When I was an undergraduate at Yale 20 years ago, Harold Bloom was the pre-eminent literary presence on campus, famous for "The Anxiety of Influence" and "A Map of Misreading," but to me he was a Jewish hero, and not simply because he looked like Zero Mostel. Bloom had somehow dislodged T. S. Eliot from his dominant position in the syllabus and replaced him with Wallace Stevens, and though there was a fine literary argument for this that had to do with Milton and his Romantic heirs, as opposed to the metaphysical poets favored by Eliot, I always suspected it had to do with the fact that Eliot was an anti-Semite.

Bloom taught a class called "Counter-Normative Currents in Contemporary Jewish Literature," which included moderns like Freud, Kafka and Babel but began with "the Yahwist," author of the oldest strand of the Hebrew Bible. Suddenly, being a Jewish writer wasn't just for post-Enlightenment Johnny-come-latelies, but an ancient birthright. This notion was given bolder expression in a lecture I heard Bloom deliver about how the New Testament was a "weak misreading" of the Hebrew Bible. I never thought I would hear a professor publicly proclaim - at Yale, no less - the great, private Jewish gripe that in layman's terms might be expressed: Christianity stole our watch and has spent 2,000 years telling us what time it is. Bloom punningly referred to the New Testament in Hebrew as "Brit haHalasha" ("weak covenant"), instead of "Brit haHadasha" ("new covenant"). "The Anxiety of Influence," in tracing the way works of literature struggle with their predecessors, had already given criticism the thrill of a blood sport. Here were all the great Bloomian notions - "misreading," "belatedness," "originality" - employed to unseat not merely T. S. Eliot but Christianity itself.

Bloom's new book, "Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine," is a fearless, provocative meditation on the themes I found so exhilarating 20 years ago, although it turns out that Judaism is, for Bloom, as much a betrayal of Yahweh as Christianity is. Bloom is not a modest critic. If literary representations of God are all we have, then literary critics are the true prophets. Bloom, it turns out, is high priest of his own religion, a Yahwist sect of one.

Bloom's Yahweh is the work of an author called the J writer by German 19th-century scholarship, but though Yahweh is a literary character, he is also, through a semi-mystical Bloomian maneuver, real. He is the "man-God" who appears to Joshua with a drawn sword, the jealous, zealous, hungry, hands-on deity who makes Adam out of a mud pie, picnics with the elders on Mount Sinai, chooses Moses and then, with irrational outrage, tries to kill him as he travels back to Egypt. This God made the redactors of the Hebrew Bible so uncomfortable that he was gradually papered over, displaced by priestly sources and the Deuteronomist, and then finally done in by the rabbis of the Talmud, whom Bloom clearly admires, and in some ways even resembles, though he finds their recasting of God as the merciful, covenant-keeping Lord of monotheism a betrayal of the rough, irrefutable reality that Yahweh represents.

None of this is to say that Bloom likes Yahweh, who he feels should be "convicted for desertion." But present or absent, Yahweh is for Bloom inescapable, like death. "My Orthodox Judaic childhood," Bloom writes, "lingers in me as an awe of Yahweh." (Bloom may be our most confessional critic. Could anyone imagine Lionel Trilling telling us, as Bloom does, that his mother trusted in the covenant with the Jewish God, though he cannot?)

But before he gets to Yahweh, Bloom turns his attention to Jesus, to whom the first half of the book is devoted. The order is important. Bloom offers an excellent explanation of the radical difference between the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. A key difference, Bloom notes, is that the Hebrew Bible ends with II Chronicles and the "heartening exhortation to 'go up' to Jerusalem to rebuild Yahweh's Temple." The reconfigured "Old Testament" ends with the minor prophet Malachi prophesying the return of Elijah, a lead-in to the Gospel of Matthew. In "Jesus and Yahweh," Bloom reverses this revision: Yahweh, though older, isn't superseded, but given the last word.

For Bloom, Jesus and Jesus Christ are two entirely unrelated figures, and Bloom spends the first half of the book exploring their incompatibility. Jesus is the Jew Yeshua about whom no verifiable facts are knowable. What we do know, aside from a few scraps from Josephus ("wonderful writer and non-stop liar"), is contained in unreliable works written "almost entirely by Jews in flight from themselves, and desperate to ingratiate themselves with their Roman overlords and exploiters." By this Bloom means the New Testament, which he also refers to as "the Belated Testament."

Jesus Christ, as opposed to Jesus, is a later theological construct that owes a great deal to Hellenic thought. Christ, for Bloom, is a betrayal of Jesus the man, Yeshua, who clearly lived inside a Jewish world, trusted in the covenant with Yahweh, did not think the Law was death, and would be appalled at, or at least entirely baffled by, the religion created in his name. Jesus belongs on one side of the Judeo-Christian divide, Christ on the other. Bloom is persuasively aware that the Judeo-Christian tradition is a convenient myth that joins two deeply incompatible religions.

Bloom's insistence on the unrecoverable details of the life of Jesus doesn't stop him from using his ear to locate in the gospels the elements that seem to him truest to the real Yeshua, that "greatest of Jewish geniuses." These are found particularly in the gospel of Mark, where Jesus' dark parables, his ambivalence toward his own apostles and toward those he would save, make him a literary, if not a literal, son of the enigmatic, mercurial Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. In Bloom's account, Jesus, with his deep connection to the uncanny Yahweh, can seem like the last real Jew, rather than the first Christian.

"Jesus and Yahweh" is not a big book, but it is bursting with ideas and contradictions, discussions (and dismissals) of New Testament scholarship, accounts of Lurianac kabbalah, gnomic Nietzschean utterances and brilliant asides about the essence of American religion. It also contains several outrageous statements - like the insistence that "Torah is Yahweh." Throughout, Bloom writes as if all Western literature were his private Talmud, turning it and turning it to reveal hidden meaning, and taking the whole of it personally: the author of the gospel of John "hates me and I respond in kind."

Bloom tells us this book is the fruit of the work he began when he wrote "The Anxiety of Influence" (1973). That work originally contained a chapter on the New Testament that he excised, and so it in fact seems Bloom's own struggle with the New Testament was always lurking behind the arguments in "The Anxiety of Influence" and was perhaps the seed of that theory, not its fruit. This makes a great deal of sense. Who really cares, in the end, that Stevens "misread" Shelley in order to produce his own strong poetry? But the battle between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible is a struggle over religious truth that goes to a core crisis in Western civilization, and in Bloom himself. It helps explain why, in Bloom's agonistic literary universe, literature, despite his genius for explaining it, can seem oddly irrelevant. It is religious truth that matters.

Bloom calls himself a cultural Jew who does not "trust" in the covenant, trust being for him the hallmark of the normative Jew. And yet what dominates this book isn't the figure of Jesus or Yahweh. It is the image of Bloom, filled with post-Holocaust anguish and outrage, awakened at 2 a.m. by nightmares of Yahweh. What ultimately gives this book its power and poignancy is the image of a 74-year-old Jew, crying out to a silent God who nevertheless "won't go away." What could be more normative than that?

Jonathan Rosen is the editorial director of Nextbook. His most recent novel, "Joy Comes in the Morning," is out in paperback.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company