In the story of Hagar and Ishmael, God's messenger will tell Hagar that God will save them because he has heard the voice of the crying boy. ix: acknowledgments . Luckily for us, he is equally skeptical of what usually replaces homily in modern commentary, namely history. Alter has taken biblical studies in a literary direction over the past few decades with such works as The Art of Biblical Narrative (1983) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1987). For beauty, this new translation is so far behind the King James as not even to be in the same race. Like Rashi and Abraham Ibn Ezra and the other great commentators whose insights fill his superb commentary, Alter has thought these stories through to their shocking ends. For instance, to parallel the pun in the creation story that plays off "adam" and "adamah," human and soil, an echo that conveys the humbleness of humanity's origins, Alter gives us "humus" and "human," which is instructive but not felicitous. Robert Alter, who has come up with this remarkable translation of the Five Books after decades of writing some of the most convincing analyses ever produced of the Hebrew Bible, is a critic with the strength of mind to resist the urge to uplift. There is something wonderful about reading them translated from scratch by a single person so that it embodies a fresh, singular ... Đọc toàn bộ bài đánh giá. "A modern classic....Thrilling and constantly illuminating. Rebekah, while instructing Jacob on how to dress like Esau so as to steal his blessing, echoes God's phrase -- listen to my voice" -- not once but twice in an effort to reassure him. What makes Alter's "Five Books" more engrossing than most other modern translations is that he bases this decision on more than instinct. Not Alter. Alter's translation puts into practice his belief that the rules of biblical style require it to reiterate, artfully, within scenes and from scene to scene, a set of "key words," a term Alter derives from Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who in an epic labor that took nearly 40 years to complete, rendered the Hebrew Bible into a beautifully Hebraicized German. He saw that they brought the reader straight to the chilling mystery at the heart of the Hebrew Bible. W. W. Norton & Company. DON'T be deterred by the unfamiliar name. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. 'The Five Books of Moses': From God's Mouth to English. In their desire to convey shades of meaning brought out by different contexts or, perhaps, to compensate for what they perceived as the primitiveness of the ancient language, they replaced biblical Hebrew's restricted, earthy lexicon with a broad and varied set of often abstract terms. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, Robert Alter, W. w. norton & company. If voices help those who know how to listen to them penetrate illusion, if voices express or summon up the will of God, what are we to think when God says to listen to the voices of the matriarchs as they advance their nefarious schemes? Title Page. But this encounter has such enormous implications, and the story in which we read of it is so frank about what it means to enter into a relationship with the Lord, that for two millenniums readers have preferred to veil its details in allegory. When Abraham balks at abandoning Ishmael and Hagar, God commands, "Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice." Raw images like these must be what made theology necessary. (The King James Version astutely preserves "voice" throughout, though it doesn't catch Rebekah's echo; it has God telling Abraham to "hearken" to Sarah's voice but Rebekah telling Jacob to "obey" hers.) For meaning ... Đọc toàn bộ bài đánh giá, Robert Alter's translation of the Five Books of Moses is stunning. Robert Alter's translation of the Five Books of Moses is one of those rare books that really is as good as everybody says it is. Scholars who study the Bible, of course, don't try to determine what "really" happened, as passionate amateurs do. Alter's magisterial translation deserves to become the version in which many future generations encounter this strange and inexhaustible book. Page 2. Fox, who wished to capture the intense aurality of biblical Hebrew (originally meant, after all, to be read aloud), as well as the dense cluster of meaning carried by individual words, wound up inventing a long-winded, much-hyphenated and gerund-filled English that can cast a weird antique spell over the reader but does not have the gorgeous terseness, what Alter calls the "poise and power," of the original. Latter-day Saint readers is The Five Books of Moses, translated by Robert Alter, a well-established Berkeley professor of Hebrew and comparative literature. All this repetition would be merely repetitive if Alter didn't tie it to a precise notion of what's going on in nearly every passage. His brilliant commentary, in footnotes on the bottom half of each page, draws on insights from the rabbis as well as modern scholars, adding depth to his own readings. Moreover, in his notes, he points out that although this particular Hebrew verb for "bound" (as in, "Abraham bound Isaac his son") occurs only this once in biblical Hebrew, making its meaning uncertain, we can nonetheless take a hint from the fact that when the word reappears in rabbinic Hebrew it refers specifically to the trussing up of animals. Alter, on the other hand, knew exactly what was going on in these passages. And the all but blind Isaac will recognize the sound of Jacob's voice, so that although his younger son stands before him with his arms covered in goatskin (to make them as hairy as Esau's), and has even put on his brother's clothes (to smell more like a hunter), Isaac nearly grasps the deceit being perpetrated against him. $39.95. Who wouldn't rather construe Abraham's knife as a metaphor for all the things that test our faith or a foreshadowing of the Cross than as a big sharp blade held by a father over his son's throat? Another recent English translation of the Five Books of Moses, published in 1995 by the Jewish studies scholar Everett Fox, also preserves its key words and archaic texture. W. W. Norton & Company. 