3 Review(s)

It has been the fate of Milton, the most Hebraic of the great English poets, to have been interpreted in this century largely by those inhospitable to his Hebraism. To remedy this, Jason Rosenblatt reveals Milton's epic representations of paradise and the fallen world to be the supreme co-ordinates of an interpretive struggle, in which Jewish beliefs that the Hebrew Bible was eternally authoritative Torah were set against the Christian view that it was a temporary law superseded by the New Testament. Arguing that the Milton of the 1643-1645 prose tracts saw the Hebrew Bible from the Jewish perspective, Rosenblatt shows that these tracts are the principal doctrinal matrix of the middle books of "Paradise Lost", which present the Hebrew Bible and Adam and Eve as self-sufficient entities.