“To qualify for the Blessing, you need not charm Yahweh, as David and Joseph do, but you must not be dull,” writes Harold Bloom about God's—or the author “J's”—search for those worth attention, worth the gift of “more life.” Those worth the Bible's attention, Gabriel Josipovici proclaims, find life in narrative: “God, in this book [The Book of God] … appears to be pure potential realized in activity … in the unfolding narrative. … To trust in narrative, as the author of Job realized, is to make the same act as to trust in children: it is to give up the impossible desire for understanding.” Being is enough.

I begin with these statements because they seem to me at once to summarize the commonalities of viewpoint in these two otherwise very different studies of the Bible's ways of knowing (not, finally, believing) and to chart in the late twentieth century a telling moment in the evolution of biblical studies (at least outside of theology schools). Both Bloom and Josipovici live, and find their heroes living, in history. Yet their history is finally Romantic, Carlylean: it is the biography of great men—and some great women, particularly Rebecca and Tamar; it is, signally and wonderfully, the telling and retelling of the story of David, and of God's identification with him.

Of the two, Bloom is the more at ease in Zion, the more “boisterously” certain of the ways of God and of the love that God and his author J have for David. Bloom long ago began to wrestle meaning, and J, from “the bevy of Yahwists” and other compilers, and from the (in his eyes) villainous Redactor. Out of “twenty-five hundred years of misreadings” he has produced his “plain sense.” That sense, as headlines in newspapers and on television trumpeted when the book appeared, begins with Bloom's gendering of J as an aristocratic woman (“of Davidic blood”) living at the court of Solomon's son Rehoboam of Judah. The reasons for this identification: her representation of biblical women (who “bear the Blessing better than her male protagonists”), her ironies, and Bloom's intuition of differences between her narratives and the others which challenge it for place and authority.

Yet this argument is by no means the key to the book, neither the source of its wonderful readings of J's texts nor of its boisterous certainties. For Bloom, as he notes early on, “all of our accounts of the Bible are scholarly fictions or religious fantasies.” His aristocratic female J is finally a metaphor for the creation of metonymies for the charismatic David. Though one might want to assert to him that women are not tropes, the real point is that his J is a collection of contradictories, an author whose writing life is focused on producing stories about David even if she may never name him (because her friend the court historian is busy producing what will become 2 Samuel). Bloom's woman writer is at once a “Jewish mother,” creating in Yahweh an “imp” of the perverse and scandalous, and a great lady for whom David, not God, is life. Bloom's J is, then, not at all the revolutionary figure the headlines discovered. The revolution lies not in her gender, although it begins in her love, but in her production of the most material, historical, wondrously visible (and unnamed) god imaginable in the midst of a text prohibiting all images of God.

Some quotations will establish this point, and Bloom's focus:

As with Moses, David's crucial relation is with Yahweh, but Yahweh is in love with David and not with Moses. … Yahweh does not overvalue David, in our judgment or in his own.

David himself is more life, and the promise of more life, into a time without boundaries.

David, whose only limitations are those of our common mortality, is also Yahweh's limit, the unique object of Yahweh's altogether incommensurate love.

When Nietzsche reminds me that the motive for metaphor, for fiction, is the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere, I think always of J, for whom the difference, the elsewhere, was David.

She had at the center of her vision not Moses or even Abram, let alone Jacob or Joseph, and certainly not Yahweh, but David. … For her, Yahweh himself matters because he is the God who fell in love with David.

I quote so much in order to make clear that Bloom's book, or J's, is really David's. Its celebrations, its faith (if I dare use that term), all focus on David as J imagined him—imagined him in Joseph, “her David, her best rival to the representation of David by the splendid author of 2 Samuel”; in Jacob, whose struggle for the Blessing prepares the way for David's glory; in Tamar, her “most memorable character” (yet here too, “in centering on Tamar [J] alludes to David, to his personality, career, and legacy”); in Yahweh. Indeed, her “Yahweh moves her at the rare moments when he is Davidic. … J certainly created Yahweh though she did not invent him.”

