I’ve just begun (re)reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Truth is, I don’t remember ever reading the whole thing through before. Snippets here and there for lit classes over the years but never from the beginning to the end. What a ride it is! And to think that Milton wrote it blind. Contemplate that, for a minute.
This, too, impresses: Where most English translations read Gen 1:2 as “the spirit of God hovered over the face of the deeps,” Milton follows the Hebrew verb describing the spirit like a bird “brooding” over the waters. That’s the way that verb appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible — the protective hovering of a bird over its nest… though Milton imagines the spirit in a masculine form impregnating “the Abyss” below despite the Hebrew’s feminine Spirit subject in this verse.
But that’s small stuff — a tiny example of the thousands of ways that Milton appeals to and shifts the biblical text. Fascinating. I’m still a little puzzled by the bad guys that open the story. I mean, Satan appears to be a different character than Beelzebub, and there are cherubim and seraphim in hell. Well, back to it, as the dark powers prepare for war.
