







































Roundtable.indd


© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007, Unit 6, Th e Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 1.1 (2007) 071–088] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368 
doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.71 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Academic Roundtable

Each spring issue of Expositions will feature an Academic Roundtable, 
in which three scholars from diff erent fi elds review a contemporary 
work of criticism or scholarship.

Harold Bloom. Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine. New York: 
Riverhead, 2005. 238 pp. $24.95. ISBN 1-57322-322-0.

I.  Jacques D. Berlinerblau, Georgetown University

Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine is so whimsically 
argued that it makes his oft-criticized 1990 study, Th e Book of J, read 
like a Heidelberg dissertation. With his most recent foray into biblical 
scholarship the popular—though not necessarily popularizing—Yale 
Professor has produced a disheveled work. It abounds in booming 
proclamations, dramatic conclusions and autobiographical asides. As 
usual, he shuns the specialists.  Instead, he chooses to rely mostly on the 
writings of a few dear friends and, to use Kafka’s term, “ale-house cro-
nies.” In a new twist, Bloom appears to have become possessed by that 
evil spirit that has possessed so many humanists of late: the Demon of 
Political Engagement. He comments so caustically (and unoriginally) 
on the war in Iraq, the current president, and the Religious Right that 
one almost expects him to fl ash a “FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL” sign 
halfway through his tome. In other instances, he seems to have set for 
himself the peculiar goal of making negative generalizations about Is-
lam while engaging in as little substantive analysis as possible.

Th is having been said, I was often charmed and captivated by Jesus 
and Yahweh. By way of full disclosure, I confess that I have always had a 
bit of a soft spot for its author. I am forever indebted to Bloom for one 
devious aside in Th e Book of J. Th e remark in question, so consonant 
with what I have elsewhere termed “secular hermeneutics,” reads as 
follows: “Since I am aware that my vision of J will be condemned as a 
fancy or a fi ction, I will begin by pointing out that all our accounts of 
the Bible are scholarly fi ctions or religious fantasies, and generally serve 

Roundtable.indd   71Roundtable.indd   71 04/06/2007   12:29:5004/06/2007   12:29:50



72 Academic Roundtable

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

rather tendentious purposes” (Bloom 1990, 9; cf. Berlinerblau 2005). 
Th e audacity of this observation continues to astound me. Bloom un-
derstood that God has left us no empirical tools that can objectively 
validate our interpretations of His perplexing writ. Permit me to ex-
trapolate: hermeneutics is no hard science. We could even say that it is 
an art form.  And if this is the case then interpretations of sacred Scrip-
ture should be judged not on their verisimilitude but on their ability to 
entertain. In fi elds of inquiry where little can be decisively proven it is 
better to be interesting than to be absolutely correct.  

And interesting Bloom is! For all of its fl aws Jesus and Yahweh dares 
to ponder the broader civilizational relevance and ramifi cations of the 
Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Th is is a task that professional Bibli-
cists have all but forsaken. While one can—and should—disagree with 
virtually every claim Bloom makes, his imagination and erudition can 
never be denied. Again and again, he gives us the intellectual razzle- 
dazzle—and given the monastery-like demeanor of our fi eld we could 
use a few sequins in our eyes. Nor should we overlook his penchant for 
making mischief.  Here he is comparing American Jewry to post-exilic 
Babylon (Jesus and Yahweh 191). Here is speaking of not the “New,” 
but the “Belated” Testament (14). Here he is dubbing Allah “a suicide 
bomber” (237). How this conforms to his disclaimer in the introduc-
tion that he hopes “only to clarify … and not to give off ense” (237) is 
anybody’s guess.  

Th is reviewer, then, professes to both like and dislike the work under 
consideration. Leaving a discussion of Bloom’s treatment of Christian-
ity and literature for the two distinguished scholars who are participat-
ing in this roundtable, I will concentrate mostly on his remarks on the 
Hebrew Bible and Judaism in general.

 Th e aforementioned Book of J, published fi fteen years ago, is actually 
the theoretical preface to Jesus and Yahweh. Th e title of that much-
discussed work portended nothing new or controversial. For centuries 
scholars have posited the existence in the Pentateuch of a distinct J 
document. Various exegetes had already attempted to tease out this 
source and read it in isolation from the rest of the Bible. Nor was the 
hypothesis that the author of J was a woman, writing in the “post-

Roundtable.indd   72Roundtable.indd   72 04/06/2007   12:30:0904/06/2007   12:30:09



Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine 73

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

Solomonic Enlightenment,” original (though Bloom seemed to have 
thought it was).1 Fortuitously, these conjectures are not frequently re-
hearsed in Jesus and Yahweh. Yet Bloom’s admiration for the artistry 
and insight of J has, if anything, grown over the intervening fi fteen 
years.