What is so striking in these Bloomian swerves through the compiled texts is how little interested he is in the difference between the Hebrews' God and the gods of their neighbors, a difference which the Hebrew writers collectively made the sine qua non of Hebrew life. Yahweh's prohibition of representation was so extraordinary as to trouble everyone, from Aaron and the Israelites in the wilderness to those later Jews who found, and wrote, in Jesus the incarnated Word—the Word made flesh. As Owen Barfield noted in Saving the Appearances, the injunction against making images of one's god “is perhaps the unlikeliest thing that ever happened.” For the Hebrews, “Everything proclaims the glory of God, but nothing represents Him. … What is the Old Testament but the tale of their long struggle against that very sin, their repeated relapses and their final victory?”

Bloom celebrates the “uncanny,” “sublime,” and “scandalous” ways J got around this prohibition. He loathes the God of the collective writers (“a kind of heavenly university president”), loathes how they tried to limit J, to diminish her Yahweh. He locates her voice, he hears her ironies, amidst the texts of the scaling-down compilers, and he “boisterously” writes a Davidiad—J's and his. She is a “visionary of incommensurates,” her ironies produced by the clash between material representation and her “antithetical imp of a God.” Thus, in examining Genesis, Bloom constructs a possible original opening from hints in Psalms and Job, an opening which the P author or the Redactor “defrauded” us of knowing in order to begin the scriptures with that normative, “just and orderly” “cosmological fantasy.” For Bloom, J's “earthbound irony” surely produced some “ironic revision of an archaic combat myth, Yahweh's battle with the Dragon and the Deep.”

I wonder. Is this kind of boisterous move not, finally, a desire to make the Hebrews and their writing “like the nations,” like the prose and myths of their neighbors against whom they so determinedly define themselves, create themselves as different? Like Bloom, I have loved David all my life, found his poetry and his murderous lust and his ego sublime and irresistible, the stuff of heroic life. But David's seduction of readers—beginning with J, and continuing—should not blind us to the fact that he creates an Israel gloriously like its neighbors because more powerful politically and economically. He finds his beginnings, after all, in God's despair that his chosen people want to be “like all the nations.” No reader can miss the irony, often repeated, against the first king, Saul. He was chosen because he was “goodlier” than others: that is, “from his shoulders upward he was higher than any of the people” (1 Samuel 9:2). His height becomes a satire on a people's desire to be like their neighbors. Saul's tragedy is that he can not follow God's ways, but chooses his own and his people's. There are few more tragic figures in the Hebrew texts—tragic in the sense of their homelessness, physical and metaphysical (the words have the same meaning in the Hebrew texts)—than Saul once his children and his people and his God have chosen David. Whether it be his desperate pleas at Endor for Samuel to return from the grave; or his tears before David who has spared his life; or the nobility of his death, he is one of the few sublimely existential figures in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures (only Mark's Peter, warming himself by the fire and denying Jesus, approaches him). His faltering rule prepares the way for the chosen David—whom God promises never to desert.

David is glorious: whether in poetry or in dancing, in battle or in misery, he sweeps all before him—including, and especially, readers and his writers. But his gorgeousness should not obscure the fact that he represents what finally made Israel at once grandly superior to its neighbors—a great royal power—and all too like them in ambition. His certainty, even when battling Saul, that “the Lord's anointed,” the King, must never be touched prepares his people to treat their king as their neighbors treated theirs, with awe and reverence (though not as a god; David always recognizes this limit). Solomon's successes and the disasters of his successors make David's specialness problematic, at the least. Bloom's Redactor may have “splintered imaginative literature for the sake of heaven,” but history in the Bible has some comment on David's wonders. After all, “J's vision of human reality as familial rather than royal or priestly” is a vision which marks the very point of David's failures. J may have loved him, she may find Moses dull; she may not be “mocked with impunity” by P and R. But they too have their say—and it tells.

