, not forgetting that night under the moon.
I had this book on me when I ran into a 60 year old acquaintance. He’s more into history and is mostly focused on his lawyering work anyway. He admired the book and turned to the quote that has followed him around since he was young. This passage is usually cherished by those who have been dealt the blow of experience in some manner.
“And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”
Isaiah 32:2
Bloom chooses this epigraph carefully, slyly, knowing of the competitive land in which he writes.
Anyway, Bloom’s star is fading, but that mind is just as active, and able to connect many north stars still. Here he presents, again, some of the best and challenging that has been said and thought in the language.
January 6, 2020
I was raised in a Christian home and went to a Christian school and church from about three to fourteen. I started reading the Bible on my own at 12 but not regularly and not very deeply. When I went to college, the first English class I took was called Great Books: Western. We read Genesis as literature, and it was eye-opening for me. I realized how much of what I read into the Bible was based on stories and interpretations I was taught in church and school rather than actual Truth from the Word of God. For instance, I was taught that Noah was made fun of by his neighbors. Maybe that's true, but the Bible doesn't say that. I was also taught that Adam was created in Eden. Again, not true. The Bible says that God created Adam and then placed him in Eden, which makes a huge difference when we Creationists are trying to make substantiated claims against Evolutionists (not that they have to contradict each other, which is another falsehood I was taught).
My point is that reading Genesis as literature and being forced to read it closely forever changed the way that I read the Bible. Now, I still read it as Truth, as the Word of God, but I also read it in a similar way to how I read novels and other literary works. The Bible consists of words, after all, so why not read it as such? Later, as a grad student, I took a class called The Bible and Literature, for which we read selected Biblical passages and one or two of the literary works those passages inspired. It reminded me, again, to read the Bible closely, to fully understand and appreciate it, not just to gloss over my readings and accept what I've been taught as the definitive interpretations and explanations.
When I saw this book at the library, I was excited to pull it off the shelf even though I'm not a Bloom fan by any means. I was excited because I've learned so much from literary readings of the Bible, and I want to keep expanding my understanding. I am okay with the fact that most people employing a literary reading of the Bible do not also see it as the Word of God. The professor I took both classes with was not openly religious, by any means, but he was very respectful of the fact that the Bible is a sacred text for many people. I don't think literary readers of the Bible and spiritual readers have to be mutually exclusive.
However, this is the worst experience I've ever had with a literary interpretation of the Bible. First of all, the entirety of the subtitle is a lie. This is not a literary anything of the King James Bible. It's definitely not an appreciation (though I'll give Bloom some leeway since, according to etymnonline.com, the root of "appreciation" is "c. 1600 'act of estimating the quality and worth of something'"). And it's not even focused on the King James Bible. Then, Bloom commits several atrocities I tell my Freshman English students to avoid in Essay #1: over quoting, writing a running commentary or summary with analysis, generalizing, and being unfair to the reader. Finally, Bloom claims that the Greek Bible is anti-Semitic and filled with hate, yet when reading his "analysis" of the Christian texts, all I feel is vitriol, bitterness, and hatred, to the point where he loves reading Galatians because Paul is at his worst, and he basically loves James because Luther hated it.
So, I say this book isn't literary because Bloom reads the Bible as a sacred text but wants us to think he's reading it as pure literature. He doesn't critique the text the way someone would critique stories. He clearly believes in what he reads yet doesn't want to and feels angst about it all. He says he's a Jewish man with Gnostic tendencies, but he can't distance his experiences from his reading. I can't either, but I don't claim to. The fact that he reads Paul into Paul's letters again shows that he's taking it all literally. Maybe Paul is just an author who's creating a character of "Paul," considering that's what authors do? But we all know Paul really existed, and Bloom seems to forget he's doing a literary analysis and attacks the author, not the text.
Bloom doesn't just critique the Greek Bible. He's so critical of the Hebrew Bible as well. He confesses to disliking YHWH, and it shows. Again, it's all too personal, and he can never forget that the Bible isn't just a book--it's the sacred text for two major religions--even though he claims multiple times to leave those perceptions out of the whole thing. There is no appreciation here, and it's certainly not even about the KJB. Bloom refers so much to the Hebrew and how the KJB can't surpass the Hebrew in many places though it does in others. And he also talks about and quotes from the Tyndale and the Geneva extensively. So, I'm not sure how this is a book in appreciation of the KJB specifically. Why couldn't he/his editors have just called it an "exploration" of the Bible?
Bloom quotes extensively, and he doesn't explain most of his claims, the majority of which are staggering in their hyperbole, their clear scholarly elitism, and their complete lack of depth. He doesn't delve into anything he discusses. He often makes one statement, quotes a long passage, and then moves on, or, worse, he makes a claim then doesn't even show the text to back it up. He generalizes, and he says things like "most careful readers will see this" or "Most of my Christian friends wouldn't understand this question if I asked it."
Overall, the only good things I got out of this book were hours of entertainment with my own frustrations and some (some) knowledge I didn't have before about the origins of the Bible, its authorship, some history, and some Hebrew etymology. I don't like to just read the Bible; I like to study it, and the more information I have, the more I can appreciate it. So, I do appreciate some of Bloom's information, scant as it may be.
I can't recommend this book. It's offensive to readers who have other interpretations and understandings than Bloom's because only his are correct, and it's offensive to Christians because Bloom calls our sacred text Anti-Semitic and filled with hate then says we "claim" it's about love. That's so rude. If he wanted to write a book critiquing Christians and Christianity, have at it. It's been done before. But that's not what this book was supposed to be, and I don't think it's scholarly or just to include barbs at a religious group different from your own in a work belonging to "academia."
My point is that reading Genesis as literature and being forced to read it closely forever changed the way that I read the Bible. Now, I still read it as Truth, as the Word of God, but I also read it in a similar way to how I read novels and other literary works. The Bible consists of words, after all, so why not read it as such? Later, as a grad student, I took a class called The Bible and Literature, for which we read selected Biblical passages and one or two of the literary works those passages inspired. It reminded me, again, to read the Bible closely, to fully understand and appreciate it, not just to gloss over my readings and accept what I've been taught as the definitive interpretations and explanations.
When I saw this book at the library, I was excited to pull it off the shelf even though I'm not a Bloom fan by any means. I was excited because I've learned so much from literary readings of the Bible, and I want to keep expanding my understanding. I am okay with the fact that most people employing a literary reading of the Bible do not also see it as the Word of God. The professor I took both classes with was not openly religious, by any means, but he was very respectful of the fact that the Bible is a sacred text for many people. I don't think literary readers of the Bible and spiritual readers have to be mutually exclusive.
However, this is the worst experience I've ever had with a literary interpretation of the Bible. First of all, the entirety of the subtitle is a lie. This is not a literary anything of the King James Bible. It's definitely not an appreciation (though I'll give Bloom some leeway since, according to etymnonline.com, the root of "appreciation" is "c. 1600 'act of estimating the quality and worth of something'"). And it's not even focused on the King James Bible. Then, Bloom commits several atrocities I tell my Freshman English students to avoid in Essay #1: over quoting, writing a running commentary or summary with analysis, generalizing, and being unfair to the reader. Finally, Bloom claims that the Greek Bible is anti-Semitic and filled with hate, yet when reading his "analysis" of the Christian texts, all I feel is vitriol, bitterness, and hatred, to the point where he loves reading Galatians because Paul is at his worst, and he basically loves James because Luther hated it.
So, I say this book isn't literary because Bloom reads the Bible as a sacred text but wants us to think he's reading it as pure literature. He doesn't critique the text the way someone would critique stories. He clearly believes in what he reads yet doesn't want to and feels angst about it all. He says he's a Jewish man with Gnostic tendencies, but he can't distance his experiences from his reading. I can't either, but I don't claim to. The fact that he reads Paul into Paul's letters again shows that he's taking it all literally. Maybe Paul is just an author who's creating a character of "Paul," considering that's what authors do? But we all know Paul really existed, and Bloom seems to forget he's doing a literary analysis and attacks the author, not the text.
