How does the Bible inform the plainness and stateliness of the language in GILEAD?
I have taught Bible at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop several times. It’s something that writers feel that they need to know, no matter what their religious evaluation of it is, or the traditions they have come from. It’s always fun to read anything together with writers, because they are very sensitive to things that you might otherwise overlook. One of the narratives that is extremely beautiful and efficient and powerful is the narrative of David and Absalom in Second Samuel. I think that had a lot of influence on my thinking in this book — Absalom, of course, being the son of King David who betrays him and so on. There is an indubitable emotional power in many of the narratives in the Bible that return one to extremely basic emotions — about fathers and sons in that particular case. I think that often scriptural language is used almost ornamentally. I think that its effect is greater if its accomplishment as narrative is taken more seriously — how complex these things actually are an
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