For Bloom and his J, none of this matters. J is at ease in Jerusalem, uninterested in the work of normativizing scribes and priests, so unawed by Yahweh as to be free to make him incommensurate—the word is used repeatedly—with everything until he must become a nation's God. J, uninhibited by a religious imagination, is uncomfortable with Moses, uncomfortable with the passing of the Blessing from grand incommensurate individuals to an entire people. For her, the scaling down necessary when Yahweh is, in a sense, democratized during his appearance before the Hebrews on Sinai produces a “crisis of representation.” J's Yahweh is more glorious when more free. A starting point for “our sense of ego,” J's Yahweh is the model for J's “pioneers of the self: Abram, Rebecca, Jacob, Tamar, and Joseph.” He is in some essential ways “the reality of charisma” that inhabits, and makes glorious, these grandly heroic, because uncannily human, individuals. His absurdities only help us to realize more completely what the Blessing is: an endless quest for “more life in a time without boundaries.”

If Josipovici is neither so explicit a celebrator of David, nor so boisterous in hearing what the textual compilers would suppress, he too cares in Bloomian ways about this quest for Blessing, and about the narratives which are necessary to figure it. Indeed, his God's “potential is only realized (in both meanings of the word) in the unfolding narrative.” Both he and Bloom need modern writers to amplify, to provide similes for, their arguments: Bloom uses Kafka as his modern J, Josipovici uses Proust; both find Shakespeare, Mann, and Kierkegaard strong writers in the great Hebraic tradition (Bloom also includes Freud). Josipovici does not find useful, even valid, Bloom's “Bible within the Bible.” For him, the whole compilation determines who we are, and has been doing so since J or whoever first began to articulate the ways of men and God. Josipovici, needless to say, writes altogether more soberly than Bloom, even as both are united in their detestation of the normative. Bloom's loathing is more inclusive—Jews, Moslems, and Christians have all diminished J. Josipovici finds in the Christians the greatest anxieties about encountering the freedom, the incommensurateness, of Hebrew scriptures. He is less at ease in Zion because he finds the Christian writers too ready to reduce the text to meaning, too determined to interpret, once and for all. Being, existence, life: for them none is ever enough.

This process of making meaning begins, for Josipovici, in the “rhythm of renewal” established in the opening verses of Genesis and in the fairy-tale narratives of character which the text places in wider narrative contexts. For him, the Bible is founded on both the acknowledgment that we all need myths, patterns, to sustain us and on the contextualizing of these patterns within history, within God's reality. “It is in fact those who think they are privy to God's word—Joseph, Saul, David—who have to learn that this is not the case: no one is privy to it, not even the reader himself. The narrative refuses its comforts to Joseph, to David, to Jesus, and to us.” Josipovici emphasizes the importance to the Hebrews of remembering, of storytelling. For him, “the need to utter,” the desire for dialogue with God and one's fellows, is essential to life. “The primary function of language, the Hebrew Bible shows, is not to convey information but to enable us to utter ourselves and thus come fully alive.” Yet the danger in this is idolatry: that we will choose our image of ourselves, our own voice, as enough, and will not “trust dialogue to reveal our own potential,” not see the limitations of language.

The narrative Josipovici develops from this is a narrative of fall. Where Bloom's J falls into the hands of religion-making and protecting scribes, Josipovici's scriptures fall into the interpretative uncertainties produced by a history which gets farther and farther from any material realization of the promises of the covenant. The writings are taken captive by the chaos of history. He contrasts the double narrative of the Joseph stories, with their hero who is yet not the founder of David's line, and the anxieties of the writing prophets, where “Meaning becomes of vital importance; how things are interpreted becomes crucial.” In the Joseph stories, the larger narrative—of the journey beyond Sinai to the city of David—triumphs, unexpectedly, over the fairy tale that is Joseph's life. By the time of the prophets, “the weight of the dialogue has become too great for the nation of Israel”; words are wearing out. Josipovici brilliantly documents the prophets' need of allegory and emblem, and their figuring on their bodies of “the meaning of events that are occurring around them and which the people refuse to acknowledge.” “God and man can no longer speak in the tones and using the expressions of everyday conversation. … Things no longer happen, they always mean.”

