Harold Bloom's new book on the KJB

Very late in the game in this 400th anniversary year, Yale literary critic and professor, Harold Bloom, offers his new book, The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible. Frankly, I am enjoying it more than I thought I would.

Bloom is inimitable, charming (sometimes too charming), insightful, and often provocative. All of this makes for entertaining reading and frequent surprises. Here are a few things that I learned and/or enjoyed from the book's Introduction:

"Cormac McCarthy's one great novel, Blood Meridian, may be a last stand of the KJB's literary influence."

[The central conceit of Bloom's Introduction is to compare the KJB with the works of Shakespeare as the two greatest achievements of English writing/literature. Given that, he writes:]

"Shakespeare's vocabulary remains extraordinary in the history of imaginative literature: more than twenty-one thousand words, eighteen hundred of which he coined.... The KJB keeps to eight thousand, a figure that surprises me because I would have guessed many more."

[It takes a literary critic to pick this up:]

"The translators of the English Bible, from Tyndale to Andrewes, were not dramatists, though Tyndale came closest. They do not voice their characters: Jacob and David do not sound different to us. That is a loss from the Hebrew."