Rowland contends that Blake should ‘be considered as one of the foremost English biblical interpreters’ and his book describes Blake's broadly consistent ‘engagement with the Bible and … biblical hermeneutics’ (p. xii). He examines the tension between Blake's investment in the Bible and his fierce criticism of its legalistic and authoritarian elements. Rowland makes a wide-ranging and sensitive examination of Blake's texts and paintings, critical accounts of Blake, and modern biblical scholarship. The first two chapters examine Blake's brilliant engravings for the Book of Job, for Rowland ‘the acme of his theological thinking’ (p. 12). The relationship between text and image invites ‘readers and viewers into the process of exegesis’ (p. 14); experience rather than tradition ‘is the motor of theological and ethical change’ (p. 16). Rowland attentively follows Blake's exegetical theme: Job must develop an independent sense of divinity, although, as Rowland notes, Blake derives ‘the entire exposition … from the Bible alone’ (p. 72). The next chapter outlines Blake's engagement with contraries in divinity and similarities to Gnosticism, based on his conviction that the Christian synthesis of Old and New Testaments obscures contraries inherent in their representations of divinity. Blake did not need specialised knowledge ‘to work out the exegetical possibilities which were inherent in the Bible itself’ (p. 85). Rowland then moves to Blake's Marriage of heaven and hell, Book of Urizen, and drawings for the Book of Enoch to explore strategies with which he enables ‘the reader to change’ (p. 94), via a mythology which remains ‘in essential continuity with the Bible’ (p. 99). The next chapter shows prophetic struggle as a key component of Blake's imagination. Blake's sense of vocation contrasts with contemporary prophets including Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott because he provides ‘no explanatory key which will make the prophecy transparent’, instead focusing on the hermeneutic aim to ‘rouze the faculties’ of his audiences (p. 130). Rowland notes that although Ezekiel inspired Blake, his distinction between the human and divine and frequent emphasis on holiness get sidelined. The next chapter uses radical seventeenth-century interpreters of the Bible as a heuristic device to reveal Blake's continuity with ‘hermeneutical characteristics of the radical mind-set’ (p. 159), demonstrating suggestive similarities between Blake and Gerard Winstanley, Abiezer Coppe, Ralph Cudworth and Hans Denck. Rowlands's conclusion, that ‘Blake inherited the non-conformist, antinomian sub-culture, not the Enlightenment radicalism of Paine’ (p. 179) downplays his distinctive, simultaneous engagement with the latter. Two chapters focus on Blake's antinomian Jesus, the first through Blake's painting ‘The woman taken in adultery’, lines from his late manuscript poem ‘The everlasting Gospel’, and The marriage. Rowland then makes a compelling but carefully qualified case for the impact of Pauline theology, especially antinomian leanings, on Blake, influencing his concepts of ‘self-annihilation’ and the primacy of Jesus as a divine collective body rather than a historical Messiah. The final chapter examines these themes in Blake's paintings of Jesus and of Revelation. Rowland concludes by emphasising the distinctiveness of Blake's mode of relationship with the Bible over its details, foregrounding creative interpretation and the affective nature of his texts and images. This is a beautifully presented and lucidly written book which draws out Blake's hermeneutic engagement with but also debt to the Bible. Blake scholarship, usually literary, can be remote from Blake's religious inspiration, so it is salutary to see the facility with which Rowland links Blake's texts and images to their biblical origins.