Blake, William, and the Bible

William Blake draws the breath and backbone of his work from the Bible, shaken loose from all constrictive creeds. A ‘most fervent admirer of the Bible, and intimately acquainted with all its Beauties’ (Bentley 2004: 140), Blake kept his favourite resource ‘thumbed from use’ (681), ‘ever in his hand’, ‘often assiduously consulted in several languages’ (617), atop the ‘ricketty table holding his copper‐plates’, art supplies, reference books, and other workroom essentials (466), for purposes best conveyed in his own words. For Blake's Bible, though textually identical with the Authorized Version of 1611, is not sanctioned by any church or state, nor is it the ‘Peculiar Word of God, Exclusive of Conscience or the Word of God Universal’ (Erdman 1988: 615). ‘To me who believe the Bible & profess myself a Christian’, Blake writes, a bishop's defence of the slaughter of thousands ‘under pretense of a command from God is altogether Abominable & Blasphemous’; what must be defended from Christians and deists alike is ‘the Bible Unperverted’ (611). To that end, assuming the persona of a latter‐day prophet in his illuminated writings (ca. 1788–1826), Blake redirects a wide array of biblical motifs and turns of phrase towards reawakening a sense of innate divinity within humankind, and he repurposes biblical genres such as prayer, lament, exhortation, praise, prophecy, wisdom, epistle, and apocalypse so as to stimulate human beings here and now to recognize the infinite and holy in all things. Not only in writings, but in major serial illustrations of biblical texts from Creation to Apocalypse (ca. 1799–1809), particularly the Book of Job (1806–26), Blake bends the Bible's overall mythic structure towards an alternate interpretation of the human predicament and its resolution, moving not from sin to restitution but from loss of the divine vision to its recovery. For Blake, the Bible read ‘in a Spiritual sense’ (Bentley 2004: 703) is ‘the book of liberty’ (57), ‘more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book’ (Erdman 1988: 702), an ‘Eternal Vision or Imagination of All that Exists’ (554), ‘filld with Imaginations & Visions from End to End & not with Moral virtues’ (664); indeed, it is ‘the Great Code of Art’ (274).