Bloom doesn't just critique the Greek Bible. He's so critical of the Hebrew Bible as well. He confesses to disliking YHWH, and it shows. Again, it's all too personal, and he can never forget that the Bible isn't just a book--it's the sacred text for two major religions--even though he claims multiple times to leave those perceptions out of the whole thing. There is no appreciation here, and it's certainly not even about the KJB. Bloom refers so much to the Hebrew and how the KJB can't surpass the Hebrew in many places though it does in others. And he also talks about and quotes from the Tyndale and the Geneva extensively. So, I'm not sure how this is a book in appreciation of the KJB specifically. Why couldn't he/his editors have just called it an "exploration" of the Bible?
Bloom quotes extensively, and he doesn't explain most of his claims, the majority of which are staggering in their hyperbole, their clear scholarly elitism, and their complete lack of depth. He doesn't delve into anything he discusses. He often makes one statement, quotes a long passage, and then moves on, or, worse, he makes a claim then doesn't even show the text to back it up. He generalizes, and he says things like "most careful readers will see this" or "Most of my Christian friends wouldn't understand this question if I asked it."
Overall, the only good things I got out of this book were hours of entertainment with my own frustrations and some (some) knowledge I didn't have before about the origins of the Bible, its authorship, some history, and some Hebrew etymology. I don't like to just read the Bible; I like to study it, and the more information I have, the more I can appreciate it. So, I do appreciate some of Bloom's information, scant as it may be.
I can't recommend this book. It's offensive to readers who have other interpretations and understandings than Bloom's because only his are correct, and it's offensive to Christians because Bloom calls our sacred text Anti-Semitic and filled with hate then says we "claim" it's about love. That's so rude. If he wanted to write a book critiquing Christians and Christianity, have at it. It's been done before. But that's not what this book was supposed to be, and I don't think it's scholarly or just to include barbs at a religious group different from your own in a work belonging to "academia."
June 4, 2013
Uh, Bloom is an incredibly well-read scholar and literary mentor to me, but he's also kind of a brat — where he's analyzing what he wants to (Genesis, Prophets, Songs) he's brilliant and it's hard to keep up with him, but in much of the New Testament he merely glosses over the writings with palpable distaste. I too am Jewish and have a detest for Paul, but that does not mean I would refuse to see Paul's literary genius, etc. In short: piercing in some places, lacking in others. Tantalizing but by no means comprehensive.
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May 23, 2014In a statement delivered to the Millennial Gathering of the Writers of the New South, poet, prose writer, and editor Dave Smith spoke on the sound of Southern speech. He averred that it was single and singular: The way we sound the sound tells all the answers, evokes all the old mysteries, including the recognition that we are deeply and intuitively related, are in fact one thing." Furthermore, just like the King James Bible, to which he pointed as underlying that sound, Smith easily transcends any of the narrow constraints of regionalism--even nationality--while striving to render "the compulsion to tell all of the human story and the splendidly alloyed language we have made to sound that story"; or, “one sound sounds the sound.”
Harold Bloom's new book on the King James Bible reinforces, if without intent and obliquely, Smith's words about its language being a racially unifying factor in the South when all else--except food, of course--bent under the rule of Jim Crow, i.e. apartheid. Though of course Africa's musical and rhythmic traditions remain undeniable in the blues' formation, its rich double-brew comes also from mixture with a very different transatlantic culture. Parallel, if closer geographically, the Elizabethan / Jacobean English of the KJB and Shakespeare arose from the collision of Latinate French and Anglo-Saxon. Ted Hughes provided a perfect example in the foreword to my battered copy of the Ecco Essentials devoted to his countryman; indeed, he takes two lines from MACBETH and points out how the latter quite literally translates the former: "The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red."
And read. With THE SHADOW OF A GREAT ROCK, Bloom gives us a magnificent book about an even more magnificent one, less to be discussed or critiqued than savored sentence by sentence if not line by line, again like Shakespeare, who is invoked as consistently as the translators of the KJB, which celebrated its 400th anniversary last year. Bloom's recent work flares, flames, and claims a place on the shelf of anyone who cares about how words arranged on a page can possess an aural effect lasting for centuries without end, amen.
"In the beginning was the word"--writing about the always prolific professor/critic's THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE (Yale University Press) in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, Robert Pogue Harrison rightly remarks that Bloom's discussion of Shakespeare comprises this study's strongest section, if Bloom's greatest shortcoming--bombast--recurs in a bizarre Back to the Future moment when Blooms claims to be an influence on Shakespeare himself.
"Influence"--Bloom's obsession with the subject and the agon, through which one author must wrestle then throw off his predecessor is what causes him to slouch away from Bethlehem and its manger...or perhaps that construction's blue-robed "manager" might be the more appropriate noun. The late Adrienne Rich noted long ago that women tend to collaborate and extend the fabric, even the territory, by piecing our own work onto what has been handed down to us; or, to use Virginia Woolf's famous words, "we think back [not against, or at least not after adolescence] through our mothers." Bloom's own measure of cloth tends to straitjacket him also when it comes to Poe, Baudelaire, and Eliot. Perhaps they all seem too sickly and agon-ized to be of sufficient interest, drooping from the straight seam he has always elevated, as if strung from the highest tent-pole--Emerson-->Whitman-->Stevens. Bloom has always reserved a special antipathy for Eliot on the grounds, so to speak, of anti-Semitism, and Plath has been the target of his critical vitriol because of her appropriation of *Shoah* imagery. Other reasons suggest themselves too, however, why both poets prove too much of an agon themselves for Bloom, and perhaps Meghan O'Rourke, arguably our time's best reader of Plath, has an answer that extends past her and past Eliot to their predecessors:
"...it's the grotesquerie of Plath's imagination that may be responsible for the continuing ambivalence about her. Morbidity is an un-American quality. The great morbid writers--Poe, Baudelaire, even Rimbaud--wreathe themselves in a baroqueness that is far more Old World than New. There is no American equivalent of mal du siécle or 'spleen.' The major American poets tend toward the exuberant--Whitman, Williams, Ginsberg--or the coolly lyrical (think of writers as different as Frost and Ashbery). Even Plath's fellow poet-suicide Hart Crane was a Romantic--and his tortured jouissance seems quintessentially American, whereas Plath's cold disdain makes her seem foreign. In some sense, Plath may not be a very American writer: beneath a surface of chirpy, aspirational hopes for the life codified by magazines.... Plath was always somewhat detached from the world in which she was raised…. Our literature of disaffection tends to be the literature of melancholia..." (POETRY, Summer 2004)
That's it! Eliot and Plath are un-American! That's why Bloom doesn't like them! Surely he'd disapprove also of noir, the self-embalmed Miss Emily, and most other Southern oddities (if that's not an ontological contradiction) as well. Yet I suspect these two poets would find his willful and knowing confusion of Shakespeare and God as subversively delightful as I do, precisely because it's a rare slip in which Bloom is caught being unpatriotic too.
Yet a question remains. Harrison asks which God or gods Bloom wants us to contemplate:
"...the god that Shakespeare resembles is neither Virgil's providential god nor the benevolent Creator that shone so luminously in Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, but a darker, perhaps post-Christian God who defects from his own creation."
To criticize the critic, I'd argue that Harrison's "post-Christian God" isn't a "defector" but a Creator who remains at an a priori distance from the manifold aspects of what He--and Bloom's God is always a masculine deity--had made. "Remove" is Bloom's word, one with more accuracy because of the gap it implies, Shakespeare being, to use his own phrase, "the major dealer in ellipsis among all the great writers."
"Ellipsis." Though word, language, sense, sound--is it any wonder that the life of Shakespeare's most famous hero ends, literally, with "silence," possibly the most powerful form of speech? Bloom's own favorite book of the Bible is Jonah (http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/...). Wouldn't the quiet--but for the churn of whale guts drowning out the noise of his own voice--of such an enclosure unnerve Bloom utterly?
Only momentarily. I’ve heard him recite more of the KJB alone than any man other than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., though its cadences continue to “sound the sound” in the poetry most deeply embedded not only in my ears, but my very body.*
*I am once again grateful to Ivan C. Lett at Yale University Press; also to David Lehman’s BEST AMERICAN POETRY site, whence I learned of THE SHADOW OF A GREAT ROCK’s imminent publication, and, of course, to Dave Smith. For further reading, see Lehman’s original BAP essay (http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/th...) and a spirited defense by the late and infamously atheistic Christopher Hitchens (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fea...).