Like so many professors of literature and poetics who have written 
about the Bible, Bloom is awed and mesmerized by the aesthetic mer-
its of Scripture.2 Th e writer J, he argues, has vexed posterity with a 
literary character named Yahweh, the “uncanniest personifi cation of 
God ever ventured by humankind” (5). “If Yahweh is a fi ction,” writes 
Bloom, He is “the most disturbing fi ction the West ever has encoun-
tered” (117).

Th e deity is depicted as freighted with “human, all-too-human traits 
of personality and of character” (2). No open book, J’s Yahweh is “para-
doxical” (7), “a character .  .  .  rich in contraries” (130), “jealous” 
(138), “turbulent” and “unpredictable” (143). In a memorable turn 
of the phrase, He is described as “bad news incarnate” (170). Railing 
against the idea of Yahweh’s anthropomorphism, Bloom lingers on J’s 
descriptions of a “human god” (195), a man, adorned with a big, bru-
talizing body (197–99).

Having established the spectacularity of J’s fi ctional creation, Bloom 
is positioned to engage in a compare-and-contrast operation of epic 
scale. J’s impish deity serves as a baseline against which a series of com-
parisons will be drawn. To the best of my knowledge few have even 
thought of making such contrasts and this is what makes Jesus and 
Yahweh, when all is said and done, a bold and intriguing work. First 
and foremost, Bloom wishes to identify diff erences between Yahweh 
of the Tanakh and God the Father of the Christian Bible. Th e latter, 
he insists, “has only the slightest resemblance” to the former (232). (A 
sub-theme in this work focuses on the lack of similarity between Jesus 
Christ and Jesus of Nazareth who Bloom calls a “more or less histori-
cal person” (1)). Th is leads naturally to a second analytical gesture, the 
juxtaposition of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Finally, 
the preceding two lines of analysis unfold into broader comparisons of 
Judaism and Christianity.  

Roundtable.indd   73Roundtable.indd   73 04/06/2007   12:30:0904/06/2007   12:30:09



74 Academic Roundtable

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

What Bloom fi nds is not continuity between the Abrahamic faiths 
and their foundational texts, but bitter, radical irreconcilability. Th e 
idea of a shared Judeo-Christian heritage is dispensed with swiftly as 
the two religions are described as “enemy brothers” (166). Such a ver-
dict befi ts an author who repeatedly refers to the Hebrew Bible as “the 
captive prize” of Christianity (113).  

But while Judaism is shown to have been victimized by Christianity’s 
appropriations and misreadings, a pronounced Jewish triumphalism 
characterizes this work. One can’t help but notice that Yahweh and 
Judaism (and to a lesser extent “the more-or-less historical Jesus”) keep 
coming up aces. Th e Christian Father, by contrast, emerges as some-
thing of a bore—white bread, to Yahweh’s crusty focaccia. Yahweh is 
fearsomely dynamic, his Christian counterpart is static (234). Yahweh 
cannot be loved, cannot be known, cannot be counted on. Yahweh is 
interesting. Th e Father is a bland theological abstraction.

Th e same boosterism can be seen in Bloom’s remarks on Scripture.  
Th e New Testament (with the exception of Mark’s Gospel) is consist-
ently held to be inferior to its predecessor. Its historical veracity is of-
ten questioned. (Th ough, for some reason, Bloom concludes that the 
apocryphal report of Jesus’ sojourn in India is trustworthy.) But what is 
historical accuracy to an aesthete anyway? Th e real defect of the Belated 
Testament lies in its defi cient artistry. Like Nietzsche, but unlike the 
Patriarchs, Bloom clearly prefers the older brother: “In the aesthetic 
warfare between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, there is 
just no contest, and if you think otherwise, then bless you” (86). Be 
that as it may, he insists “the Christian Bible has defeated and refash-
ioned the Tanakh” (156). 

Th e victory of the New Testament was a hollow one indeed. Its mis-
reading of the Hebrew Bible has given birth to Christology, unceremo-
niously described as “weird science” (154). Christianity, as evidenced 
by its historical treatment of Jews, has betrayed the message of the 
historical Jesus. Christians, for their part, do not come off  much better.  
Th ey search for their Jesus Christ but invariably fail; what they fi nd at 
the end of their quest is themselves. Rounding out these un-ecumeni-
cal sentiments is Bloom’s contention that Christians are unaware that 

Roundtable.indd   74Roundtable.indd   74 04/06/2007   12:30:1004/06/2007   12:30:10



Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine 75

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

the Jesus Christ they worship is irreconcilable with the more-or-less 
historical Jesus.

