Reading: “The Shadow of a Great Rock” by Harold Bloom

The Shadow of a Great Rock:
A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible
by Harold Bloom

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Back when I was an English major in the 1990s, Harold Bloom was the guy. His Bloom’s Literature criticism collections were the go-to reference books, alongside the CLC and TCLC volumes, and though we knew little about the man himself, we relied heavily upon him. His name hovered in the air of our department in the same way that those of his forerunners FR Leavis and Northrop Frye did. I didn’t read Bloom’s 1994 book The Western Canon until after college, then I skipped 2001’s How to Read and Why and went straight to The Daemon Knows when it came out in 2015. I used to use his “Introduction” to The Western Canon in my twelfth-grade English classes to help students understand why some literature is “great.” Let’s just say I’m a fan.

So reading The Shadow of a Great Rock was a pleasure, since Bloom is one of my favorite critics and since the King James Bible is the translation I prefer. (I am Catholic, but the Church’s New American translation can be a little . . . starchy.) I got my best introduction to reading the Bible in Dr. Frank Buckner’s freshman religion classes at the Methodist-affiliated Huntingdon College, and my first Biblical love was the KJV’s Ecclesiastes, whose imagery and poetry are vivid and beautiful. To read Bloom discussing the King James Bible is a double bonus.

For a Christian whose familiarity with the Bible is better than average, Bloom’s “Literary Appreciation” is enlightening, though sometimes uncomfortable to read. Examining the figures not by their connections or roles to sacred tradition but by their characteristics and actions, we get a different view of these ancient men and women.  And the critic spares no expense. The targets for his criticisms include Yahweh Himself, Isaiah, and Paul. He points out the strange and inconsistent behavior in the Old Testament and the baffling admonitions in the New. We see how Yahweh, in the early days, placed himself among His people, sometimes in the form of natural phenomena and sometimes even walking among them. Bloom gives a brief but wonderful commentary on the verses in Exodus 24, in which God was sitting with Moses, Aaron, and others while they ate on Mount Sinai. In Bloom’s analysis, we also see Jacob limping around and Esther facilitating revenge. We find thoughtful remarks on the differences between Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah. And, in the midst of it all, he finds room for his characteristically wry sense of humor: writing about Psalm 126, which “I take particular delight in,” he tell us, “If you are sleepless, then Yahweh does not love you.”

Acknowledging quite often throughout the book that regarding these figures and these stories as sacred makes it hard to view them as people or as characters, Bloom also shows us where he believes our English-language translators were off-base. It can be a little tedious to read the same passages more than once, which one has to do in this book, but here we find the KJV’s text alongside the earlier translations by Wycliffe and Tyndall. There are also piecemeal notes about the meanings of words in the original Tanakh, where Bloom walks us briefly through nuances in verbiage that he sees as missed opportunities. He doesn’t like the translators’ misrepresentation of Joseph’s “coat of many colors,” which he tell us was actually a specific type of royal garment. In Job, he laments that the “ha-satan” has been equated to Lucifer/Satan but would have instead been either a “blocking agent” or some kind of prosecutor for God.

Harold Bloom’s knowledge and intelligence are notable to me as a life-long reader and long-time writer. The man was extremely insistent on examining and assessing texts with unrelenting levels of scrutiny. Yet, by the 1990s, as multiculturalist and critical theories were challenging established notions, Bloom’s hard-line attitudes made him an easy target. (Mainly since he stood in the wide open and criticized his detractors smugly in return.) It would be wrongheaded to consider the old critic as a relic of now-dead past, because his main point in battling back against critical theories was that, for literature to be called great, it has to be great. Responding to calls for wider inclusion, he responded, Only if they’re as good as the writers you’ll be placing them next to. In that, I agree entirely, while counting myself among the literary practitioner-thinkers who want greater diversity in our American canon. And it’s in that spirit that I read The Shadow of a Great Rock. We should want to embrace the greatness of our Bible, our religion, and our tradition, and we should want to understand that greatness for what it is and what it includes. Bloom’s book is one (among many) that can remind us about the original texts and the cultures that produced them. In our everyday concerns over “faith and works,” what shouldn’t be neglected is intellectual work— the inconvenient and often arduous tasks of reading and studying with an open mind, done not with an intention to tear down the religion by exposing flaws and misconceptions, but to get closer to it by understanding what has changed over thousands of years and multiple translations.

Note: In the book, Bloom uses the abbreviation KJB for King James Bible. Here, I use the abbreviation that is more familiar to me: KJV for King James Version.