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  • The best passages are where he describes the god of the old testament, who we forget is actually very human in form: "Yahweh likes to walk in the cool of the day, in the Garden of Eden, and enjoys a picnic with Abraham... he himself closes the door of Noah's ark [and] buries Moses in the soil with h ... Continue

    The best passages are where he describes the god of the old testament, who we forget is actually very human in form: "Yahweh likes to walk in the cool of the day, in the Garden of Eden, and enjoys a picnic with Abraham... he himself closes the door of Noah's ark [and] buries Moses in the soil with his own hands. Most significant, Yahweh fashions Adam out of the adamah, moist and rich red earth... [humans] walk and talk with Yahweh... [He] is not a sky god, but alternates between cultivated fields and mountaintops."[return][return] (There is an interview of Bloom in the NPR archives where he gives a stirring description of Yahweh. Go check it out.)[return][return]But the real thesis is this: "Believers, scholars, politicians all deny this, but Western monotheism has become a profound puzzle. I am inclined to argue that Jesus Christ, Allah, and Yahweh all are antithetical, one to another."[return][return]Bloom 's ego shows up on every third page, unfortunately. The book could have been much more enjoyable and much shorter if he's cut out all the paranoid political stuff, too.

    

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Harold Bloom has written about religion and the Bible throughout his career, but now, with Jesus and Yahweh, he has written what may well be his most explosive, and important, book yet.

There is very little evidence of the historical Jesus-who he was, what he said. As Bloom writes, "There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews." And so Bloom has used his unsurpassed skills as a literary critic to examine the character of Jesus, noting the inconsistencies, contradictions, and logical flaws throughout the Gospels. He also examines the character of Yahweh, who he finds has more in common with Mark's Jesus than he does with God the Father of the Christian and later rabbinic Jewish traditions. Bloom further argues that the Hebrew Bible of the Jews and the Christian Old Testament are very different books with very different purposes, political as well as religious.

Jesus and Yahweh is a thrilling and mind-opening read. It is paradigm-changing literary criticism that will challenge and illuminate Jews and Christians alike, and is sure to be one of the most discussed, debated, and celebrated books of the year. At a time when religion has come to take center stage in our political arena, Bloom's shocking conclusion, that there is no Judeo-Christian tradition-that the two histories, Gods, and even Bibles, are not compatible-may make readers rethink everything we take for granted about what we believed was a shared heritage.

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