Harold Bloom's new book on the King James Bible reinforces, if without intent and obliquely, Smith's words about its language being a racially unifying factor in the South when all else--except food, of course--bent under the rule of Jim Crow, i.e. apartheid. Though of course Africa's musical and rhythmic traditions remain undeniable in the blues' formation, its rich double-brew comes also from mixture with a very different transatlantic culture. Parallel, if closer geographically, the Elizabethan / Jacobean English of the KJB and Shakespeare arose from the collision of Latinate French and Anglo-Saxon. Ted Hughes provided a perfect example in the foreword to my battered copy of the Ecco Essentials devoted to his countryman; indeed, he takes two lines from MACBETH and points out how the latter quite literally translates the former: "The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red."
And read. With THE SHADOW OF A GREAT ROCK, Bloom gives us a magnificent book about an even more magnificent one, less to be discussed or critiqued than savored sentence by sentence if not line by line, again like Shakespeare, who is invoked as consistently as the translators of the KJB, which celebrated its 400th anniversary last year. Bloom's recent work flares, flames, and claims a place on the shelf of anyone who cares about how words arranged on a page can possess an aural effect lasting for centuries without end, amen.
"In the beginning was the word"--writing about the always prolific professor/critic's THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE (Yale University Press) in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, Robert Pogue Harrison rightly remarks that Bloom's discussion of Shakespeare comprises this study's strongest section, if Bloom's greatest shortcoming--bombast--recurs in a bizarre Back to the Future moment when Blooms claims to be an influence on Shakespeare himself.
"Influence"--Bloom's obsession with the subject and the agon, through which one author must wrestle then throw off his predecessor is what causes him to slouch away from Bethlehem and its manger...or perhaps that construction's blue-robed "manager" might be the more appropriate noun. The late Adrienne Rich noted long ago that women tend to collaborate and extend the fabric, even the territory, by piecing our own work onto what has been handed down to us; or, to use Virginia Woolf's famous words, "we think back [not against, or at least not after adolescence] through our mothers." Bloom's own measure of cloth tends to straitjacket him also when it comes to Poe, Baudelaire, and Eliot. Perhaps they all seem too sickly and agon-ized to be of sufficient interest, drooping from the straight seam he has always elevated, as if strung from the highest tent-pole--Emerson-->Whitman-->Stevens. Bloom has always reserved a special antipathy for Eliot on the grounds, so to speak, of anti-Semitism, and Plath has been the target of his critical vitriol because of her appropriation of *Shoah* imagery. Other reasons suggest themselves too, however, why both poets prove too much of an agon themselves for Bloom, and perhaps Meghan O'Rourke, arguably our time's best reader of Plath, has an answer that extends past her and past Eliot to their predecessors:
"...it's the grotesquerie of Plath's imagination that may be responsible for the continuing ambivalence about her. Morbidity is an un-American quality. The great morbid writers--Poe, Baudelaire, even Rimbaud--wreathe themselves in a baroqueness that is far more Old World than New. There is no American equivalent of mal du siécle or 'spleen.' The major American poets tend toward the exuberant--Whitman, Williams, Ginsberg--or the coolly lyrical (think of writers as different as Frost and Ashbery). Even Plath's fellow poet-suicide Hart Crane was a Romantic--and his tortured jouissance seems quintessentially American, whereas Plath's cold disdain makes her seem foreign. In some sense, Plath may not be a very American writer: beneath a surface of chirpy, aspirational hopes for the life codified by magazines.... Plath was always somewhat detached from the world in which she was raised…. Our literature of disaffection tends to be the literature of melancholia..." (POETRY, Summer 2004)
That's it! Eliot and Plath are un-American! That's why Bloom doesn't like them! Surely he'd disapprove also of noir, the self-embalmed Miss Emily, and most other Southern oddities (if that's not an ontological contradiction) as well. Yet I suspect these two poets would find his willful and knowing confusion of Shakespeare and God as subversively delightful as I do, precisely because it's a rare slip in which Bloom is caught being unpatriotic too.
Yet a question remains. Harrison asks which God or gods Bloom wants us to contemplate:
"...the god that Shakespeare resembles is neither Virgil's providential god nor the benevolent Creator that shone so luminously in Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, but a darker, perhaps post-Christian God who defects from his own creation."
To criticize the critic, I'd argue that Harrison's "post-Christian God" isn't a "defector" but a Creator who remains at an a priori distance from the manifold aspects of what He--and Bloom's God is always a masculine deity--had made. "Remove" is Bloom's word, one with more accuracy because of the gap it implies, Shakespeare being, to use his own phrase, "the major dealer in ellipsis among all the great writers."
"Ellipsis." Though word, language, sense, sound--is it any wonder that the life of Shakespeare's most famous hero ends, literally, with "silence," possibly the most powerful form of speech? Bloom's own favorite book of the Bible is Jonah (http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/...). Wouldn't the quiet--but for the churn of whale guts drowning out the noise of his own voice--of such an enclosure unnerve Bloom utterly?
Only momentarily. I’ve heard him recite more of the KJB alone than any man other than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., though its cadences continue to “sound the sound” in the poetry most deeply embedded not only in my ears, but my very body.*
*I am once again grateful to Ivan C. Lett at Yale University Press; also to David Lehman’s BEST AMERICAN POETRY site, whence I learned of THE SHADOW OF A GREAT ROCK’s imminent publication, and, of course, to Dave Smith. For further reading, see Lehman’s original BAP essay (http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/th...) and a spirited defense by the late and infamously atheistic Christopher Hitchens (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fea...).
October 27, 2021
I would say that this book was pointless, but the point is clear: to sell books on the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. It was obviously rushed to press with little thought. It's not a very long book and an astonishing amount of it is cut and pasted selections from the KJV the Tyndale Bible and the Geneva Bible. The author then might say something like: The KJB does not improve upon Tyndale's translation. But then he will not say why Tyndale's is better.
The most interesting parts of the book are in the very beginning when Bloom discusses the genius of the Yahwist—things he talks about in other books he's written. But what does the Yahwist have to do with the King James Bible? Yes, the translators worked with the text of the Yahwist, but that's it. He abandons the pretence of the book he's writing to recycle stuff he says elsewhere.
Books take a lot of work for most people. I usually give writers the benefit of the doubt. But when someone who has written 50 books so clearly mails it in and keeps other hard workers from participating in a great list of publications like Yale Press, I get more than annoyed. The existence of this book angers me.
The most interesting parts of the book are in the very beginning when Bloom discusses the genius of the Yahwist—things he talks about in other books he's written. But what does the Yahwist have to do with the King James Bible? Yes, the translators worked with the text of the Yahwist, but that's it. He abandons the pretence of the book he's writing to recycle stuff he says elsewhere.
Books take a lot of work for most people. I usually give writers the benefit of the doubt. But when someone who has written 50 books so clearly mails it in and keeps other hard workers from participating in a great list of publications like Yale Press, I get more than annoyed. The existence of this book angers me.
November 12, 2018
Bloom knows the Bible much better than most people who profess to believe it, but he doesn't believe it a bit; he is, as he says in the introduction, "desperately secular." Yet he thinks that the English Bible has much of what is most important and even genuinely beautiful in all of literary history, and so this is his book about how to read a book you don't believe which is trying to get you to believe things you don't believe, taking into account what it wants you to believe only as data while appreciating it as poetry or novel or folk tale.
What that looks like in practice is an annotated greatest hits of the more memorable parts of the King James, together with lots of quoting, commentary on the original Hebrew and Greek, and the interplay between Tyndale, the Geneva translation, and the Authorized Version. And a bunch of asides in which Bloom consistently reads the Bible against the grain, for instance when he sides with the 'strange woman' in Proverbs against the book's author. It makes for lively reading and should be on your shelf if you're either interested in Literature as such or in being able to talk to educated nonbelievers about the Bible as such.
