I can interpret it however I want.

Some quotes from Harold Bloom about the Yawhist, known as "J":

J has "a radical irony, unlike almost any other [writer], that I find also in certain moments of Kafka. This irony is neither the contrast or gap between expectation and fulfillment, nor the saying of one thing while meaning another. It is the irony of J's Hebraic sublime, in which absolutely incommensurate realities collide and cannot be resolved."

"J was a vastly eccentric great writer whose difficulty and originality are still obscured for us, and by us, because of a condition of enclosure that J's force has imposed upon us. When we attempt to call J's stories of Yahweh anthropomorphic, we truly are defending ourselves against J, by over-literalizing the figurative being he called Yahweh. When that over-literalization reaches its final point, then you end up with what Blake satirized as our vision of God as Urizen or Nobodaddy, a cloudy old man hovering up in the sky. Yet, in the Sinai Theophany, J shows us a picnic scene, Moses and seventy elders of Israel sitting and eating a Covenant meal while staring directly at Yahweh. Faced by the uncanny dignity of what we might call theomorphic Patriarchs as represented by J, we retreat into mere facticity of muttering about an anthropomorphic deity."

Bloom of course had read all the ancient literature, and could discern nuances in the ancient Hebrew that have never been translated into English. He is right here to point to Blake, who called the Bible the "great code of art," and learned from it that sacred poetry is never journalism or self-help but is an unsolvable ironic puzzle. Blake's own poetry is nearly all spoken by other characters, not Blake himself, who contradict themselves and each other, and if we were to distill their meanings into some prose version of "what he meant to say" we would inevitably be wrong. (And this comes as no surprise to anyone who has read apophatic theology: any statement we can make (in human language) about God must necessarily be wrong.)

People who want to read the Bible as straightforward narration, to be read literally like journalism or a science textbook, oversimplify.

It was funny and too accurate when Richard Dawkins demonstrated in a Tweet that he didn't understand anything about Kafka. Dawkins and other literalists have no access to the richness and beauty of that ironic sublime, which Bloom understood and Blake learned from.

People have indeed been interpreting the Bible in various ways, but most who believe in it believe that everything in it happened.

If that bothers you, you can see this discussion as if it were about characters in a novel.

And when it comes to experts, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a biblical scholar, wrote a book called "God: An Anatomy," where she explains how authors of the Bible and other believers considered god as a corporeal, human-shaped deity, who walked and talked and wept and laughed. A god who ate and slept and felt and breathed. And a god who was distinctly male.

Reformists have attempted to close the gap between the science and logical problems with how the bible portrays God and what is accepted in the modern age by arguing that God is less anthropomorphic and more pure abstract along the lines of the god of the philosophers. The people who wrote the bible didn't believe in any such god of the philosophers. Starting with Augustine, it has been a long battle to reform an anthropomorphic, physical god into something more palatable to the world after Plato and Aristotle. Bloom is just another in a long line of reformist apologists attempting to resolve their cognitive dissonance by retconning the bible.

(June 2, 2026 at 10:53 am)Angrboda Wrote: Reformists have attempted to close the gap between the science and logical problems with how the bible portrays God and what is accepted in the modern age by arguing that God is less anthropomorphic and more pure abstract along the lines of the god of the philosophers.  The people who wrote the bible didn't believe in any such god of the philosophers.  Starting with Augustine, it has been a long battle to reform an anthropomorphic, physical god into something more palatable to the world after Plato and Aristotle.  Bloom is just another in a long line of reformist apologists attempting to resolve their cognitive dissonance by retconning the bible.

What evidence or logical argument do you have to demonstrate that J intended his writings to be literally true, or that he intended his readers to accept them as literally true?

What evidence do you have the Harold Bloom was at all religious and had any interest in doing what you accuse him of?

(June 2, 2026 at 6:13 pm)Belacqua Wrote:

(June 2, 2026 at 10:53 am)Angrboda Wrote: Reformists have attempted to close the gap between the science and logical problems with how the bible portrays God and what is accepted in the modern age by arguing that God is less anthropomorphic and more pure abstract along the lines of the god of the philosophers.  The people who wrote the bible didn't believe in any such god of the philosophers.  Starting with Augustine, it has been a long battle to reform an anthropomorphic, physical god into something more palatable to the world after Plato and Aristotle.  Bloom is just another in a long line of reformist apologists attempting to resolve their cognitive dissonance by retconning the bible.