17: EXODUS . By Robert Alter. What kind of family-unfriendly message is that? Instead they attempt to reconstruct how the books must have been assembled. Alter does stumble on occasion, most often when he tries to reproduce some Hebrew pun in English. As he explains in his introduction -- an essay that would be worth reading even if it didn't accompany this book -- the Hebrew of the Bible is, in his view, a closed system with a coherent literary logic, "a conventionally delimited language, roughly analogous in this respect to the French of the neoclassical theater," though plain-spoken where neoclassical French is lofty. DON'T be deterred by the unfamiliar name. Biblical Hebrew has an unusually small vocabulary clustered around an even smaller number of three-letter roots, most of them denoting concrete actions or things, and the Bible achieves its mimetic effects partly through the skillful repetition of these few vivid words. Instead he lets the Bible convey the seriousness of the problem. That their truth is God's truth? Translators often win praise for their attention to nuance, but in the case of the Hebrew Bible subtlety has hurt more than it has helped. 9: the book of genesis . Fumbles like these, though, are minor when measured against his usual sureness of touch. Page 4. INTRODUCTION . Not that Alter overlooks the Bible's moral and spiritual dimensions; he could hardly do so, given that roughly half the Five Books is made up of laws, and the other half -- the narrative half -- is concerned with working out the covenants made by God with his chosen people. Robert Alter's translation of the Five Books of Moses is stunning. The matriarchs' behavior is indefensible, yet God defends it. There is something wonderful about reading them translated from scratch by a single person so that it embodies a fresh, singular ... Read full review. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, Đánh giá của Người dùng  - cstebbins - LibraryThing. Des milliers de livres avec la livraison chez vous en 1 jour ou en magasin avec -5% de réduction . Rebekah tells her son Jacob to trick his father, the now elderly Isaac, into giving him a blessing rightfully owed to Esau, Jacob's ever-so-slightly older twin brother. THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES A Translation With Commentary. But by allowing us to see for ourselves how the Bible embeds its most acute ironies in wordplay and repetition, he affords us a fuller glimpse than we are usually given of the dark and often surprisingly unpious sensibility that essentially invented Western religious life. As he wrote in 1992, "Divine election is an exacting and perhaps cruel destiny that often involves doing violence to the most intimate biological bonds.". How in the world can one do anything new with the Bible? The great philologist E. A. Speiser, by contrast, whose 1962 translation of Genesis offered the best textual analysis of the time, failed either to see or to communicate this alarming vision of the deity when he had God telling Abraham "Do whatever Sarah tells you." Often enough his choice to be literal stems from the rare resolve not to look away from the text, even when it dismays us, or ought to. Only by universalizing or typologizing the life stories of the biblical protagonists could most people stand to think about them. By Robert Alter. Page 3. As a matter of principle, though, he declines to chop stories into pieces, reassigning parts to "J" or parts to "P" for the purpose of resolving apparent contradictions. Alter's translation thus suggests a dimension of this eerie tale we would probably have overlooked: that of editorial comment. Alter doesn't try to explain away the paradox of a moral God sanctioning immoral acts. The translators of the New Jewish Publication Society edition of Genesis missed it when they translated Rebekah's echo of God's phrase as, first, "listen carefully as I instruct you," then, "do as I say." But Alter's translation is better. The art of the translator, like the art of the narrator, lies in knowing when to paraphrase and when not to. And his biblical prose is fresher and more immediate. "—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World, Well, I've finished Genesis, and I really don't see what all the excitement is about. Take Alter's treatment of the cycle of stories in which the first two matriarchs, Sarah and Rebekah, conspire against elder sons for the benefit of younger ones. xlix: introduction . Page 5. 1,064 pp. Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Bible, the magnificent capstone to a lifetime of distinguished scholarly work, has won the PEN Center Literary Award for Translation. Alter doesn't answer such questions; he doesn't even raise them. In between these extremes of possible experience, between the magnificent birth of the universe and the anonymous death of the human being, lies a tale that still has the power to astonish: "The encounter between a group of people and the Lord of the world in the course of history," in Martin Buber's phrase.

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