Before unleashing further provocations, it must be noted that there is 
one glaringly manifest diffi  culty with this line of analysis. Th is concerns 
Bloom’s isolation of the J source at the expense of all other scriptural 
materials. Assuming that the J source exists, it must be recognized that 
J’s Yahweh is not synonymous with the Hebrew Bible’s conception of God.  
In classic documentary hypothesis J is but one document in the Penta-
teuch. It was recombined, repositioned, refracted and often drowned 
out by three other sources (i.e., E, D and P) as well as large swaths of 
the Prophets and the Writings. J’s Yahweh is not necessarily the God 
that Jews have venerated any more than the E source’s Elohim is. Th e 
image of God in Hebrew Scriptures is an unruly, multifaceted, multi-
valent thing. His overall portrait is a hodge-podge of varying concep-
tions of the divine scattered across twenty-four scrolls, each written 
and redacted across centuries. Th us, to draw inferences about the dif-
ferences between Christianity and Judaism on the basis of the J source 
alone seems a specious endeavor.

Yet by confl ating the God of the Jews with the God of the J source 
Bloom wanders into a variety of intriguing existential and theologi-
cal dilemmas. He confronts them in starkly personal terms and these 
encounters comprise some of the most poignant sections of the book.  
Scholarly writing rarely features anything that could be labeled as nar-
rative. But this appears to be precisely what we have in Jesus and Yah-
weh—a narrative with full-blown character development. Th e central 
character: Professor Harold Bloom. Th e development: the protagonist’s 
coming to Yahweh.  

At the beginning of Jesus and Yahweh the God of the Hebrew Bible 
is referred to as a fi ction. Yet as the plot advances, we begin to won-
der. Picking up clues from the Genesis legends, Bloom identifi es those 
fl aws in Yahweh’s character that have caused undue suff ering for His 
subjects.  J off ers us a portrait of a deity with no allegiance to his handi-
work, one who retains a “highly ambivalent attitude toward his own 
creation” (213). Bloom lashes out at the God of the Jews for staying 
true to biblical form in his later dealings with His people. Here is a de-

Roundtable.indd   75Roundtable.indd   75 04/06/2007   12:30:1004/06/2007   12:30:10



76 Academic Roundtable

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

ity that has exiled himself and thus permitted the catastrophes of Jew-
ish history. Fleshing out the rudiments of (a Gnostic) post-Holocaust 
theology Bloom asks about Yahweh’s abandonment of the children of 
Israel. Th e world, he observes ruefully, is a place from which Yahweh 
has withdrawn. Th e deity, it is suggested, should be convicted on the 
charge of desertion.

Mindful of his approaching seventy-fi fth birthday, Bloom seems to 
have resigned himself not only to Yahweh’s character fl aws, but to His 
non-fi ctional nature. Halfway through the work he declares: “Whether 
you regard him as ‘a literary character’ or as your creator scarcely mat-
ters in this struggle to reach the unreachable” (131). But does the fol-
lowing candle-lit passage sound like the musings of someone who sees 
Yahweh as a mere literary character?

I very much want to dismiss Yahweh as the ancient Gnostics did, fi nd-
ing in him a mere demiurge who had botched the creation so that it 
was simultaneously a Fall.  But I wake up these days, sometime between 
midnight and two A.M., because of nightmares in which Yahweh sar-
donically appears as various beings, ranging from a Havana-smoking, 
Edwardian-attired Dr.  Sigmund Freud to the Book of Daniel’s silently 
reproachful Ancient of Days (236).

Increasingly haunted by the deity, he confesses to an “uneasy waning 
of skepticism in regard to Yahweh” (234).  Elsewhere, Bloom argues, 
with no discernible wink or nod, that the Jewish God returned to Israel 
in 1948. Th e narrative ends with Bloom wondering aloud if He will 
make a covenant with humanity that He both can and will keep.

 “Where shall transcendence be found?” is the question posed in 
the fi nal stanzas of Jesus and Yahweh (235). Bloom’s answer, “the arts,” 
strikes me as eminently plausible. Even more plausible is his recogni-
tion that this form of transcendence only appeals to elites. Th e major-
ity is not about to experience the divine (or something approximating 
it) upon reading Hamlet or listening to the Jazz pianist Eric Reed. It is 
more likely that they will submerge themselves in what Bloom refers to 
as “the blood-dimmed tide” of Scripture. And for these reasons secular-
ists who ignore sacred texts do so at the risk of completely misreading 
their own societies.

Roundtable.indd   76Roundtable.indd   76 04/06/2007   12:30:1004/06/2007   12:30:10



Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine 77

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

In its own strange way, Jesus and Yahweh attempts to off er secular 
transcendence to the select few. For this work aspires to be beautiful, 
a work of art in and of itself. Although it often fails in this regard, and 
although the ideas it advances are not always convincing, it does some-
times succeed in provoking and entertaining with a luminous original-
ity. Looking at the Big Picture is no small feat and for this we should 
laud Professor Bloom in his seventy-fi fth year.

