A quirky dish

The four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible has produced some great books. Almost all aspects have been covered: the general histories of Melvyn Bragg and Gordon Campbell ranged over the politics and history, while David Crystal’s Begat showed how its idioms and phrases have percolated through our language. Now, in The Shadow of a Great Rock, Harold Bloom finishes the year by approaching the KJV as a work of art.
 
With a working knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, he shuffles between the original languages and a variety of English translations — Tyndale, the Geneva Bible and the King James itself. This approach makes for one of the book’s great strengths, namely the rich spread of quotation. It also gives us a chance to see how those famous phrases were worked through into their final form. Take that quartet of monosyllables, ‘a still small voice’, in 1 Kings 19, verse 12: we move from the Hebrew qol demmanah daqah (roughly ‘a voice of thin silence’) to Tyndale’s ‘a small still voice’, then the Geneva Bible’s ‘a still and soft voice’ until compressed into lapidary eloquence as ‘a still small voice’ in the KJV. As Bloom notes, ‘here the KJV triumphs absolutely’.
 
The book also excels in showing the ways the Bible has influenced later literature. Bloom points out the links between Jacob and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers; Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and the book of Ruth; the death of Falstaff and Psalm 23; Jonah and Moby-Dick; the lineage of apocalyptic themes from Ezekiel to Revelation and the work of Dante, Milton, Blake and Shelley; and, most extensively, the parallels between the Wisdom of Solomon and King Lear. The nourishing force of biblical imagery on western literature is ably flagged up, if not stressed, throughout.
 
However, the book is too often marred by the author’s idiosyncrasies. Bloom freely admits that he takes ‘Shakespeare and Whitman as Scripture’ rather than the Bible. Thus, Biblical characters are often pitted unfavourably against those of the Bard. For Bloom, David ‘anticipates Hamlet’ while Tanakh apparently produces characters who are ‘almost of Shakespearean capaciousness’ (with that head-patting almost summing up the general tenor).
 
Such comparisons lead to absurdities when Bloom comes to the New Testament. He is breezily dismissive of any value in the Greek original – ‘the translation is an immense improvement’. Bloom also compares Mark to Edgar Allan Poe (‘a bad stylist who yet fascinates’) and later observes parallels between St Paul and Uriah Heep. While he often gets away with such dare-devilry in his more conventional literary criticism, here it stalls. A sterner editor would have trimmed such excess.
 
If you want one book on the KJV to read before the year is out, then the Bragg volume is still the best to go for. With a brace of chapters on the Bible and literature, plus one on language and another on Shakespeare, it includes many of the highlights of Bloom’s book and so much more. Tackle Bloom once the main meal has been eaten, a cheese course of sorts – brief, but with a few tasty surprises in there as well.