What that looks like in practice is an annotated greatest hits of the more memorable parts of the King James, together with lots of quoting, commentary on the original Hebrew and Greek, and the interplay between Tyndale, the Geneva translation, and the Authorized Version. And a bunch of asides in which Bloom consistently reads the Bible against the grain, for instance when he sides with the 'strange woman' in Proverbs against the book's author. It makes for lively reading and should be on your shelf if you're either interested in Literature as such or in being able to talk to educated nonbelievers about the Bible as such.
May 9, 2022
Bloom has the massive reputation, he was obviously very prolific as well as very smart, gifted even. But I've often compared him to a writer I often have liked but tend to view him in a similar fashion to how I view Bloom. Asimov was indeed brilliant, very prolific, had a massive reputation that will likely dwarf all of science fiction for infinity, able and willing to delve into many other areas one might not have expected, and he could -- sometimes -- tell a mean tale. Yet all that aside, I have never believed he ever legitimately EARNED his reputation for genius, incredible writing, amazing sci fi foresight, overall brilliance in practically every field he dove in to and it's like he was handed the trophy of sci fi god #1 simply due to popularity, not being That Damn Good -- because I assure you he was Not! His reputation is beyond inflated and aside from his being so prolific -- and I personally know a number of incredibly prolific authors and I know how and why some became prolific and I know the "secrets" to any success they may have had and thus I view them as little more than frauds, unworthy of any minor reputation they may have gotten. At the risk of sounding like an "elitist" these days, I don't think it takes any effort other than hitting your wallet a good bit, to have your own press and "publish" hundreds of books, broadsides, pamphlets, chapbooks, booklets, etc., of your own work with the expectation of being forever lauded as a great writer and author. Because you're not. Otherwise you would have done what many, if not most, had to do for endless years, and with one exception I can think of (or two at the most), me as well, that is read, research, write every damn day and do your due diligence -- pay your damn dues, despite its possible total failure, despite the impatience, despite the millions of rejections (I knew a writer who papered his bathroom with rejection letters), despite the criticism, despite finally finding an agent willing to take you on only to find it was pointless because no publisher will touch your stuff regardless, and have the heart and guts and willpower to keep churning on because it's your damn LIFE and you'll be damned if you give up and admit you're a failure! Because THAT, my friend, is how I and tens of thousands of other actual AUTHORS define one's authenticity as an actual Author and not merely a Writer hack who never tried after their first initial rejection, who were too impatient, too lazy, too weak to take the heat, the fire, and who wanted their work published and out there, available to the public no matter what and no matter if they were actually any good or their work merited publication, so they caved and took the "easy way" and paid to have their work published or paid to self-publish and now these days, pay to publish digital "books" with no need to pay any dues, with no competition one has to beat to get an agent or to get a publisher to Accept your manuscript(s) over those of dozens or hundreds or thousands of others and who don't have to worry about rejections and who can claim to have "best sellers" using cute tricks literally self published via Amazon that tell the secrets of how to get that cred, at least for one day, so you can call yourself that and introduce yourself as a best selling author when you never had the fucking GUTS (and for far too many, neither the talent) to lay it all on the line and Earn your title of Author when you just bought it instead. And what I just wrote, the sentiment expressed, has been the very typical view of the majority of traditionalists who have and did have to pay their dues, go through hell, wait 20 years while hoping a publisher will take their manuscript and who respect others who did, knowing what they sacrificed to get to that point, only to have others who never did anything, who lacked the patience, fortitude, competitiveness, determination, strength, willpower and talent just buy their way into the club, so to speak, and call themselves Authors while patting each other on the back as they push their books and earn fans without ever having Earned it. How can the generations of those who did it, who survived, who won, have any viable respect for the self appointed "peers" when they did the metaphorical and functional equivalent of buying their diplomas through a diploma mill and getting a title that was never earned? Elite snob? Asshole? Yes, most likely, without apology for the very reasons I just gave. I've never claimed to be the best poet or writer and I never will, but I have claimed and for some years others claimed it about me, that I was just about the hardest working published writer out there (except for Lyn Lifshin) who wrote and submitted for hours a day despite having to work jobs for 12-14 hours a day just to pay rent at times and did this 24 x 7 x 360 days a year every year for close to two decades, who had no damn life to speak of, because I was dedicated to my craft, to my passion, to my career and I'd be damned if I let anyone outwork me and beat me because if I would fail it would be due to lack of talent, not work ethic. And while every writer, including the greatest ever, gets rejected if and when they submit, I had a tremendous acceptance record and rarely had difficulties getting a publisher to accept and publish my work, many with tiny presses, but in some cases with huge publishers that had virtual household names -- because I paid my dues and earned it. So is it literally that black and white? Of course not! I just described a significant generalization, a longstanding stereotype that's existed until just the past 15 years or so, and a new publishing paradigm that is being proven to be successful in a new definition of "success" that defies the former definition, that has become so prevalent as to diminish and likely one day eliminate the stigma, and one that actually DOES contain numerous writers -- authors -- of great talent, who can tell a mean tale, who had their reasons for doing it that way and especially before it became so relatively easy and cheap that many ask why go through that hell most once had to do when I can succeed immediately rather than gambling all and waiting for who knows who long just in the hope that one day I Might get published -- when I can do it right now and gain more readers in a month than most traditionalists do in years. That Was the stigma, but now it is -- to a large degree -- proving the stigma to no longer be legit because the new paradigm has become legit and it's well known that many famous writers and authors over the centuries often initially self-published and some great works were initially self-published (Joyce, anyone?), it's only been in this century that many people of great talent have taken this route and have proven that going the increasingly former way maybe isn't that smart for many people and maybe not having to "pay your dues" in the traditional, old fashioned way is actually the Smart way and many are proving it to be a successful and increasingly legit paradigm and are Earning their fanbase because they actually are that talented -- I have no choice but to admit this because it has become accurate to say these things and the old way will one day become virtually extinct and life moves on, yes? I try to remind myself regularly to ask myself who am I to cast judgment when I don't know personal circumstances behind every author's decisions and when some of my favorite writers, especially sci fi, are truly better than some of the big name, big publisher writers who have the name, the fame, the fortune, but who really aren't and never were that great.