Endnotes

1. For a discussion of the lack of originality in Bloom’s writings on J see the 
impassioned critique of Richard Elliot Friedman (1991).

2. “Bible as Literature” scholars are the Intelligent Design theorists of modern 
Old and New Testament research: while they posit a preternaturally gifted 
author as the source of the text, they cannot rationally prove that this author 
actually existed. See Berlinerblau 2004.

References

Berlinerblau, Jacques
2004 Th e Bible as Literature?  Hebrew Studies 45: 9–26.
2005 Th e Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously.  Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bloom, Harold
1990 Th e Book of J.  New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

Friedman, Richard Elliot
1991 Is Everybody a Bible Expert? Not the Authors of the Book of J.  Bible 

Review 7: 16–18, 50–51.

II.  John Gager, Princeton University

Is it really true that all scholarship is a form of projection, of autobiog-
raphy; that we are all caught in a tangled web of narcissistic self-refl ec-
tion? In the early 20th century, Albert Schweitzer, in his monumental 
work on the history of lives of Jesus, wrote that no task so reveals an 
era’s, or one might just as well say in individual’s, self-understanding 
as the attempt to write a life of Jesus. He was surely right in this obser-

Roundtable.indd   77Roundtable.indd   77 04/06/2007   12:30:1104/06/2007   12:30:11



78 Academic Roundtable

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

vation but never paused to consider whether his fundamental insight 
(we might also call it an iron law) applied to his own work as well.  
Did he believe, as I suspect must be true, that the German myth of 
Wissenschaft, of history as the domain of objective, unbiased, presup-
positionless inquiry, enabled him to transcend the theological trap that 
had ensnared all of his predecessors?

Harold Bloom’s “quirky, unforgivable, but deliciously provocative 
book” (Berlinerblau 2006, B12) embodies Schweitzer’s law, but much 
more as well. It comes full circle from Bloom’s hugely infl uential Th e 
Anxiety of Infl uence, fi rst published in 1973, but does so in a way that 
fi nally lets the cat out of the bag. As one insightful critic, indeed a 
former student of Bloom at Yale, has put it,

Who really cares … that Stevens “misread” Shelley … ? But the battle 
between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible is a struggle over 
religious truth that goes to the core crisis in Western civilization, and 
in Bloom himself.  It helps explain why, in Bloom’s agonistic literary 
universe, literature, despite his genius for explaining it, can seem oddly 
irrelevant.  It is religious truth that matters.” (Rosen 2005)

My one complaint about this otherwise brilliant insight into Bloom’s 
own anxiety of infl uence—of a passionate Jew living in, or at least at 
the end of a Christian civilization—is that for Bloom there is fi nally 
no distinction between literature and religion. For the most part, the 
fi gure of Yahweh has no existence apart from its embodiment in the J 
material of the Hebrew Bible. Likewise, and again for the most part, 
the fi gure of Jesus has no embodiment apart from the gospels of the 
Christian scriptures.

Indeed, the parallels go well beyond this simple observation.  For 
Bloom, there are unmistakable similarities between the Yahweh of J 
and the Jesus of Mark. Bloom’s characterization of his Yahweh would 
do just as well for his Jesus: ambivalent creator and destroyer (the fi g 
tree episode in Mark 13); uncanniness; trickster; enigmatic; a personal-
ity without a sexual component; and so on. Moreover, the subsequent 
traditions of ancient Israel and early Christianity found Yahweh and 
Jesus to be completely unacceptable and thus subjected them to radi-
cal revision, making their rough places plain. Th e underlying issue of 

Roundtable.indd   78Roundtable.indd   78 04/06/2007   12:30:1104/06/2007   12:30:11



Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine 79

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

infl uence becomes clear in Bloom’s remark that “Jews have a negative 
relationship to Christ, but not necessarily to Jesus, who is scarcely re-
sponsible for what supposed Christianity has done in his name” (27). 
In short, Jesus belongs not to Christianity but to Judaism, more pre-
cisely to authentic, Yahweh-inspired Judaism. Th e Christianity that has 
dominated Western civilization, and not so coincidentally the Jews, 
for 20 centuries is thus an inauthentic version not just of authentic 
Israel (the Yahweh variety) but of its own supposed founder. Of course, 
much the same can be said of later, post-Yahweh Judaism, but that is 
largely beside the point inasmuch as it is Christianity and not Juda-
ism that has been the primary cultural infl uence on all of us.  But for 
Bloom it remains fundamentally true that “Christianity (and Judaism) 
no longer are biblical religions” (172).