This change in attitudes towards language—towards what I would call the ability to know God through language—is brought to crisis and promised resolution in the Christian scriptures, especially in Matthew, Luke, and John, and in Paul. (Both Bloom and Josipovici stress how at ease in the contingencies of the Hebraic modes of narration Mark is.) In Josipovici's reading, “Moses showed the people signs; Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel presented themselves to the people as signs. But they were signs of something else. Jesus presents something else as a sign of himself.” This emphasis on one person as fulfilling the scriptures acts to establish meaning, to “seal” interpretation, once and for all. No wonder the author of the Apocalypse threatens with plagues and fire anyone who would add to his words. We may question the sublime imagination that would make Jacob and Rebecca and David God's chosen; yet all the ambiguities provoked by our questions will never be resolved. The Christian writings present not questions, but the answer. The Hebrew “turning” towards the right path becomes for Paul and the Christians a “conversion” to the one way. The Blessing becomes Revelation. The command to Remember becomes the injunction to “See, know, understand.”

The implications of this change are enormous, not least in the formation of Western ideas of the self and representation. God, or the dialogue between a people and their God, is gradually being privatized, removed from life lived in community and history to an “inner self.” The famous moment in 1 Kings 19 where Elijah finds God not in wind or earthquake or fire but in “a still small voice” may be one of the defining moments of Hebrew history. (Josipovici's comments on the relation of this change to autobiography and to the rise of the novel are important and contrast critically with Bloom's hearing in J “the origins of the Protestant will whose heroines dominate British and American fiction.” Bloom's monist J would not care for the dualism Josipovici describes, and fears.) Living and believing are becoming dissociated enterprises. Narrative and interpretation are becoming synonymous.

Josipovici hesitates to damn this process. Yet “we have to ask,” he writes,

what are the gains and losses in reading the Hebrew scriptures figuratively. It is not enough to say that because the Bible is full of patterns we must read it ahistorically, as a set of patterns. It is not enough, because what is at issue in much of the Bible is precisely the nature of patterning, of God's design for the world. … Perhaps we do not need to choose. But we should at least recognize the price of Truth.

Josipovici's “theology of narrative” is profoundly, movingly Hebraic as defined in J, in the court writer of the histories of Saul and David, and in Mark. It is a theology located in Saul's tears and David's silences, in the man in the field whom Joseph encounters when looking for his brothers, and in the man in the loincloth watching Mark's Jesus in Gethsemene. It is a theology expressed when the contingent is accepted, when interpretation ceases before awe and one acknowledges that one's own story is not the only one, or even the main one. Josipovici thus defines the blessing as Bloom does, through its connection with David:

We can not “make sense” of him; we can only repeat his story. … David lives for us much more immediately, much more fully, than figures far better attested to by history: Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler. And he does so because we are made to sense at so many moments the way in which life always runs ahead of meaning.

The “price of Truth”? Life.

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,
The picture pride of Hollywood.

(“Provide, Provide”)

Robert Frost is, like Bloom's J, not blinded by David's glare, comfortable with both hard ends and fairy tales. Bloom and Josipovici want to be. But at the center of their narratives is a profound distrust of writing when it becomes a commodity available to many, and a deep suspicion of readers (and compilers) who want the meaning of that writing made clear. They fear that these texts will not matter essentially to most readers, will not conquer the normative in their lives. The Bible, Josipovici asserts, “is not ‘literature’ because it has no time for ‘literature’”; it continues to command our attention because it affirms repeatedly “the need to speak meaningfully of what is meaningful.” “The strongest writers,” Bloom declares, “have the knack of overrewarding even a lazy or casual reading, indeed, any reading whatsoever. … Learning to read J ultimately will teach you how much authority has taught you already, and how little authority knows.” But the readers they have too often encountered—the bevy of normative compilers and early Christian authorities determined to make everything mean something—cause them exuberant despair.

