Abstract

The focus of this article is the Bible in literature. The author starts with a reference to Erich Auerbach’s well-known Mimesis. By comparing two contemporaneous texts, one episode in The Odyssey and the sublime story of Abraham’s sacrifice, Auerbach has found a number of qualities characteristic of the different narrative techniques in these texts as well as of their spiritual attitudes. These observations were used as a starting-point, when Auerbach wanted to study the evolution of realism in Western literature up to our time, and in his brilliant analyses of selected texts one meets an amount of important interpretations of the impact of the Bible. One example of the impact of Bible on literature is the different accounts on the description of the creator’s work in the first chapter of Genesis. Two famous examples are John Milton’s Paradise list and De cultu et amore Dei by Emanuel Swedenborg.