Much of what Bloom says along these lines is familiar stuff . Jewish 
scholars, among whom one may cite Martin Buber (in his Two Types 
of Faith, [1951] 2003) as one example among many others, have long 
argued that Jesus was a Jew, pure and simple; his followers misun-
derstood and misrepresented him from the very beginning. Much of 
recent Christian scholarship on Jesus follows a similar line, but with 
one important diff erence. Whereas Jewish scholars tend to see in Jesus 
a Jew who remained faithful to his tradition from start to fi nish, with 
no hint of reform or rebellion, Christian scholars, including those who 
emphasize Jesus’ Jewishness, seem unable to resist the temptation to 
fi nd some point in Jesus’ life where he departs from or undermines 
Judaism in some fundamental fashion. In these cases, the underlying 
motivation is surely to reclaim Jesus, at whatever price, for Christian-
ity, and to proclaim him as the true founder of the new faith.  For me, 
the desire to fi nd a point of departure from Judaism in the life of Jesus 
rests on a fundamental misuse and misreading of the early gospels, 
some of which (Luke in particular) are heavily invested in making Jesus 
the founder of Christianity, while others (here Matthew is the parade 
example; see Anthony Saldarini’s remarkable Matthew’s Christian-Jew-
ish Community (1994)) are read as Christian only with the aid of a 
profound ignorance of ancient Judaism.  

But there is another tendency in Bloom’s work on Jesus that betrays 

Roundtable.indd   79Roundtable.indd   79 04/06/2007   12:30:1104/06/2007   12:30:11



80 Academic Roundtable

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

both his status as an amateur in the fi eld and at the same time his reli-
ance on an unfortunate trend in all forms of Jesus scholarship—the 
tendency to slip from gospel stories to ‘facts’ about the real Jesus. Th e 
tendency is understandable enough in a broad sense. We all want to 
know something reliable about the fi gure of Jesus. We are all suscepti-
ble to horror vacui.  True enough.  Both professionals and amateurs in 
any fi eld are open to gaff es of many kinds.  Yet in this case, Bloom’s is 
all the more surprising in that his take on the gospels, and especially 
the Gospel of Mark, is shaped by the work of another amateur, Frank 
Kermode in his magisterial Norton Lectures on Mark, Th e Genesis of 
Secrecy (2006). “Rereading Kermode’s book, after a quarter century, I 
am stimulated to augment his pioneer analysis by swerving into sur-
mise as to the psychology of Jesus” (Bloom 31). What surprises in this 
swerve is that Kermode insists throughout his lectures that we need to 
concentrate on what is written, i.e., the gospel stories and how they are 
told, and turn aside from what is written about, i.e., the real story of 
the historical Jesus. Th us when Bloom asks, “Did Jesus believe in the 
originality of his message?” (32), he slips back, if only momentarily, 
into a mode of inquiry that is curiously out of place, not just in profes-
sional Jesus-scholarship but in his own literary domain. What we have 
is stories, versions and nothing more.  

Following his denial that Jesus intended to establish a new religion, 
Bloom locates the true founder of Christianity in the fi gure of Paul 
(27). Today this seems like an odd claim. While it is certainly true that 
Paul dominates the New Testament, the conclusion to be drawn from 
this is not that Paul was the founder of Christianity but rather that 
the makers of the New Testament, centuries after his death, made him 
the founder of their religion. Th ey were Christians. If Jesus was not, 
as Bloom rightly avers, neither was Paul. He became a Christian only 
through the New Testament.  

If Jesus somehow appeals to him, perhaps as a distant echo of Yah-
weh, Paul puzzles. On the one hand, Bloom can hold that “For Paul, 
the Resurrection, or Christ-event, proclaimed the death of Torah” (42).  
Yet only a few pages later, he comes to strikingly diff erent conclusions: 
“Th e vehemence and violence of the Apostle’s personality are revealed 

Roundtable.indd   80Roundtable.indd   80 04/06/2007   12:30:1104/06/2007   12:30:11



Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine 81

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

through his letters, which are mostly argued against Jewish Christians, 
rather than against Jews and Judaism … Pharisees, the hated oppo-
nents of Matthew, are not a target for Paul” (53). Strike the phrase 
“Jewish Christians,” substitute for it something like “other Jewish be-
lievers in Jesus,” and recall the earlier statement that Paul “devoted the 
remainder of his life to the conversion of Gentiles” (52)—with these 
modifi cations, the words about “the death of Torah” simply could not 
have been written or at the very least would have to be modifi ed to read 
that “Paul proclaimed the death of the Torah in the sense that its regu-
lations, most notably circumcision, were not incumbent on Gentile 
believers in these last days of history.” Something new had happened.  
But to Gentiles. And that new thing can certainly not to be summed 
up as “the death of the Torah.”

