1

Blake’s attitude towards the Bible was ambivalent. He believed it is at once revelatory in its prophetic mode and yet repressive in its espousal of the moral law – the Mosaic Law or Decalogue. His radical aesthetic challenges the notion that the Bible, as the embodiment of the Law, is a semantically stable and formally unified text and that, as such, the implication that it contains a single, infallible meaning. The Bible, despite being the Law, is not subject to the laws or conventions of reading and writing which promote a single, authoritative voice or textual presence. Blake’s poems similarly challenge the notion of reading and writing as creative acts bound by formal and institutional laws and conventions. Samuel Beckett notes an etymological connection between the origin of the word law and the act of reading in the evolution of the Latin word lex (Beckett 11). The word lex originally meant a crop of acorns and its correlative verb legere meant to gather (acorns). Gradually, lex came to mean a gathering of peoples into an assembly – a political or legal assembly – and hence law; and the verb legere came to mean a gathering of letters into a word, to read. In the light of the notion that the Bible promotes an unbound, lawles