My thoughts on how the world works

I am reading The Shadow of a Great Rock: a Literary Appreciation of the Kings James Bible by Harold Bloom.

Right away, I am struck by how much my religious family did not understand the Bible – as contrasted by how much they thought they understood it. Their logic seems to be this – not knowing anything about anything amounts to knowing everything about everything. To their simple-minded way of thinking opposites are equals.

Bloom, by contrast, who can read the Bible in the original Hebrew, goes to great trouble to understand it on many levels. He describes one of these contrasts beginning on page 10:

The Hebrew text of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers is more a palimpsest than a mosaic; and centuries of scholarly fiction have failed to render a persuasive account as to how it works, since it has worked and goes on performing.

(I had to look up palimpsest myself.) Bloom is writing for a sophisticated audience here, one that is not afraid of working at understanding.

He goes on to explain the various sources of this scripture (Yahwist or J, and Elohim or E, which were combined by a Redactor who added Deuteronomy, and integrated a later Priestly (P) document. This is typical scholarly Biblical criticism, which no other religion has. We should regard this with pride, but instead we are most proud of our total idiocy.

He then writes this, where how he writes is as important as what he writes:

I prefer to simplify by urging the reader to distinguish between two voices, one that tell its story with an irony so large and pervasive the literalists simply fail to hear it. That, ultimately is the voice of the Yahwist: aristocratic, skeptical, humorous, deflationary of masculine pretenses, believing nothing and rejecting nothing, and particularly aware of the reality of personalities, Yahweh’s most of all.

The other voice is pious, fearful, cultic, ornately slow, pretentious, distrustful of women, impatient as to the vagaries of personality.

This is not only excellent writing, but useful as well. It tells you how to appreciate the Bible. And not only that, the Christian attitude in general – which still saturates our culture, whether we like it or not.

He finishes with this:

The Bible matters most because the Yahwist imagined a totally uncanny god, human-all-too-human and exuberant beyond all bindings.

It is now fashionable to regard the Bible with disgust – as part of a distasteful past. I can sympathize with this attitude, since I too suffered from a religious childhood. And religious fundamentalism has returned with all its odious stink.

But the Bible is part of our history, and we should be trying to understand it. Without a past there can no present, or no future. And this unfortunately, is what we seem to be now aiming at.

A world not only without a Bible, but also without any people in it.