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.
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.
