Volume 35, Number 5 · March 31, 1988
Literature as the Bible
By Harold Bloom
The Literary Guide to the Bible
edited by Robert Alter, edited by Frank Kermode
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 678 pp., $29.95
What happens when we attempt to read the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament in some of the same ways that we read Homer or Shakespeare, Wordsworth or Proust? Is such an attempt legitimate? Should we say that the distinction between sacred and secular literature is wholly social and political, and so is not a literary distinction at all? The ancient vexed relation between poetry and belief perhaps reduces to the question of whether any single poem or story can be more sacred than any other. I myself have come to the opinion that it makes sense to assert that all strong literature is sacred, and just as much sense to insist that all of it is secular. What is less sensible, I think, is to say that some great literature is more sacred or more secular than some other.
Review, 4027 words
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