So did I veer off course? Maybe and especially at first glance. But I actually did this intentionally to go to an extreme in an effort to make my point I'm about to make. I think and have long thought that Bloom, just like Asimov, was and were very good writers, extremely intelligent, deserved a good reputation, etc., but I have never and will never cede them the title so many others do -- that of "greatest" sci fi writer or "greatest" literary critic, etc., because I think they benefited from functional similarity that successful writers going with the new paradigm sometimes enjoy. Some of the new authors deserve the praise and attention they receive because they absolutely are that good. Yet many others do not deserve the praise and attention they receive because they simply aren't that good but they may be so at marketing their work, at promoting, at passing themselves off to more and more people as a great writer and acquiring, if not being given, a great reputation despite errors, inconsistencies, inaccuracies, total lack of proofing or editing, etc., that even their big fans point out on a regular basis. My contention is basically that Asimov and Bloom both fit the description of that second writer who gets handed the blue medal rather than the first writer who may be successful and rightly so but may not have quite the same fame and success as the latter because they haven't benefited from the same marketing and promotion skills and opportunities, if not some luck as well, yet they've been handed the title they may not truly deserve. Was Bloom worthy of perceived greatness? And Asimov? Yes, I'd be a fool to not admit that. Were they the greatest ever in their primary fields? Fuck no! They got handed those titles on a silver platter, on reputation and truly on popularity alone, if not less competition than one finds today, because while some of their work does stand at the pinacle, most simply does not and never did. Is that subjective? Admittedly. Is that an accurate assertion? I believe it can successfully be argued, if not proven so. Here is one quick, specific example off the top of my head about Asimov that applies to his entire body of work and that, IMO, would apply to Bloom as well. Perhaps Asimov's best known, most loved, and greatest work rests in his Foundation series. I've read that a thousand times, as well as the ones that came after that were spinoffs by other writers. And I've often enjoyed a number of them. But Asimov had a tendency that has always annoyed the shit out of me and Bloom shares the equivalent of this in his own field. Asimov has often been considered to be the greatest sci fi author to foresee a legit future for humanity, the universe, existence, etc., and while others have been attributed with similar gifts and others have proven they were pretty dead on about some big things, others have been way off the mark in many of their books and are thus often not accepted by as many because they were or are viewed as not having the skills, if you will, to be as accurate as an Asimov in accurately utilizing and describing realistic "predictions." One well-known example would be one of my favorites -- Philip K. Dick. Despite amazing creativity and possessing many great gifts and despite writing some great gems, he was an abject consistent failure at placing his future sci fi worlds in a plausibly realistic future timeframe. Thus we have an enormous popular success such as a Blade Runner (not his title for it) that might be set in the 1980s or 1990s with Dick's vision of that being the realistic timeframe for what is depicted in such a work, and what percentage of that came out to be true? 10%? 5%? Probably not even 2%. And he's far from alone. Why do writers who wrote in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and still today place their future worlds in such a close-to-their-present-time world that their work can't possibly be close to accurate because it's not remotely realistic to think that in 20 or 30 years (from back then) the world might no longer have any geographic boundaries and every human will be tan/brown (so many sci fi writers do this) because everyone will have intermixed and just a couple of generations in the future there won't be any more colors, so to speak -- definable ethnicities based on race-oriented colors such as white, black, "yellow," etc., -- because those will have been eliminated and everyone will share the same genetic codes to ensure they all share the same skin tone. If I've not described that perfectly, forgive as I do not possess the scientific terminology or knowledge to accurately describe the genetics behind skin color, for the sake of expediency. I hope you understood my meaning in that example. Was (and am I) "racist?" No. Did I object to this future scenario? No. Do I refuse to accept it as a plausible reality, if not an accurate prediction? No, no, no! (Am I even offended or appalled at such a scenario? No!) Because that is not the issue. The issue is these predictions of species-changing future worlds are based on all of this taking place in such a short time period -- in Dick's case merely two or three decades ahead of when he wrote, which means back in the 20th century, enabling us to realize that if he was remotely serious about the time periods who threw out -- and many think he was, like many other sci fi writers -- he had to have been one of the most extreme failures in history at predicting the future because virtually none of what he predicted ever came true DURING THE TIMEFRAME HE PREDICTED. Humanity didn't morph into a combo of cyborgs, androids, etc., by 1980 or 1990. I don't know if it ever will, although I personally know and know of many scientists literally working toward that now at a number of well known schools and labs, but I DO know that some 30, 40, 50 years have passed Dick's predictions and not only has he been woefully off base, but I predict he will remain so for a long time to come.
Asimov was much smarter about that potential problem. So much so that he's given credit as a huge genius simply because he posits his future so many zillions of years/lifetimes in the future, that it does seem entirely plausible that the scenarios he describes could literally take place. Space travel from planet to planet, galaxy to galaxy, might be the norm far sooner than he ever depicted. So what's my beef? Why do I NOT give him the credit others do as being a type of anti-PKD who was so dreadfully wrong on his sci fi predictions? Here then is my favorite example and it's so common in virtually all of his work that it literally ruins some of his books for me and makes it difficult for me to even finish them, let alone appreciate or enjoy them. In the Foundation series, he often had his characters flying in their spaceships using vague futuristic types of technology that may be plausibly accurate at some point -- but he's so vague in many ways that he often CAN'T be wrong ever because he was never specific enough about the actual science, for instance, in a number of cases -- but his characters are jumping here and there in their spaceships before reaching their intended destination of a planetary space capital and upon landing, they debark and go in search of a place to relax after their journey -- just a quick break -- and then Asimov gets incredibly specific. His character will just have exited an amazing typically accepted as plausible, transportation device -- a kick ass space ship -- and will grab a newspaper to read. A newsPAPER!!! Are you fucking kidding me? Zillions of years in the future, he's got everyone hopping from planet to planet (using his beloved "atomics" -- heh!) with crazy ass super hi tech action only to land and decide to get their news, their entertainment, their readings from a source that was prevalent while he was writing in the 1950s and since automobiles would likely be a thing of the past zillions of years in the future having been replaced by awesome spaceships, one might think it would occur to such a genius that PAPER might have been replaced by basically anything and worked that into his text. Because while he was writing these incredible books they were already in the process of using early computers to work on problems that will be solved in the near future, if not already, and indeed, he is SO Very Wrong about this that before his death, for all intents and purposes, a key element of his predicted scenario worlds in a future so distant it makes Star Trek seem embarrassingly archaic had already become so obsolete that in just a few years of his passing, it would effectively have been so largely replaced by ... computing technology as to be well on its way to extinction. Newspapers as a concept are already close to a thing of the past and were in the process of starting to die out in Asimov's own lifetime, so he actually was a zillion times WORSE than Philip K Dick and many other sci fi writers because elements of his own future scenarios, set so much further out than nearly any of his competitors, were already essentially extinct and had been bypassed during his fucking career. And that, my friends, is failure to me. That to me makes him look like an embarrassment. That is why I cannot and will not and will never accept Asimov as the near-universally accepted greatest sci fi writer who has ever lived. Because nothing could be further from the truth. His "sci fi" was SO very wrong as to have been disproven while he was still alive. As that was not an intentional plot device on his part, as far as I know, that displays idiocy to a degree I never thought possible and to contrast that to his otherwise amazing and currently nonexistent technologies that may become plausible sometime down the road but NOT in his lifetime makes it even worse. It makes it hard for me to accept anything he writes because he screws up something so very basic he most likely overlooked and never thought twice about it, showing himself to be very distant from the godhead bestowed on him. And that is merely one of his many failures through his body of work. I guess "Incredibly Overrated" would be my description. Not a hack, not bad -- just not deserving of his worshipfulness. Who is? I don't know. That's not for me to say. It's probably impossible because what they are describing likely would not have already taken place, ya know?
So too Bloom, finally moving that analogy on over to him. I view Bloom and his body of work as being quite similar to Asimov. He had an amazing brain and great talent, but he's been given the status of the god critic since during his career and as far as I might guess, possibly forever, yet despite writing some great stuff, THIS piece of crap seems far more common in his canon and it should prove an embarrassment and it should lead people to question his stature -- yet it doesn't. And that boggles my mind.
Ironically I'm running out of characters and I hadn't even intended to write anything! Instead, I've written a piece as long as the book he addresses here. And his thesis is crap, as is this book.
