“To love the Torah more than God is protection against the madness of a direct contact with the sacred.” Emmanual Lévinas, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaisme
“Language, therefore, cannot make its own possibility a totality and include within itself its own origin or its own end.” Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas”

I shall be concerned here not with the details but with the general problem of the relation between the Bible and Milton’s major poems, that is, not with annotation alone, which is endless—or in Lévinassian terms, infinite—but with the total form of this relation, a double one, with spread wings. To the one side, the entangled verbal density of the Bible enters into Milton’s major poems as their limitless substance, a substance not unlike the original state of Milton’s God, ‘filling infinitude’ and infinitely dense (Paradise Lost 7.168-69). On the other side, the major poems enter into the Bible, they intervene, at particular moments (the Fall of Man; the Temptation of Jesus; the agony of Samson), energizing the Bible from within and giving it a total poetic form. What then, in the poet’s mind, is the authority of his major poems in comparison with the authority of the Bible? Is the relation between them one of dependency or of equality? This is an iteration of the question I have asked in earlier work, ‘Who has the authority to create?’