SOURCE: “Abishag's King,” in Raritan, Vol. 11, No. 3, Winter, 1992, pp. 105–16.

In the following review, Qualls compares Harold Bloom's The Book of J with Josipovici's The Book of God.

“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...