Who Narrated the Bible?

• In Event: Early Modern Christian Readings of the Hebrew Bible I: Milton and the Bible

Abstract

In Paradise Lost, John Milton anomalously has Adam speak Genesis 2:24 ("Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh"), although that is an implausible reading of the verse. I reconstruct Milton's reasons, which fit within a broader shift in early modern interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Well before controversy emerged about the Bible's composition, English commentators and theologians began to imagine an human narrator as a literary-theoretical intermediary between the divine author and the biblical text. By tracing the interpretive history of Gen. 2:24, I show how early moderns came to posit a theoretical narrator distinct from the text's divine author. Milton innovates further by identifying that narrator as human. Finally, increasing attention to the biblical narrator might have shaped Milton's construction of his own Biblical epic.

Author

• Raphael Magarik, University of California, Berkeley