It is true that Paul is a diffi  cult fi gure, perhaps even an unlikable one, 
but this is no reason to give up trying to make sense of his thinking.  
We may not like him, but we should not rush to judge him as one who 
“confuses anyone attempting a dispassionate stance toward him.” Here 
Bloom has taken the easy way out, perhaps under the infl uence of his 
Yale colleague, Wayne Meeks, who appears to have convinced him of 
Paul’s Protean, i.e., essentially unstable and contradictory, character.  
We may well be “left baffl  ed by him,” but it is surely not because “We 
know too much about him” (57).

I suspect that much of our puzzlement about Paul is due to our in-
ability to wash away the centuries of sludge that Christianity has piled 
upon him. As the Apostle of Christianity, he has been hailed as the 
founder of every conceivable orthodoxy and heresy, including notably 
Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Bloom is well aware of this 
but like many modern readers of Paul he fails to break completely free 
of these traditions.  

At the same time, Bloom is an extraordinary reader. He comes re-
markably close to a complete break with the hundreds of post-Pauline 
Pauls.  As noted earlier, the chief stumbling block remains his use of 
the term “Christian” with reference to the apostle. Th is term, which 
never occurs in any of Paul’s letters, is increasingly out of place today.  
What is now taken for granted of Jesus (he was not a Christian in 

Roundtable.indd   81Roundtable.indd   81 04/06/2007   12:30:1104/06/2007   12:30:11



82 Academic Roundtable

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

any sense of the term) is now widely held to be true of the apostle as 
well. On the other side, Bloom has no truck with the old, and sadly 
still prevalent view that Paul preached the divine rejection of Israel.  
“Yahweh and Israel, Paul implies, will work out the Chosen People’s 
Redemption” (56). Nor will he accept the notion that Israel’s fi nal re-
demption will take the form of accepting Christ or, in Bloom’s terms, 
becoming Christians like Paul. “Did Paul … really believe that Israel 
would accept Christ at that moment?” (56). Characterizing his basic 
disposition, he comments that “His ways of thinking and feeling es-
sentially remained Pharisaic.”  And fi nally, of the Pharisees, he “does 
not regard them as particularly prone to sin, nor, as their student, does 
he think of himself that way” (53). Here I wish that Bloom had paused 
to draw out the consequences of these penetrating insights, for they 
contain the seeds of a truly radical reassessment of the apostle. But the 
last step is frequently the most diffi  cult one to take.

Of course, with Bloom, one gets much more than the title promises: 
bits of Shakespeare, the Gospel of John (a lot here), Kierkegaard, Mil-
ton, Maimonides, Gnostics (no surprise), Kabbalah and Jewish-Chris-
tian dialogue (not a good thing). But in the end this is a book, as the 
title announces, about Jesus and Yahweh. Or rather about books about 
Jesus (gospels) and Yahweh (Torah). Or better yet, whether these books 
create these two fi gures, bring them into being by naming them, or 
whether in some way they refl ect a prior existence in some realm other 
than the purely literary.

References

Berlinerblau, Jacques
2006 What’s Wrong with the Society of Biblical Literature?  Th e Chronicle of 

Higher Education, Nov. 10.

Buber, Martin
2003 Two Types of Faith. [1951]  Trans. Norman P. Goldhawk. Syracuse:  Syra-

cuse University Press.

Kermode, Frank
2006 Th e Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Th e Charles Eliot 

Norton Lectures). New Edition. Cambridge:  Harvard University Press.

Roundtable.indd   82Roundtable.indd   82 04/06/2007   12:30:1204/06/2007   12:30:12



Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine 83

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

Rosen, Jonathan
2005 So Who Is the King of the Jews?  Rev. of Jesus and Yahweh, by Ha-

rold Bloom. Th e New York Times, Nov. 27. <http://www.nytimes.
com/2005/11/27/books/review/27rosen.html>

Saldarini, Anthony J.
1994 Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community.  Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press.

III.  Milton L. Welch, North Carolina State University

In his 1939 lectures “Idea of a Christian Society,” T.S. Eliot argues 
that a Christian State is the sole alternative to totalitarianism when 
democratic majorities become tyrannical and liberalism declines in free 
societies. He opens by remarking, 

I am not writing for scholars, but for people like myself; some de-
fects may be compensated by some advantages; and what one must 
be judged by, scholar or no, is not particularized knowledge but one’s 
total harvest of thinking, feeling, living and observing human beings 
(Eliot 1940, 5). 