What evidence or logical argument do you have to demonstrate that J intended his writings to be literally true, or that he intended his readers to accept them as literally true?

Ancient literature of the time presents plenty of parallels for which we do know what the people thought. We also know the same for the bible. Do you have any evidence that J departs from the norm?

(June 2, 2026 at 6:13 pm)Belacqua Wrote: What evidence do you have the Harold Bloom was at all religious and had any interest in doing what you accuse him of?

I never claimed he was religious. We have plenty of evidence of Bloom's general conservative bent concerning tradition and plenty of examples of similar authors doing likewise (e.g. the Muslim reformers).

Regardless, both your points are arguments from silence and are basically invalid as argument, so, what's your point? Can you show that what I said is false?

(June 2, 2026 at 8:07 pm)Angrboda Wrote: Ancient literature of the time presents plenty of parallels for which we do know what the people thought.

That's right! All the ancient texts are myth, allegory, fable, and just-so stories. (Up until Herodotus, and even he is a bit iffy.) So if we were to claim that J's writings were meant literally it would mean that he is a serious exception to the rule, and that would require strong evidence or argument. 

Which of the ancient texts can you point to with confidence as intended to be literal reporting? 

Quote:We have plenty of evidence of Bloom's general conservative bent concerning tradition and plenty of examples of similar authors doing likewise (e.g. the Muslim reformers).

Right, so a "general conservative bent" proves that he is dishonestly claiming that the ancient texts were not meant literally. Even though he makes book-length arguments based on close reading of the ancient Hebrew and knowledge of the historical situation.

And this means you can tie him to Muslim reformers who are completely different from him.

So far your arguments don't give me any specifics about ancient texts, or the actual history of literary or biblical hermeneutics. If you're not interested in providing actual facts, please point to a reputable historian who supports your view.

If the jahwist source is more or less an anthology of folkore - and the compilers didn't believe a word of it...then the priestly source would be a candidate for literal reporting. Either in that the originating community genuinely believed it......or...the originating community cynically wrote it that way with the hopes that someone else would.

I think it's a mix of the two myself. As to whether or not people believe in some or all elements of their cultures folklore....well....we continue to do that today. Theirs was a more human alike god. He made weird and stupid decisions that would have been recognized as weird nd stupid decisions even then. In the ugaritic genesis (that the jahwist genesis almost certainly knew of and drew from) it's god and his wife that live in the steppe garden and have people problems. This has been a problem for religious authoritarianism and doctrine ever since. Evidence of that tension arising from the text itself, between jahwist and the later priestly editors... for starters.

(June 2, 2026 at 8:27 pm)Belacqua Wrote:

(June 2, 2026 at 8:07 pm)Angrboda Wrote: Ancient literature of the time presents plenty of parallels for which we do know what the people thought.

That's right! All the ancient texts are myth, allegory, fable, and just-so stories. (Up until Herodotus, and even he is a bit iffy.) So if we were to claim that J's writings were meant literally it would mean that he is a serious exception to the rule, and that would require strong evidence or argument. 

Which of the ancient texts can you point to with confidence as intended to be literal reporting? 

No, they weren't treated as such at the time. You're retconning to defend retconning. There are plenty of examples in Hinduism and Buddhism to illustrate the point (e.g. "For example, the colossal 18-day war in the Mahabharata is widely viewed on a literal level, but it is deeply and universally interpreted as the constant internal war between good and evil within an individual's own consciousness." - ChatGPT). These text were not interpreted as myth, allegory, fable, or just so stories. You're engaging in a form of presentism.

There are two questions here. Whether the source was compiling folklore and whether or not the places and people the source got that folklore from (or transmitted it to) believed in it literally are not the same question.

We might ask the same of the brothers grimm....but we would be very safe in assuming that if the folklorist component of the documentary hypothesis were true the folklorist j got those stories from people who believed they were literally true, and enough people believed they were literally true after transmission for it to be worth the p sources time to make them fit centuries later for legal purposes.