Perhaps more importantly, Alter’s Hebrew Bible is the only single-author translation by someone who has spent a lifetime studying literary artistry in both Hebrew and English. Miles Coverdale did not really know Hebrew of the most prominent 19 th–Īnd 20 th-century Jewish translators, Isaac Leeser and Harold Fisch,īoth would be perhaps better described as revisers of earlier translations.) Solo translators, William Tyndale did not translate the entire Hebrew Bible and Publication Society translations, a group project. Last half-millennium has been, like the King James Version and the two Jewish Has been widely remarked upon, it is worth noting just how unprecedented it is.Įvery major, complete translation of the Hebrew Bible into English over the The sheer scale of Alter’s achievement in translating the entire Hebrew Bible Relentlessly attending to the literary techniques and “forked possibilities of Something like a 21 st-century American equivalent of what he hasĬalled the “simple yet grand” English of the King James Version, while Progressed through the Tanakh, continuing to produce translations that aim at Years since he published The Five Books of Moses, Alter has steadily Scripture, to which Alter is heir, that it can’t be read alone. Has, of course, been the central claim of the Jewish traditions of reading James Version had worked “to supply readers with a self-explanatory text.” It Hebrew text.” After all, the company of translators who had produced the King Somewhat peevish and very Protestant complaint in the New Yorker thatĪlter spent too much time luxuriating “in the forked possibilities of the This was inadvertently pointed out by John Updike’s Recourse to Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and others, marked the distinctively Jewish nature The commentary, as much by its unapologetic presence as by its frequent Translations were accompanied by a lucid commentary, which was animated byĪlter’s characteristic concerns with the techniques of ancient Hebrew prose and The two books of Samuel and the beginning of Kings, before turning back to It, beginning with Genesis, then moving forward to the story of King David in In the mid-1970s, scholar and critic Robert Alter began writing about
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