Th at Eliot’s “total harvest” is uncritical of bland racial generality—“the 
Anglo-Saxons display a capacity for diluting their religion, probably in 
excess of that of any other race” (20, my emphasis)—indicates a source 
of the agonistic spirit with which Harold Bloom has approached Eliot’s 
critical work until quite recently. In his more than fi fty years of writing, 
Bloom has helped to overturn Eliot’s judgments on the Romantics, 
to argue for alternate traditions of modernism, and has developed a 
controversial theory of infl uence that undercuts Eliot’s basic premise 
in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that literary works contribute 
to literary tradition as monuments.

Bloom’s work in religious criticism vies, fi nally, to displace the traces 
of Eliotic social thinking, and has from the start addressed how reli-
gious value and political value infl uence one another in the present 
day. For instance, the fi rst sentence of Th e American Religion (1992) 
reads: “Freedom, in the context of the American Religion, means be-
ing alone with God or with Jesus, the American God or the American 

Roundtable.indd   83Roundtable.indd   83 04/06/2007   12:30:1204/06/2007   12:30:12



84 Academic Roundtable

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

Christ” (15). In Bloom’s contemporary America, spirit and culture are 
tangled in a Gordian Knot that becomes a noose when capacities for 
critical appreciation vanish, leaving behind political and religious myo-
pia. For this reason, Bloom’s latest book, Jesus and Yahweh, belongs to 
his continuing challenge to the conservative mode of criticism and 
social thought that Eliot helped to entrench in twentieth-century liter-
ary criticism.

One unfortunate consequence of the culture wars may be that Ha-
rold Bloom’s work on behalf of undermining Eliot’s cultural geneti-
cism is lost (see also Gates 1992). Th is geneticism sees culture as racial 
genetics—for the Eliot of Four Quartets, racial ancestry even drums 
the rhythms of poetry with ghostly “[f ]eet rising and falling” in “East 
Coker” (Eliot 1991, 56). Bloom’s trajectory from Map of Misreading to 
his infamous essay, “ ‘Th ey have the numbers; we the heights,’ ” charts 
a rising tide of polemics: other scholars, and, subsequently, prominent 
literary fi gures objected to Bloom’s stinging—and as critic Roy Sellars 
has pointed out, allusive—attacks against trendiness in critical and aca-
demic reading. And yet Bloom’s attacks were issued in an era that un-
knowingly witnessed the gradual collapse of university publishing (see 
MLA 2002) and the erosion of buying power in U.S. academic librar-
ies, two major scholarly crises of today (Greenblatt 2006). Even in the 
public, if reading is indeed at risk as an NEA study (Reading at Risk) 
announced in 2004, the conditions of that risk emerged during the 
culture wars, as Bloom’s writing coursed into fever pitch. Culture wars 
threw the humanities into a still acknowledged crisis (Cohen 2005), 
and perhaps only by ignoring academic history do Bloom’s polemics 
on the unique disciplinary grounding of literary study read as reaction-
ary politics to students of literature. Bloom’s unfortunate (and inaccu-
rate) caricature as a reactionary also ignores the force of Bloom’s pun 
on Andrew Marvell’s phrase “ruin the sacred truths,” which becomes 
a Nietzschean imperative for literary criticism to expose what Francis 
Bacon—and after him Melvin B. Tolson—called the Idols of the Tribe 
(see the poem by that name in Tolson 1999). Such ruining is the pho-
bia of Eliotic conservatism. Bloom is, however, one to be thanked if 
criticism has become less accommodating to, among other things, the 

Roundtable.indd   84Roundtable.indd   84 04/06/2007   12:30:1204/06/2007   12:30:12



Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine 85

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

casual anti-Semitism of Eliot’s droll chauvinism in After Strange Gods, 
his 1933 Paige-Barbour lectures at the University of Virginia.

If Th e Anxiety of Infl uence is right, Jesus and Yahweh may be Bloom’s 
phase of apophrades with Eliot—what Bloom once called the return of 
the dead, a writer’s late reckonings during which she will fail or fl our-
ish. Bloom’s new book is his most vigorously daring criticism in years, 
but his readers will recognize one of the book’s central claims as one 
that has appeared throughout his religious criticism—Jesus Christ in 
the New Testament and Yahweh in the Old Testament and Tanakh, 
whatever else they may be, are literary characters. As a work of criti-
cism, one of the questions Jesus and Yahweh raises is, however, what 
“literary character” may mean, and whether the term must devalue 
spiritual matters. In a recent interview (2005), Bloom claimed among 
others things that Yahweh “haunts” him, and at a point in the book 
Bloom makes an extravagant cultural prophecy that Yahweh has al-
ready returned to Earth (233). If literary character means a branded 
personality, then we should be puzzled—puzzled enough to consider 
assumptions about the roles literature and its characters may play in 
our lives.  Bloom defi nes “literary character” as “the vital protagonist, 
the principle of apotheosis, the hope for transcendence” (13), and con-
cludes his study asserting “God’s unknowability” (219), a literary judg-
ment that is also a spiritual position, albeit a rare position in the U.S., 
where according to a Gallup Poll oft-cited by Bloom, almost nine in 
ten believe in God’s personal love for them.

