The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible (review)

Harold Bloom calls the King James Bible (KJB) one of "the two central masterworks of English literature." The other, the plays of Shakespeare's major phase, emerged at the same time. The KJB translators wanted simply, as they said, "to make a good translation better," and on its four-hundreth anniversary Bloom adds his own personal tribute to their achievement. He is a "Bardolator" rather than a believer—Shakespeare does not moralize—but he knows the Bible inside and out and is thoroughly familiar with the KJB and the history of its production. Gerald Hammond's appreciation of its style in The Making of the English Bible (1982) wins his praise, but he traces his own literary appreciation to Matthew Arnold's God and the Bible and Isaiah of Jerusalem.

"To write a literary appreciation of the KJB," he says, "is necessarily to compose an aesthetic estimate of the English Bible: Tyndale, Coverdale, Geneva, and finally the Authorized Version" (89). With an eye on the Hebrew text, he wonders whether the original or its translations should be the "proof-text" of literary excellence and distributes his praise and criticism accordingly. The Greek New Testament is a different matter. The translation, largely Tyndale's, is with few exceptions—he will select the Greek of Hebrews and James—"an immense improvement" (245). Moreover, "the Greek New Testament, except for Paul and James, the brother of Jesus, is a viciously anti-Jewish work" (246) that "has hatred at its core despite its doctrine of love" (247). Nietzsche said something like the last part about the New Testament but meant the hatred of slaves for their masters. Yet Bloom hastens to remind his readers that his book is a literary appreciation and "neither a polemic nor a defense of the Jewish people" (245). He also criticizes the religion of the Hebrew Bible severely at times.

The five books of Moses, the four heroines, Deborah, Ruth, Esther and Judith, David, the Prophets, the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs draw Bloom's comments in turn. Many, often lengthy quotations compare the English versions and illustrate his own critical judgments. It is the best feature of the book. As in The Book of J, he champions as author an early Yahwist and resists contemporary criticism's tendency to see her or his work as a post-Exilic patchwork. J's Joseph and Jacob, possibly modeled on the extraordinary figure of David, he admires in character and story, but the main reason he calls the Yahwist "one of the universe's greatest writers" is that great creation, Yahweh. "The Bible matters most because the Yahwist imagined a totally uncanny god, human-all-too-human and exuberant beyond all bindings" (11). The Eden story, for example, "can be viewed as a bad father's deliberate blunder, since Adam and Eve essentially are children. I recall saying that J's point is 'When we were children, we were terribly punished for being children'" (32-33). He finds literary gems in the Exodus accounts of liberation and theophany but dismisses the commandments and "the instructions for confecting the Tabernacle and the Ark." An aesthetic appreciation need not consider them. The difference between Bloom and believers is they have to find a home for the God J created, and so they may appreciate the Redactor's art in housing the "outrageous fellow" in their midst after getting Moses to talk him into curbing his temper and showing his gentler side in one of their neighborly face-to-faces.

I cite a few of Bloom's most perceptive comments. After testing Geneva against KJB's "the thunder of the captains and their shouting," the last words of the war horse description in Job 39:19-25, he states as a rough principle that "the impulse that guides a strong poet to end a work with a touch of finality was...