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Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine Hardcover – October 6, 2005
| Harold Bloom (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Price | New from | Used from |
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRiverhead Hardcover
- Publication dateOctober 6, 2005
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions6.26 x 0.93 x 9.26 inches
- ISBN-101573223220
- ISBN-13978-1573223225
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Product details
- Publisher : Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition (October 6, 2005)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1573223220
- ISBN-13 : 978-1573223225
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.26 x 0.93 x 9.26 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,637,213 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,781 in Christology (Books)
- #2,977 in Religious Philosophy (Books)
- #8,584 in Judaism (Books)
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About the author

Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.
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The problem for Dr. Bloom is that the trick doesn't work in this instance. A deep understanding of history is vital to his enterprise. The New Testament and the Tanakh were written by people whose cultures, languages, and world views were profoundly different from our own. Whatever we make of their narratives at present, these authors were writing about what they believed to be real events and real beings. If we ignore what historical analysis can tell us about them and the worlds they lived in, we forfeit our insight and flatten the intellectual landscape, destroying all that time and distance have done to separate our world from theirs. We then judge ancient writers almost entirely by our modern beliefs and assumptions - and lose contact with them in the process.
Because of this, Dr. Bloom's analyses of the gospels of Mark, John, and the letters of Paul are not even "bird-bath deep," to borrow a phrase from H.L. Mencken, and are filled with errors. Most of the insights in them are not new and they are deeply distorted by personal reactions that the author is proud to wear on his sleeve. His ruminations about Yahweh suffer from the same approach and are even more idiosyncratic. After dismissing the rabbis of the Midrash and the Talmud for "softening" the wild Yahweh of the Torah's "J" writer, he treats us to a strange excursus on selected Kabbalistic speculations about the nature of God, parts of which will seem incoherent to most readers, as they did to me. While not without its own enduring value, the gnosticism of the Kabbalah tells us no more about the Yahweh of the "J' writer than the baroque cosmological schemes of the Hellenized Christian gnostics tell us about the real Jesus who lived in the Galilee and died in Jerusalem. Dr. Bloom makes frequent use of the term "misreading" in several contexts throughout the book, but the great misreading here is his own, caused by his failure to paddle out beyond the shallow water in comprehending his primary sources. The author's true home, of course, is in the self-absorbed world of modern literary criticism. He is at his most comfy quoting somebody's analysis of somebody's analysis of somebody's analysis and seems to have trouble seeing a primary text apart from the layers and layers of scholarly commentary that often obscure as much as they reveal. This is where a stiff sentence on a chain-gang run by insightful historians would do him a lot of good.
That being said, there is something of value here. Despite the horror it must induce in many of his sophisticated intellectual colleagues, part of Harold Bloom still wants to go where the angels fear to tread. I found the book infuriating in many ways but it compelled me read on and to ask myself why I had such a vivid reaction. It may do the same for you and if so, it is no small accomplishment. If Dr. Bloom can produce such responses in even a handful of his readers, then it appears he has learned something important from Mr. Jesus and Mr. Yahweh after all.
Bloom's favorite characters in all of literature, in descending order, are Yahweh (of the Tanakh/Old Testament), Jesus (of the New/Belated Testament), and Hamlet. There is no shortage of reverence and amazement for Jesus and Yahweh in this book.
The subject matter of this book necessarily precludes any attempt to artificially break it down into neat categories and packages. In other words, attempting to formally outline this book would be a harrowing experience. Bloom's writing wanders and trips and backtracks. But Bloom never lets key themes slip through the cracks: it's the first book I've ever read where I genuinely appreciate how repetitive it sometimes becomes. By returning to an underdeveloped theme several times in various contexts, we come to understand the rather nuanced and complex conclusions Bloom is trying to explain.
Some critics have labeled this book self-defeating, but only because they misread it. These critics claim that Bloom asserts that everyone winds up seeing only themselves when they look at the person of Jesus Christ. That's not at all what Bloom says. The book's approach is as a character study of 3 fascinating characters: the historical Yeshua (Jesus, in Greek) of Nazareth; the divinity his followers either realized him to be or made him into, Jesus the Christ; and the God of the Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh. Bloom points out what should be painfully obvious to anyone who has read much in the subject: the so-called Quest for the Historic Jesus is a doomed enterprise. All extant texts about Yeshua of Nazareth are heavily proselytizing documents, intended to win people over to their set of beliefs rather than to create an accurate historical record. Because there is so little to work with in trying to uncover the "historical Jesus," most of the work consists of deciding which words, sentences, or authors to trust. It's a highly subjective process, and one in which the searcher is bound to reveal more to us about himself than about Yeshua of Nazareth. Because the enterprise is so flawed and suspect, Bloom hardly spends any time at all on the historical Yeshua; instead, he moves quickly on to the characters we find in the literary bodies of the Jewish and Christian Bibles.
Bloom has not set out to write a polemic, and I don't think he has written one. He longs to discover what has happened to the ancient Yahweh of the Tanakh he reveres so deeply (and whom Jesus--for Bloom the greatest of Jewish geniuses--also deeply revered). Compared to this longing, he doesn't really seem to care much at all about getting us to agree with his conclusions.
That said, the core conclusion of Bloom's book is that the Christian New Testament constitutes the greatest misreading in the history of literature. "Greatest" because its various authors are genuinely brilliant in how they bend the Hebrew scriptures to align with their new Christ the Messiah, and a "misreading" in that it considers itself to be the fulfillment of the "Old Testament" even though it frequently gets the Tanakh just plain wrong. Bloom is inclined to refer to it as the "Belated Testament" when he points out how the New Testament's turning of Yahweh into the tame, vague God the Father is a disappointing neutering of the most complex and enigmatic character in all of Western (indeed world) literature.
Because this is not a direct attack on Christianity and because of its high degree of complexity, Christian readers will not be able to quickly duck and run into the shelter of the typical gang of apologists--Josh McDowell, Ravi Zaccharias, etc. Instead--and here is the true value and genius of this book--"Jesus and Yahweh" will send you diving for your Bible--perhaps in different translations than you're accustomed to--to read it anew, in a deeper, broader, and more astute way.