“I remember composing a section,” Bloom discloses about Th e Anxi-
ety of Infl uence in the current book, “on the New Testament’s anxiety 
of infl uence in regard to the Hebrew Bible, which is the subject of this 
chapter” (46).  Jesus and Yahweh’s claim that the Judeo-Christian tradi-
tion is misnamed is a topic that shaped his theory of infl uence, and 
is also rejoinder to Eliot’s conservatism.  Bloom’s antithetical mode 
of criticism here applied to the idea of a Judeo-Christian tradition is 
iconoclastic and at odds in every way with Eliot’s avowed spiritual and 
political stances. In Eliot’s vision of tradition as race, the greatness of 
the individual talent’s monument—which is to say of literature—is 
its honoring both whiteness and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Th e 

Roundtable.indd   85Roundtable.indd   85 04/06/2007   12:30:1204/06/2007   12:30:12



86 Academic Roundtable

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

shocking challenges Bloom puts to his reader are the historical and 
textual grounds for such a tradition, and subsequently, the further 
challenge of considering “Who was, who is Yahweh?” (131). Bloom 
off ers that Yahweh is “a planter of gardens, and is happy to picnic in 
the shade of a terebinth tree” (150). Th is description recalls Wallace 
Stevens’ portrait of the artist as an anthologist (Stevens 2003, 252–3), 
in that word’s etymological sense of studying fl owers:

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations.  Th e light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Refl ecting snow.  A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations—one desires
So much more than that.   (“Th e Poems of our Climate” 1.1–7)

Is Stevens writing about God as well here? Is this poem or its image 
of arranging fl owers a spiritual experience? Can we learn about God 
from reading literature? In reading the Tanakh or the Bible, have we 
already done so? Jesus and Yahweh can be admired for its thought-pro-
voking take on religion and literature. It will certainly provoke theo-
logical discussion in academic and public circles, but only coteries of 
literary academics will talk about it.  Th e latter situation is unlucky 
because this book is also a remarkable meditation on the uses of liter-
ary experience.

References

MLA (Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing)
2002 Th e Future of Scholarly Publishing.  In Profession 2002, 172–86.  New 

York: MLA.

Bloom, Harold
1992 Th e American Religion.  New York:  Simon & Schuster.
2005 Interviewed by Debbie Elliott. All Th ings Considered. National Public Ra-

dio.  December 11.  NPR: Archives. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
story.php?storyId=5048309

Cohen, Ralph, ed.
2005 Essays on the Humanities.  Spec. issue of New Literary History 36.1: 1–139.

Roundtable.indd   86Roundtable.indd   86 04/06/2007   12:30:1204/06/2007   12:30:12



Jesus and Yahweh: Th e Names Divine 87

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

Eliot, T.S.
1991 Collected Poems, 1909–1962.  New York:  Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. 
1940 Th e Idea of a Christian Society.  In Christianity and Culture, 1–78.  New 

York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis
1992 Integrating the American Mind.  In Loose Cannons: Notes on the Culture 

Wars, 105–20.  New York: Oxford University Press.

 Greenblatt, Stephen
2006 Special Letter from Stephen Greenblatt. MLA, Nov. 16. http://www.mla.

org/resources/documents/rep_scholarly_pub/ scholarly_pub

Perloff , Marjorie, et al.
1998 On Harold Bloom’s ‘“Th ey have the numbers, we the heights.”’ Poetry 

Forum.  Boston Review, Summer 1998.  http://bostonreview.net/BR23.3/
contents.html

Sellars, Roy
2006 Harold Bloom (Comic) Critic.  In Figures of Bloom: Th e Salt Companion to 

Harold Bloom, ed. Roy Sellars and Graham Allen, 255–89.   Cambridge: 
Salt Publishing.

Stevens, Wallace
2003 Th e Poems of Our Climate.  In Modern Poetry, Vol. 1 of Th e Norton An-

thology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd ed., ed. Jahan Ramazani, 
Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair, 252–53.  New York: W.W. Norton 
& Company.  

Tolson, Melvin B.
1999 “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems.  Ed. Raymond Nelson.  Charlottesville: 

University of Virginia Press.

U. S. National Endowment for the Arts.
2004 Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America.  Washington: 

Research Division, National Endowment for the Arts.

Roundtable.indd   87Roundtable.indd   87 04/06/2007   12:30:1304/06/2007   12:30:13