So did I veer off course? Maybe and especially at first glance. But I actually did this intentionally to go to an extreme in an effort to make my point I'm about to make. I think and have long thought that Bloom, just like Asimov, was and were very good writers, extremely intelligent, deserved a good reputation, etc., but I have never and will never cede them the title so many others do -- that of "greatest" sci fi writer or "greatest" literary critic, etc., because I think they benefited from functional similarity that successful writers going with the new paradigm sometimes enjoy. Some of the new authors deserve the praise and attention they receive because they absolutely are that good. Yet many others do not deserve the praise and attention they receive because they simply aren't that good but they may be so at marketing their work, at promoting, at passing themselves off to more and more people as a great writer and acquiring, if not being given, a great reputation despite errors, inconsistencies, inaccuracies, total lack of proofing or editing, etc., that even their big fans point out on a regular basis. My contention is basically that Asimov and Bloom both fit the description of that second writer who gets handed the blue medal rather than the first writer who may be successful and rightly so but may not have quite the same fame and success as the latter because they haven't benefited from the same marketing and promotion skills and opportunities, if not some luck as well, yet they've been handed the title they may not truly deserve. Was Bloom worthy of perceived greatness? And Asimov? Yes, I'd be a fool to not admit that. Were they the greatest ever in their primary fields? Fuck no! They got handed those titles on a silver platter, on reputation and truly on popularity alone, if not less competition than one finds today, because while some of their work does stand at the pinacle, most simply does not and never did. Is that subjective? Admittedly. Is that an accurate assertion? I believe it can successfully be argued, if not proven so. Here is one quick, specific example off the top of my head about Asimov that applies to his entire body of work and that, IMO, would apply to Bloom as well. Perhaps Asimov's best known, most loved, and greatest work rests in his Foundation series. I've read that a thousand times, as well as the ones that came after that were spinoffs by other writers. And I've often enjoyed a number of them. But Asimov had a tendency that has always annoyed the shit out of me and Bloom shares the equivalent of this in his own field. Asimov has often been considered to be the greatest sci fi author to foresee a legit future for humanity, the universe, existence, etc., and while others have been attributed with similar gifts and others have proven they were pretty dead on about some big things, others have been way off the mark in many of their books and are thus often not accepted by as many because they were or are viewed as not having the skills, if you will, to be as accurate as an Asimov in accurately utilizing and describing realistic "predictions." One well-known example would be one of my favorites -- Philip K. Dick. Despite amazing creativity and possessing many great gifts and despite writing some great gems, he was an abject consistent failure at placing his future sci fi worlds in a plausibly realistic future timeframe. Thus we have an enormous popular success such as a Blade Runner (not his title for it) that might be set in the 1980s or 1990s with Dick's vision of that being the realistic timeframe for what is depicted in such a work, and what percentage of that came out to be true? 10%? 5%? Probably not even 2%. And he's far from alone. Why do writers who wrote in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and still today place their future worlds in such a close-to-their-present-time world that their work can't possibly be close to accurate because it's not remotely realistic to think that in 20 or 30 years (from back then) the world might no longer have any geographic boundaries and every human will be tan/brown (so many sci fi writers do this) because everyone will have intermixed and just a couple of generations in the future there won't be any more colors, so to speak -- definable ethnicities based on race-oriented colors such as white, black, "yellow," etc., -- because those will have been eliminated and everyone will share the same genetic codes to ensure they all share the same skin tone. If I've not described that perfectly, forgive as I do not possess the scientific terminology or knowledge to accurately describe the genetics behind skin color, for the sake of expediency. I hope you understood my meaning in that example. Was (and am I) "racist?" No. Did I object to this future scenario? No. Do I refuse to accept it as a plausible reality, if not an accurate prediction? No, no, no! (Am I even offended or appalled at such a scenario? No!) Because that is not the issue. The issue is these predictions of species-changing future worlds are based on all of this taking place in such a short time period -- in Dick's case merely two or three decades ahead of when he wrote, which means back in the 20th century, enabling us to realize that if he was remotely serious about the time periods who threw out -- and many think he was, like many other sci fi writers -- he had to have been one of the most extreme failures in history at predicting the future because virtually none of what he predicted ever came true DURING THE TIMEFRAME HE PREDICTED. Humanity didn't morph into a combo of cyborgs, androids, etc., by 1980 or 1990. I don't know if it ever will, although I personally know and know of many scientists literally working toward that now at a number of well known schools and labs, but I DO know that some 30, 40, 50 years have passed Dick's predictions and not only has he been woefully off base, but I predict he will remain so for a long time to come.
Asimov was much smarter about that potential problem. So much so that he's given credit as a huge genius simply because he posits his future so many zillions of years/lifetimes in the future, that it does seem entirely plausible that the scenarios he describes could literally take place. Space travel from planet to planet, galaxy to galaxy, might be the norm far sooner than he ever depicted. So what's my beef? Why do I NOT give him the credit others do as being a type of anti-PKD who was so dreadfully wrong on his sci fi predictions? Here then is my favorite example and it's so common in virtually all of his work that it literally ruins some of his books for me and makes it difficult for me to even finish them, let alone appreciate or enjoy them. In the Foundation series, he often had his characters flying in their spaceships using vague futuristic types of technology that may be plausibly accurate at some point -- but he's so vague in many ways that he often CAN'T be wrong ever because he was never specific enough about the actual science, for instance, in a number of cases -- but his characters are jumping here and there in their spaceships before reaching their intended destination of a planetary space capital and upon landing, they debark and go in search of a place to relax after their journey -- just a quick break -- and then Asimov gets incredibly specific. His character will just have exited an amazing typically accepted as plausible, transportation device -- a kick ass space ship -- and will grab a newspaper to read. A newsPAPER!!! Are you fucking kidding me? Zillions of years in the future, he's got everyone hopping from planet to planet (using his beloved "atomics" -- heh!) with crazy ass super hi tech action only to land and decide to get their news, their entertainment, their readings from a source that was prevalent while he was writing in the 1950s and since automobiles would likely be a thing of the past zillions of years in the future having been replaced by awesome spaceships, one might think it would occur to such a genius that PAPER might have been replaced by basically anything and worked that into his text. Because while he was writing these incredible books they were already in the process of using early computers to work on problems that will be solved in the near future, if not already, and indeed, he is SO Very Wrong about this that before his death, for all intents and purposes, a key element of his predicted scenario worlds in a future so distant it makes Star Trek seem embarrassingly archaic had already become so obsolete that in just a few years of his passing, it would effectively have been so largely replaced by ... computing technology as to be well on its way to extinction. Newspapers as a concept are already close to a thing of the past and were in the process of starting to die out in Asimov's own lifetime, so he actually was a zillion times WORSE than Philip K Dick and many other sci fi writers because elements of his own future scenarios, set so much further out than nearly any of his competitors, were already essentially extinct and had been bypassed during his fucking career. And that, my friends, is failure to me. That to me makes him look like an embarrassment. That is why I cannot and will not and will never accept Asimov as the near-universally accepted greatest sci fi writer who has ever lived. Because nothing could be further from the truth. His "sci fi" was SO very wrong as to have been disproven while he was still alive. As that was not an intentional plot device on his part, as far as I know, that displays idiocy to a degree I never thought possible and to contrast that to his otherwise amazing and currently nonexistent technologies that may become plausible sometime down the road but NOT in his lifetime makes it even worse. It makes it hard for me to accept anything he writes because he screws up something so very basic he most likely overlooked and never thought twice about it, showing himself to be very distant from the godhead bestowed on him. And that is merely one of his many failures through his body of work. I guess "Incredibly Overrated" would be my description. Not a hack, not bad -- just not deserving of his worshipfulness. Who is? I don't know. That's not for me to say. It's probably impossible because what they are describing likely would not have already taken place, ya know?
So too Bloom, finally moving that analogy on over to him. I view Bloom and his body of work as being quite similar to Asimov. He had an amazing brain and great talent, but he's been given the status of the god critic since during his career and as far as I might guess, possibly forever, yet despite writing some great stuff, THIS piece of crap seems far more common in his canon and it should prove an embarrassment and it should lead people to question his stature -- yet it doesn't. And that boggles my mind.
Ironically I'm running out of characters and I hadn't even intended to write anything! Instead, I've written a piece as long as the book he addresses here. And his thesis is crap, as is this book.
May 9, 2012
As a Christian English major I was highly excited to see that some level of study has been carried out analysing the Bible as literature. Alas, Bloom's superfluous commentary has minimal traction with the text and the literary analysis is neither comprehensive nor profound. Furthermore, I was mildly irritated by Bloom's comparison between Christians and people who live with Shakespeare as their god and other such unnecessary slights; to some extent such subjective and biased comments mitigated the more objective analyses he DID make. Still, it is nice to know that this book exists- hopefully it will lead to an increase in scholarly research in this lacking area.
July 18, 2014
It was the best of books. It was the worst of books. The intro and section on the Old Testament were terrific and a brilliant literary commentary. The section on the New Testament was mostly a theological diatribe with scant mention of a literary values. Recommend skipping that portion of the work.
March 7, 2016
My guru writes a lovely appreciation of the beauty, majesty and power of the King James Bible. Not the dogma, the language. It's not a religious book, but his enthusiasm it may have you cracking the covers of the KJB anyway.
February 24, 2012
Harold Bloom doing close readings of the King James, Tyndale, and the Geneva. As good as it gets.
December 23, 2024
"The creation of Eve is Yahweh's triumph, aesthetically superior to that of Adam, since she is fashioned out of life and not from clay."
When I read that line in an early chapter, there was no doubt in my mind that I was reading a 4-5 star book. I am sad to say I was wrong.
