Thus the legend. Yet stripped of the sacral, it encapsulates the most up-to-date thesis concerning the nature of the Hebrew Bible: that it can, after all, be read as a unity, indivisibly, like any literary work. The contemporary idea of reading the Bible as literature comes after two hundred years of strenuous philological sorting out, the purpose of which was to unravel what tradition had always held to be a tightly textured whole. Scholars, minutely excavating linguistic layers and Ugaritic cognates, pulled out disparate threads, and identified each according to its purported source and time. Instead of one Author, there were now several: the J writer, for whom God bore the name Yahweh (the German philologists' J Englished to our Y); the E writer, who invoked not Yahweh but Elohim; the P writer, a priest, or circle of priests, absorbed by the formalities of cult and rite; and finally D, the Deuteronomist. But even for the unravelers, who had zealously quartered the singularity of Transcendence, there was a unifier. This was the unknown Redactor, who, shrewdly concealing the seams, had spliced all four strands into canonical coherence. It was the Redactor whom the philologists sought to undermine. Below his work lay the multifaceted hidden truth.
For the ascendant Bible-as-literature movement—a movement, if it can sustain the term, confined mostly to university classes and those common readers drawn to Scripture for reasons other than pious belief—the Redactor returns not simply as an implied collator or pragmatic editor, but as a conscious literary mind, alert to every nuance of trope and type, whether verse or prose, from storytelling and the drama of character to national epic, from monotheistic grandeur to homely lentil stew. The Bible, then, can be read not for its authority (or not for its authority alone), but for its fastidious and deliberate art. But since Scriptural artfulness is also moral art, a potency of precept adheres to it nonetheless. The literary approach, writes Robert Alter, "directs attention to the moral, psychological, political, and spiritual realism of the biblical texts, which is a way of opening ourselves to something that deserves to be called their authority, whether we attribute that authority solely to the power of human imagination or to a transcendent source of illumination that kindled the imagination of the writers to express itself through these particular literary means."
The quotation is from Alter's 1991 volume, The World of Biblical Literature, which—along with The Art of Biblical Narrative, The Art of Biblical Poetry, and related earlier works—can, in retrospect, be seen as the arduously analytic preparation for an undertaking of such ambitiousness that to call it uncommon hardly suggests how very rare it really is. "Ethical monotheism," Alter sums up, "was delivered to the world not as a series of abstract principles but in cunningly wrought narratives, poetry, parables, and orations, in an intricate patterning of symbolic language and rhetoric that extends even to the genealogical tables and the laws." And in the most succinct summary of all, he cites the Talmudic view: "The Torah speaks in human language." Human language, yes, but who would dare to render Scripture single-handedly, all on one's own? In fact, in the entire history of biblical translation, there have been only three daredevil intellects, each inspired by profound belief, who have achieved one-man renditions: the Latin of Jerome, the German of Luther, and the English of William Tyndale. Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for his presumption in desiring the Bible to be accessible in the vernacular, is generally regarded as the forerunner of, or influence on, the King James Version—a work that is distinctly a committee enterprise. Though Jerome and Luther each had occasional rabbinic consultants, and Luther was advised also by Melancthon, a Reformist scholar, their translations stand as monuments to the power of individual rhetoric and intent. Luther in particular impressed on German as inexhaustible a linguistic force as the King James Version left on English. In English, notably, all significant biblical translation since Tyndale's sixteenth-century version, without exception, has been by committee. Until now.
That is why Robert Alter's intrepid Englishing of the Pentateuch, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, can be called historically astounding: with a gap of four hundred years, it comes directly after Tyndale. It will be seen to differ from standard American translations, whether it is the Anchor Bible, or the Revised English Bible, or the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh, or any other significant collective project that may come to mind. Though not without manifold influences and appreciations (the medieval Ibn Ezra, for instance, or E. A. Speiser, a contemporary philological exegete), Alter aspires beyond erudition to the kind of sensibility a reader might bring to James or Proust. In this he scarcely means to reduce the hallowed stature of the biblical narratives, but the very opposite. Close attention to "the literary miracle of the stories," he points out in an introductory essay, will emphasize and intensify the rhetorical ingenuities by which "the chief personages are nevertheless imagined with remarkable integrity and complexity as individual characters ... growing and changing through long stretches of life-experience." At the same time, he reminds us, the Hebrew Bible, unlike the novel of character and personal vicissitudes, "has been shaped to show forth God's overwhelming power in history, exerted against one of the great ancient kingdoms, and the forging of the nation through a spectacular chain of divine interventions that culminates in the spectacle of the revelation on the mountain of God's imperatives to Israel." So it is no wonder that previous translators, trembling before the transcendent majesty of the Hebrew text, have huddled together in protective consultative committees.
