Shadow of a Great Rock

The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible by Harold Bloom, 295 pages

Famed critic and scholar Harold Bloom (The Book of J, The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) describes this work as "a literary appreciation of the King James Bible" but a more honest subtitle would have been "a personal appreciation of the original texts and their Reformation English translations".  It is clear that the theodical shadow of the Holocaust has helped to turn the octogenarian Bloom into a "Jew who does not believe in the covenant" and encouraged his "Gnostic tendencies", with the result that his sympathies lie wholly with Israel in the centuries-long wrestling with God, and wholly against the "Belated Testament" which "has hatred at its core despite its doctrine of love."  Given Bloom's "anxiety of influence" hermeneutic, he can hardly see it otherwise - every author, whatever they might protest to the contrary, seeks to supplant the memory of those who came before, and so the New Testament authors were closet Marcionites whose claims of fulfillment only mask the Oedipal drive to erase the Jews from history.

Bloom has spent a lifetime reading the Bible in various forms, alongside an awesome amount of world literature which he has not only read, but reread and thought deeply about.  The passages here where he discusses the original text and the Tyndale, Geneva, and Authorized translations, as well as those where he instances the influence of Scripture on literature are at least solid.  His reading on Scripture, however, seems rather more narrow - there is little here to suggest he has seriously engaged with anyone who disagrees with him on the issues on which they disagree.  Perhaps because he is an agnostic Jew writing about a Protestant translation, Catholics and Orthodox Christians are invisible here - there is no hint that most Christians regard some of the Apocrypha as canon, nor that there is another perspective on Paul's teachings on justification.  When, at the abrupt conclusion of the book, Bloom mourns that there are those who see the Bible as more than literature, it is difficult to see it as anything other than regret that despite a lifetime of work he has been unable to satisfactorily master the text and shrink it down into a shape of his choosing.