I love Harold Bloom. While I disagree with most of his religious insights, I almost always find his views interesting. That changed with this book. I'm not looking for an author who agrees with everything I think. In fact, many of my favourite authors hold and espouse views that radically differ with my own. The problem, though, is Bloom here let his distaste for the God of the Bible (and the content of the New Testament) interfere with what was supposed to be a literary appreciation. As other reviews have pointed out, his 'appreciation' of the New Testament was scandalous at best.
For a lot of this book, Bloom forgets his role as a critic and writes theological treatises of his own, arguing for, among other views, strange forms of Gnosticism. Additionally, the author went on record to say he was able, in his youth, to read around 1000 pages an hour. He was much older when he wrote this book, and his reading speed had admittedly declined considerably, but I'm sure it was still quite fast. I'd wager that's one of the reasons a lot of the exegesis here is, forgive me, embarrassing.
I think I have identified why this book failed at its task. In How To Read and Why, Bloom wrote
Unfortunately, in The Shadow of a Great Rock, Bloom listened to the voice that whispered "I hate" and the result is this disappointing diatribe.
When I read that line in an early chapter, there was no doubt in my mind that I was reading a 4-5 star book. I am sad to say I was wrong.
I love Harold Bloom. While I disagree with most of his religious insights, I almost always find his views interesting. That changed with this book. I'm not looking for an author who agrees with everything I think. In fact, many of my favourite authors hold and espouse views that radically differ with my own. The problem, though, is Bloom here let his distaste for the God of the Bible (and the content of the New Testament) interfere with what was supposed to be a literary appreciation. As other reviews have pointed out, his 'appreciation' of the New Testament was scandalous at best.
For a lot of this book, Bloom forgets his role as a critic and writes theological treatises of his own, arguing for, among other views, strange forms of Gnosticism. Additionally, the author went on record to say he was able, in his youth, to read around 1000 pages an hour. He was much older when he wrote this book, and his reading speed had admittedly declined considerably, but I'm sure it was still quite fast. I'd wager that's one of the reasons a lot of the exegesis here is, forgive me, embarrassing.
I think I have identified why this book failed at its task. In How To Read and Why, Bloom wrote
"[Virginia Woolf's] best advice is to remind us that "there is always a demon in us who whispers 'I hate, I love,' and we cannot hope to silence him." I cannot silence my demon, but in this book anyway I will listen to him only when he whispers, "I love," as I intend no polemics here, but only to teach reading."
Unfortunately, in The Shadow of a Great Rock, Bloom listened to the voice that whispered "I hate" and the result is this disappointing diatribe.
January 17, 2019
In The Shadow of a Great Rock, Professor Bloom offers his readers quite a few interesting insights into the literary aspects of the several English-language bibles from Tyndale through the King James version, and he does not flinch from pointing out dubious translations from the Tanakh. One of his initial observations struck a chord (though in retrospect it should be obvious): Labeling a course as "The Bible As Literature" is as ridiculous as labeling one "Shakespeare As Literature" or "Milton As Literature" for all qualify equally as literature. If one is not already familiar with the history of English-language bibles, however, I recommend Wide As The Waters by Benson Bobrick as prerequisite reading to better follow Bloom's references to Tyndale, Coverdale, the Geneva Bible, etc. God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson is also a good companion (either pre- or post-Bloom) for readers wanting a more in-depth study of the creation of the KJB.
December 19, 2016
My admiration for Harold Bloom began years ago as I was writing my undergraduate thesis at UNC-Asheville. The essay itself was pathetic, but the literary criticism I found was remarkable. Bloom is poised at the pinnacle of Shakespearean research. His understanding of Elizabethan and Jacobean language is superlative to any other scholar (in my opinion), and when I first saw this particular book, I was dubious about the quality: would it shine and resonate like his critical work of Shakespeare. The answer is a resounding yes. A literary study of any religious texts unearths a beauty that we often miss when seeing it as a science book or the ultimate form of morality on earth. When we look at it as poetry, as literature, the words and phrases take on new meaning and we are submerged in a world of metaphysical conceits. Take note of Bloom's style and his inimitable view of literature.
October 8, 2020
This is a marvelous book to read for its exploration of how the Bible (old and New Testament) was written. Covering every book and many of the characters, Bloom adroitly and expertly uses his considerable intellect and resources to delve into the beauty and mystery and power of the Bible.
Despite my atheism, I was moved by the philosophical, eternal and existential stories, poems, proverbs and prose cited in The Shadow of a Great Rock. The heritage of the King James Bible continues to exert power over writers, thinkers and all human beings throughout the centuries.
Despite my atheism, I was moved by the philosophical, eternal and existential stories, poems, proverbs and prose cited in The Shadow of a Great Rock. The heritage of the King James Bible continues to exert power over writers, thinkers and all human beings throughout the centuries.
April 11, 2021
This is pretty boring, actually. Bloom is a lot. I love the King James Version of the Bible, but this book is mostly long passages from three different versions (KJB, Tynsdale, and Calvins Geneva version), and while I find the different translations laid out together to be interesting, I find Bloom’s observations to be meh.
Life is too short to read meh books.
Life is too short to read meh books.
June 12, 2019
About 15% a literary appreciation and the other 85% opinions on related topics, half of which were interesting. When you've only got 5 pages to discuss the gospels and half of it is spent complaining about authorial intent or historical legacies, I question your dedication to your own project.
October 29, 2024
Excellent companion to the Old testament during my Bible as literature course. Broad overview of the literature greatness Tyndale manifests in his translations and connections to later literature. New testament section is far less useful.
February 25, 2018
“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” - Micah 6:8
April 18, 2018
Gives you a view of the bible as literature. As with other subjects bloom builds a passion for his subject that cant help but be passed along
November 26, 2019
If you read the Bible, don’t bother with this tossed-off book. The Bible quotations are extensive, and the commentary often muddled.
September 21, 2020
This is how the Bible should be read. Bloom was interesting when I took the time to look up the many unfamiliar words, confusing and boring if I didn’t.
Want to read
December 22, 2023Half price books
January 7, 2014
I started this book with high hopes. While I don't believe the Bible to be historically or ontologically true, I do appreciate its literary qualities and the impact that it's had on Western civilization. Harold Bloom approaches the Bible from this perspective...like a wine connoisseur or an art critic. But--like a wine connoisseur or an art critic--he has the tendency to get very flowery and obscure in his language: name-dropping and making single-word references to classical literary works or authors, with no apparent need to explain what he means by these comparisons.
You end up feeling simultaneously impressed by Bloom's literary breadth and annoyed at how he makes you feel like a slow pupil. Don't get me wrong. I don't think that Bloom's condescending. I think he genuinely enjoys what he's talking about and genuinely wants to include you in that conversation. But since most of us aren't experts in John Milton, Soren Kierkegaard, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Thomas Mann...we don't always feel part of the conversation. At least I didn't.
Still, Bloom offers a beautiful, close reading of the King James Bible that will expand your knowledge and appreciation its history; and will illustrate how it differs from earlier English versions in poesy and content.
You end up feeling simultaneously impressed by Bloom's literary breadth and annoyed at how he makes you feel like a slow pupil. Don't get me wrong. I don't think that Bloom's condescending. I think he genuinely enjoys what he's talking about and genuinely wants to include you in that conversation. But since most of us aren't experts in John Milton, Soren Kierkegaard, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Thomas Mann...we don't always feel part of the conversation. At least I didn't.
Still, Bloom offers a beautiful, close reading of the King James Bible that will expand your knowledge and appreciation its history; and will illustrate how it differs from earlier English versions in poesy and content.
September 12, 2020
I was expecting a good look at the origins of the go-to English translation of the Bible, the King James, published in 1611. This was my Bible growing up in a religious household, and it’s prose and poetry still touch my soul.
We get precious little history of the translation of the books of the Bible into English, however. Nothing about how inferior translations into Greek were used as source materials for the OldTestament translations, but a whole lot of comparison to the Jewish version of the Christian Old Testament.. The author is at his best on Torah, the first five books, and on all the prophets. This book is absolutely TERRIBLE when it reaches the New Testament. Instead of a scholarly look at Paul’s epistles, we are simply treated in the hatred the author obviously feels toward Paul. He like the books of James and Revelation somewhat better, and basically completely dismisses the Gospels.
