THE KING JAMES BIBLE AND THE DREAM OF WHOLENESS

1 1 9 R T H E K I N G J A M E S B I B L E A N D T H E D R E A M O F W H O L E N E S S L E S L I E B R I S M A N Roughly coincident with the publication of this issue of The Yale Review, Yale University Press is issuing The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible, by Harold Bloom. The perdurability of the Authorized Version, or King James Bible (KJB), for four hundred years and the durability of the genius of Harold Bloom in well over four hundred volumes seem to me equally miraculous; their special confluence is an occasion to be celebrated. What I propose to do here is to brood over one theme in Bloom’s book whose iconoclastic acumen outweighs the volumes of less insightful adoration of the King James translation: the role of this translation in abetting the illusion that the Bible is a single work. Here is a sample Bloom sentence: ‘‘The largest literary failure of the KJB . . . is the tonal uniformity its baroque style imposes upon very di√erent writers.’’ Not surprisingly, what Bloom understands as the failure of the KJB is precisely what so many have celebrated as its greatest success. There are, essentially, two ways to read the Bible – symbolically (one book, one purpose, one plot, one author) and diabolically (many books by di√erent authors whose historicity and di√erences in theology, style, and sense of literariness are the 1 2 0 B R I S M A N Y appropriate subject for academic, as opposed to church, study). George Bernard Shaw caught the spirit of the former: ‘‘To this day the common Britisher or citizen of the United States of North America accepts and worships it as a single book by a single author, the book being the Book of Books and the author being God.’’ Shaw may have been sneering, but many a Christian, even many a scholar rapt beyond reason into pure adulation, have treated the Bible as though it were indeed not an anthology of sacred books but a book, whose author (since the actual writers lived over the course of a millennium) can only be called God. Take Northrop Frye, for example, whose Great Code proclaims that typological reading is ‘‘the ‘right’ way of reading it – ‘right’ in the only sense that criticism can recognize, as the way that conforms to the intentionality of the book.’’ The ‘‘intentionality’’ means one intention, ‘‘the book’’ treats the whole Bible as one book, as though the typology of Paul in Romans governed not just all the letters of Paul, all the letters (such as Hebrews and Timothy ) not by Paul, but all the books of the Old and New Testaments. What is it about the King James Bible that makes it seem especially responsible for what Bloom perceives as the error of the homogenization of di√erent biblical sublimities? At the outset, there are three obvious things to say on this score that perhaps should be stated together: the first is that any translation of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament into English, the same English, is bound to further the impression that the Bible is a book, not a collection of books. When reading in Hebrew, it is not hard to tell that Isaiah is not written by the priests who penned Leviticus, and even within a single book such as Genesis it is possible to distinguish the style of the J Writer from that of E, or the pious sayings that Ecclesiastes inherits from his own, startlingly antithetical proverbs; reading in Greek, one is constantly aware of how di√erent Mark is from Matthew, or Revelation from the Gospel of John. In this sense, any translation into English of the whole collection of biblical books furthers the blending of di√erent voices. If historical accident (and special commercial as well as sectarian interests) had not privileged the King James translation and proscribed the more popular Geneva, we would be saying that the Geneva...