Explore "The Bright Book of Life" by Harold Bloom on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
IT SEEMS JUST TO ASSERT that the two most powerful narrative ancient writers in Western tradition are the Homer of the Iliad, and the Yahwist, who first told the tales of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, in what we now call Genesis and Exodus.
I find little in common between the Iliad and the J writer. They are morally and cognitively incompatible. Achilles is the son of the sea nymph Thetis and of Peleus, a warrior king who accompanies Heracles and Jason in the quest for the Golden Fleece. Thetis dips the infant Achilles in the Styx so as to make him immortal, but since she holds him by one heel, that becomes his vulnerability. He survives the Iliad but in later poetic legends is slain by a poisoned arrow in that heel.