I have to say I was really horrified at the author’s anti-Christian bias shining through at every turn. One would think a professor of Classics could look dispassionately at the New Testament, but apparently not. Considering that he is writing about the most important work EVER for Protestant Christians — his actual audience for a work such as this! — I would have thought he would have tried harder. He just can’t hide his Jewish disdain of Christ.
Do yourself a favor and do NOT read this book, or limit yourself to the first several chapters, where the book is at its best. I recommend Prof John Barton’s “A History if the Bible” for a detailed examination of the translation of the Bible from its original languages into English.
We get precious little history of the translation of the books of the Bible into English, however. Nothing about how inferior translations into Greek were used as source materials for the OldTestament translations, but a whole lot of comparison to the Jewish version of the Christian Old Testament.. The author is at his best on Torah, the first five books, and on all the prophets. This book is absolutely TERRIBLE when it reaches the New Testament. Instead of a scholarly look at Paul’s epistles, we are simply treated in the hatred the author obviously feels toward Paul. He like the books of James and Revelation somewhat better, and basically completely dismisses the Gospels.
I have to say I was really horrified at the author’s anti-Christian bias shining through at every turn. One would think a professor of Classics could look dispassionately at the New Testament, but apparently not. Considering that he is writing about the most important work EVER for Protestant Christians — his actual audience for a work such as this! — I would have thought he would have tried harder. He just can’t hide his Jewish disdain of Christ.
Do yourself a favor and do NOT read this book, or limit yourself to the first several chapters, where the book is at its best. I recommend Prof John Barton’s “A History if the Bible” for a detailed examination of the translation of the Bible from its original languages into English.
July 1, 2012
Despise the anxieties of some Christians who bristle at the notion of Bloom, a self-described Gnostic Jew, conducting an "appreciation" of the King James Bible, this book succeeds at being an unbiased admiration of a central Western literary text. Bloom's readings, which sometimes comprise comparative readings of three or four different versions of the religious texts at once, never fail to provide enlightenment and insight into the aesthetic and rhetorical prowess of these Protestant scriptures. Though he clearly has a stronger appreciation of the "Old Testament," Bloom nevertheless appreciates the Greek New Testament with something like awe, particularly regarding the Gospel of Mark, where he sees Jesus uncannily more human than in the other three Gospels. (Incidentally, I'm as fascinated by that Gospel's depiction of Jesus as Bloom is. Compare the characterization of Jesus in Mark to those in the other Gospels, and encounter this fascination for yourself.)
This is solid literary analysis of a text that has had an immense impact on the literature of the West, primarily from the 19th century onwards, and for that reason, this too is a book to appreciate. I, for one, will return to this book and savor Bloom's masterful readings.
This is solid literary analysis of a text that has had an immense impact on the literature of the West, primarily from the 19th century onwards, and for that reason, this too is a book to appreciate. I, for one, will return to this book and savor Bloom's masterful readings.
October 29, 2016
“And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land,” Isiah Chapter 32: 2.
Harold Bloom takes the title of Shadow of a Great Rock from this specific Old Testament verse. This book works best when it analyzes specific segments of the Bible as literature. For some reason, he wants to incorporate passages from two other versions of the bible; which are William Tyndale’s translation and the Geneva Bible along with the King James Version. In retrospect, I wish he just focused on King James translation.
Professor Bloom wrote this in 2011 which was the 400 anniversary of that specific translation. As a critic, he infuses his religion (Jewish culturally, but with a fascination with agnosticism) into his criticism. Yet, he struggles with doing that as an author and literary critic. For instance, when he writes, “Can a world after Hitler and the Holocaust, and the horrors enacted by Stalin and Mao, allow such profuse praise of what no longer can be praised? (He means God). There are insight points and there are moments where I toss his book aside altogether.
Harold Bloom takes the title of Shadow of a Great Rock from this specific Old Testament verse. This book works best when it analyzes specific segments of the Bible as literature. For some reason, he wants to incorporate passages from two other versions of the bible; which are William Tyndale’s translation and the Geneva Bible along with the King James Version. In retrospect, I wish he just focused on King James translation.
Professor Bloom wrote this in 2011 which was the 400 anniversary of that specific translation. As a critic, he infuses his religion (Jewish culturally, but with a fascination with agnosticism) into his criticism. Yet, he struggles with doing that as an author and literary critic. For instance, when he writes, “Can a world after Hitler and the Holocaust, and the horrors enacted by Stalin and Mao, allow such profuse praise of what no longer can be praised? (He means God). There are insight points and there are moments where I toss his book aside altogether.
January 14, 2012
Confession: I only made it through the introduction, which I happened to find fascinating and full of promise for the rest of the book. Then the slim volume sat on my bedside table...and sat...and sat. Last night I picked it up and plunged into Chapter One, only to hit the following structure: (1) giant chunk of text in one translation, followed by (2) smaller chunk in another, followed by (3) discussion of Yahwist (sp?) versus some other redactor--dang! I snore, just typing it.
I think I was expecting (1) short passage exemplifying some trait, where KJV translators made particular literary choices, followed by (2) how those wonderful choices have reverberated through English literature with specific examples.
In any case, I give it three stars for learnedness (what else would you expect from Bloom?) and for interest level if this is your thing. But if you already thought the Bible was boring, stay away from this book!
I think I was expecting (1) short passage exemplifying some trait, where KJV translators made particular literary choices, followed by (2) how those wonderful choices have reverberated through English literature with specific examples.
In any case, I give it three stars for learnedness (what else would you expect from Bloom?) and for interest level if this is your thing. But if you already thought the Bible was boring, stay away from this book!
December 28, 2016
I don't know why I read anything by Harold Bloom - he's just a hard read for me. But I always learn something, as I did in reading this book.
ADDENDUM: Now, about six months after finishing this book, I have changed my rating to 4-stars. As a book, it's one thing - but considering the long-term effect it has had on me, well....that's something else. I picked up this book at a time in my life when I was looking for something to salvage in my relationship with the Bible, and I found it here. Who knew? I have embraced again the old KJV, not for the reasons that motivate some of my conservative Christian friends, but for the reasons that Bloom suggests (at least, this is where my mind went) - that inspiration gives us a tiny little glimmer of understand of God, The Other, The Holy, or whatever name one wishes to use. This book rescued me.
ADDENDUM: Now, about six months after finishing this book, I have changed my rating to 4-stars. As a book, it's one thing - but considering the long-term effect it has had on me, well....that's something else. I picked up this book at a time in my life when I was looking for something to salvage in my relationship with the Bible, and I found it here. Who knew? I have embraced again the old KJV, not for the reasons that motivate some of my conservative Christian friends, but for the reasons that Bloom suggests (at least, this is where my mind went) - that inspiration gives us a tiny little glimmer of understand of God, The Other, The Holy, or whatever name one wishes to use. This book rescued me.
July 18, 2015
The introduction was extremely helpful to me.
It is necessary to have access to a dictionary and an encyclopedia close by both of which I used online frequently. If you read Greek and Latin; are a scholar of the Talmud and other Hebrew writings; intimately familiar with a number of ancient and modern poets; have already read much of the Old Testament in the the KJB version; and are a Shakespeare scholar, these tools are not necessary.
I am none of the above but that did not decrease my enjoyment of the book. I took from it what I could, did a lot of research and feel Glad that I spent some time doing so.
My ignorance was no excuse for not enjoying Bloom's writing which is sprinkled with both humor and personal opinions written for the average Job or Ruth.
It is necessary to have access to a dictionary and an encyclopedia close by both of which I used online frequently. If you read Greek and Latin; are a scholar of the Talmud and other Hebrew writings; intimately familiar with a number of ancient and modern poets; have already read much of the Old Testament in the the KJB version; and are a Shakespeare scholar, these tools are not necessary.
I am none of the above but that did not decrease my enjoyment of the book. I took from it what I could, did a lot of research and feel Glad that I spent some time doing so.
My ignorance was no excuse for not enjoying Bloom's writing which is sprinkled with both humor and personal opinions written for the average Job or Ruth.
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