Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine
by Harold Bloom
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Book Summary Information
Author: Harold BloomEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10-06
ISBN: 1573223220
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Book Reviews of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine
Book Review: The Bloom of Resentment
Summary: 5 Stars
As Bloom might say, I've been brooding over this review.
If you are a Sunday-school teacher looking for inspiration here, you will likely be disappointed.
If you are an admirer of Bloom and his thinking and theories, you will be right at home.
Let me start by saying that 'Divine' is full of some of Bloom's densest and least repetitive writing, as well as his most thrilling speculation and provocative scholarship.
Even if you are a reader familiar with Bloom's books, you would do well to read his 'Book of J' and 'The American Religion' before picking up 'Divine'.
I feel compelled to mention that in this book Bloom seems to associate Christianity and Karl Marx ('fantastic builder of error') and implicitly blames this odd amalgam for our current academic landscape, notoriously dubbed by Bloom 'The School of Resentment'. However, unlike all his books since around 1985, 'Divine' contains no explicit polemic against academic Leftists. The Bush administration now bears the responsibility for the sorry state of reading as well as for all the cultural ills of the West. Perhaps this three-headed monster has always been lurking in Bloom's ideas, or perhaps it is his new caprice.
As an erstwhile Christian, I can anticipate certain readers' responses (and I feel certain Bloom can too) whose ox may be only a little gored, which would likely be enough for most.
For, however spectacular his flights of fancy or how sound his scholarship, Bloom is clearly kinder to the text(s) of his Jewish roots than he is to Jesus or to Christianity. (For anyone who is familiar with Bloom's Anxiety of Influence theory, what is implicit in 'Divine' is the notion that Christianity is a dangerous 'weak misprision' or weak misreading of Tanakh, which is the reason Bloom places Jesus' section first in the book. It is not done to give Yeshua pride of place-- as it might appear to some-- but because Bloom himself is troping according to his own theory. The ordering of 'Divine' is a reversal of Old Testament/New Testament: the weak derivation, Jesus, placed first, is fulfilled by the stronger source, Yahweh, who is placed last).
Although I find Bloom's intellectual understanding of the Christian psyche penetrating and accurate, it is clearly temperamentally impossible for him to engage Christianity and it's mysteries imaginatively with any real (as he might say) zest, since his fear and distaste are palpable even as his anatomies are dazzling, and even as I am left with a sense of his personal struggle. And although he may intellectually accept the notion that polytheism may not be inferior to monotheism, Bloom's spirit, as regards Jesus at least, balks at becoming too Greek.
All that said, I'll say it again, bluntly: everything in the New Testament, as Bloom implies, may indeed be aesthetic bilge; 'a suicidal Yahweh' may be 'inconceivable' to a Jewish mind (the book's refrain); the apostle Paul may be an 'unlovable' and 'delusional agitator'; the Christ people claim to see and know personally may only be perceived through one's daemon; all Jews complicit with Christianity's program at its inception (and thereafter) may be 'quislings' who want to placate Roman authority. But surely J and the Court Historian and all associated with them and the Captive Testament are not infallible? Surely not all the ignorance and ugliness in the world, aesthetic and otherwise, is and has been committed only by those undesirables who stole Torah, however much 'bad news' a 'mercurial' Yahweh may be?
And when Bloom says that Jesus was the 'greatest Jewish genius of all time', I don't believe he really believes what he is saying a jot, even as he chooses his words carefully enough for his evasions to succeed with most. And, even if, as it appears, he is finessing the word 'genius' to really mean 'charismatic', much in the mode of Hamlet, a charismatic whom Bloom doesn't mind calling dangerous. I also don't buy the notion that the voice of Mark's Jesus doesn't sound like Yahweh, when indeed it often does, but with a difference. And it's this difference that Bloom refuses to engage. But perhaps, after all, I should oblige him. Or, to use a rhetorical question as he might, one unanswerable in the negative: How could I do otherwise?
Like the first half on Jesus, the last half of the book, the section on Yahweh, is magnificent. I find it to be some of Bloom's deepest, knottiest and most difficult writing ever. Rhetorical questions like: 'What would Shakespeare ask Yahweh: What do you want for yourself?' simply ignite the page.
I love Bloom and his books (and I have read just about all of them, and have even written a thesis with them) but I don't like seeing Bloom as a stereotype--even a shade of one-- of fear and resentment; or reading a text that often whispers that I am an anti-Semite, or one that compels me to think (or write) like one, no matter what Bloom's subject matter, and no matter what he is saying out loud to me, be it about Jesus or not.
But I digress. Really.
Thankfully another year has passed, and my row of Bloom's books now has yet another marvelous addition.
Summary of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine
Harold Bloom has written about religion and the Bible throughout his career, but now, with Jesus and Yahweh, he has written what may well be his most explosive, and important, book yet.There is very little evidence of the historical Jesus-who he was, what he said. As Bloom writes, "There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews." And so Bloom has used his unsurpassed skills as a literary critic to examine the character of Jesus, noting the inconsistencies, contradictions, and logical flaws throughout the Gospels. He also examines the character of Yahweh, who he finds has more in common with Mark's Jesus than he does with God the Father of the Christian and later rabbinic Jewish traditions. Bloom further argues that the Hebrew Bible of the Jews and the Christian Old Testament are very different books with very different purposes, political as well as religious.
Jesus and Yahweh is a thrilling and mind-opening read. It is paradigm-changing literary criticism that will challenge and illuminate Jews and Christians alike, and is sure to be one of the most discussed, debated, and celebrated books of the year. At a time when religion has come to take center stage in our political arena, Bloom's shocking conclusion, that there is no Judeo-Christian tradition-that the two histories, Gods, and even Bibles, are not compatible-may make readers rethink everything we take for granted about what we believed was a shared heritage.
Bloom?s occasional forays into religious criticism are particularly interesting, given his lifelong passion for poetry and his contributions to the study of literature. And while discussions of religion itself are in play here, it is the characters of Jesus and Yahweh that inhabit the pages, and Bloom?s literary critic more than his moonlighting theologian examining them. And what of that analysis? Bloom has an obvious affinity for Yahweh over Jesus (even though Jesus gets first billing in the book?s title.) But to ascribe that preference to his Jewish roots is perhaps too easy. A close reading reveals more. Bloom finds that Yahweh, with his covenants, tempers, resolutions, and even occasional forays into the physical where he fights, eats and walks in the cool of the Garden presents a more interesting character than the rather enigmatic Jesus who only comes truly alive for him in Mark?s gospel, and even more so beyond the canonical scriptures in the Gospel of Thomas. And though in sensibility and identification Bloom hews closer to Yahweh, he acknowledges the place Jesus and his followers have made in the world, through an application of his own theory of the anxiety of influence, noting that "The New Testament frequently is a strong misreading of the Hebrew Bible, and certainly it has persuaded multitudes." Provocative statements like these abound, but Bloom is no provocateur. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his meditations on the names divine, it is hard not to respect his vigorous intellect and bracing candor as he explores their power.--Ed Dobeas
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