Bloom and Josipovici will never be found among a bevy of normativizing scribes. They are so strongly committed to “the primacy of narrative over interpretation” (Josipovici); they so dislike those who would scale down the incommensurate in order to enforce meaning—religious and otherwise; they know that “meaning will never catch up with life” (Josipovici) and that the Blessing means “more life in a time without boundaries” (Bloom); they believe that biblical narrative—that is, Hebrew narrative, and Mark's Gospel—“brings us more fully to life” (Josipovici) because it brought David to (our) life, and thus brings God's desires into representation. The exuberance of their commitments produces brilliant criticism, of a kind which knows no school. Bloom is Bloom, incommensurate. His way of “hearing” (one of his favorite critical acts) J's voice at once amuses and produces readings that seem uncannily “right.” Beyond the hero-worship of David are his discussions of Jacob and Tamar, the one struggling to win the name Israel, the other battling for “the immortality of her own name”; of Abram; of the psychology of Yahweh. And then there is his creation—or invention—of J: the sublimely aristocratic voice of the power of Israel realized in David, and of the perversities of its Yahweh also realized in David. Josipovici takes both Hebrew and Christian scriptures as his text, and finds in them not only that “growing urge to forge a single meaning” which so alarms him but also a “multiplicity of voices” and a relish for the ways these voices turn interpretation against itself and renew the words. His discussions of Joseph and revelation, of speech and dialogue, of the Book of Judges and of the building of the Tabernacle surprise us constantly into new attention to the texts (some of which we rarely read). His contrasts between the four Gospels and the apocryphal gospels give one an invigorated sense of the ways of canon formation and exclusion; they show too his appreciation of the writings of the early Christians even as he articulates misgivings about their certainties.

Yet, I would offer one caveat: In all of this worship of David and of the narrative freedoms he inspires, both Bloom and Josipovici risk making the king and perhaps even his God the “picture pride of Hollywood.” There is a “natural supernaturalism” in their celebration of the heroic and in their preference for narratives which embody these figures that causes them (especially Bloom) to damn or ignore interpretations which these narratives and others provoked their readers to make; after all, no text so consistently commands its readers to fill in the gaps as do these writings. Carlyle's conviction that “Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine Book of Revelation” is, read literally, also Bloom's and Josipovici's—as long as that human being is David or someone with his charisma, his zest for more life. Moses is, not surprisingly, a figure that both authors would prefer not to encounter, perhaps because his actions are so singularly “religious.” Bloom finds him “plod[ding] along in J, loyally trying to make up in zeal what he lacks in zest.” Josipovici sees him at best as a vehicle of God's work, not a figure of triumphant life in the ways David and Saul and Jacob and Tamar are. Both authors are as uneasy with a normative, or democratized, human world as they are with the evolving religions which would represent that world and its God to itself.

Their Yahweh, if not “invented,” is finally “created”—by Bloom's J, by Josipovici's narratives. Tellingly, the characters they prefer—and whom I too love, David above all—are not those characters (like Moses) whom they would call God-intoxicated. But surely the Bible's people are this? Surely they trust—or try to trust—in God and not David? Surely David becomes compellingly human, more than charming, when he must face the fact that God's displeasure differs from a king's? Surely a “theology of narrative” in this book is above all a representation of the quests of God-intoxicated lives? What other context is there in these writings? The Hebrews made no separation between language and art and history and religion: they were one. The Christians made the separation; they insisted that the God-intoxicated would choose God's way, not man's. Ignoring God except as he is represented in the seductive humanity of his Great Men and Women risks making the Bible seem like the Camelot of American nostalgia. Surely neither Bloom nor Josipovici intends this? Frost's “memory of having starred” is not the Bible's Remembrance and Revelation. “Provide, provide.”