I like Donald Akenson’s cheerful remark “I cannot believe that any sane person has ever liked Yahweh.” But as Akenson adds, that is irrelevant, since Yahweh is reality. I would go a touch further and identify Yahweh with Freud’s “reality-testing,” which is akin to the Lucretian sense of the way things are. As the reality principle, Yahweh is irrefutable. We are all going to have to die, each in her or his turn, and I cannot agree with Jesus’ Pharisaic belief in the resurrection of the body. Yahweh, like reality, has quite a nasty sense of humor, but bodily resurrection is not one of his Jewish or Freudian jokes. […]
We know that, for many among us, Yahweh remains the most accurate answer to the anguished question “Who is God?” A Buddhist, Hindu, or Taoist would not agree, nor would many contemporary Christians, Muslims, and Jews, but mine is a literary critic’s answer, and founds itself upon the force and power of the only literary personality that exceeds in vividness and memorability even Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Lear, Cleopatra. To transpose into religious terms, J’s Yahweh is the most persuasive representation of transcendent otherness that I have ever encountered. And yet Yahweh is not only “anthropomorphic” (a hopeless term!) but absolutely human, and not at all a pleasant fellow, but then why should he be? He is not running for office, questing after fame, or seeking benign treatment in the media. If Christianity insists that Jesus Christ is the good news (an assertion that brutality by Christians throughout history has invalidated), then Yahweh is bad news incarnate, and Kabbalah tells us he most certainly has a body, an enormous one at that. It is an awful thing to fall into the hands of the living Yahweh.
Harold Bloom. Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.
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