In one striking case, the consultants have not been present at the table. Everett Fox, relying on the work of the German-Jewish luminaries Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, and adopting their approach of etymological mimesis—Hebrew roots cast as German roots—attempted a similar effect in English. Useful as a study guide and as a trot, it is not quite what we mean by translation, if translation is taken to be the avoidance of awkwardness. Fox's awkwardness is purposeful: "YHWH will pass over the entrance,/and will not give the bringer-of-ruin (leave) to come into your house to deal-the-blow" (Exodus 12:23). Helpful though this may be to the beginning student peering into the Hebrew, it is scarcely normative English.
Isaac Leeser, it ought to be noted, an eminent nineteenth-century German-born American rabbi, might have been able to claim the mantle of one-man translation (his was published in 1853) had he not clung so closely to the King James Version, faithful to its diction in general, and differing only in an occasional well-argued word: in Genesis, for instance, choosing "expansion" for "firmament."
So the opportunity for modern singularity, post-Tyndale, remains open to Alter. Yet what he has undertaken is not an act of hubris; it is a work of conviction. His conviction is twofold: first, the unextraordinary recognition that all translation is of its time, steeped in an impermanent idiom, ultimately to be superseded by the more familiar lingo of ongoing generations. The language of the King James Version is poetically enthralling and rightly revered, but our daily tongues no longer traffic in "walketh"s and "shalt"s (and we may be impatient with its deliberate, if only occasional, christological inaccuracies). It goes without saying that the foundational document of our civilization, as the Bible is often termed, needs to be understood in the language of its period; the drive toward the vernacular that defines Luther, Tyndale, and the King James Version is as urgent today as it was then, and perhaps more so now, when Scriptural references are alien to most undergraduates, and the majority of American synagogue congregations turn from the Hebrew text to the facing page, where the English translation resides.
If the necessity of contemporary usage were all that motivated Alter, he might have been content with the existing collective translations, despite their lack of stylistic force. But the second element drawing him to this mammoth work—he calls it "an experiment"—is the belief that it is precisely the discoveries of philological scholarship that have distanced readers through their preoccupation with lexical components and syntactical forms at the expense of insight, metaphor, tone, imagery, cadence, all spilling from the cor
nucopia of literary virtuosity. In short, the obstacle of philology's tin ear. Citing still another objection to contemporary modes of translation, Alter condemns "the heresy of explanation": as when, for example, the ubiquitous word "hand" (yad in Hebrew, a similarly strong monosyllable), a stoutly visual and flexible noun capable of multiple figurative effects, is "clarified" abstractly as "trust" or "care." ("And he left all that he had in Joseph's hands," Genesis 39:6.)
Alter also faults the common reliance on subordinate clauses to avoid parataxis, the distinctive biblical repetition of "and ... and ... and." Here we may recall E. M. Forster's witty formulation, in Aspects of the Novel, of plot as opposed to story: "'The king died and then the queen died' is a story. 'The king died, and then the queen died of grief' is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it." Biblical narrative will have none of this. A typical series of statements connected by "and" complicates, it does not simplify, the reader's comprehension; implied causality haunts the chain of events through rhythmic repetition directed, in the way of a musical composition, at the interpretive ear. The Bible is all plot, all causality: its substance derives, after all, from the First Cause.
In arguing for the Bible's literary status, or standard, Alter maintains that "the language of biblical narrative in its own time was stylized, decorous, dignified," yet was never "a lofty style, and was certainly neither ornate nor euphemistic ... a formal literary language but also, paradoxically, a plain-spoken one." And again: "A suitable English version should avoid at all costs the modern abomination of elegant synonymous variation, for the literary prose of the Bible turns everywhere on significant repetition, not variation." Finally, he insists that "the mesmerizing effect of these ancient stories will scarcely be conveyed if they are not rendered in a cadenced English prose that at least in some ways corresponds to the powerful cadences of Hebrew."
This, then, is the prescription: the task, the aim, the experiment Alter has set for himself. The heresy of explanation will be repudiated. The sound and sense of the original will be honored. Contemporary English will be employed, but not slavishly: "a limited degree of archaizing is entirely appropriate," he warns. And clearly Alter's vision includes the sweeping moral horizon that is the Bible's raison d'être. In addition, all this is to be accomplished while traversing vastly disparate regions of text and idea: the thematic and psychological Patriarchal Tales, the ritual instructions, the communal imperatives, and ultimately the pervasive assurance that the God of the Bible directs the course of history through an interdependent compact with humankind, and particularly with humankind's biblical stand-in, the nation of Israel.
Can Alter, working alone—sans colleagues, relying solely on his own instinct for the impress and idiom of two unrelated linguistic strands, as isolated in his toil as any of the fabled seventy-two—can he pull it off?
One might as well begin before the beginning, with pre-existence, before there was anything. Here are the first four verses of the profoundly familiar King James Version:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.
And now Alter:
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, "Let there be light." And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.
What can be discerned in these nearly identical passages? A syntactical disagreement over the first word, b'reshit: does the particle b' represent a prepositional phrase ("In the beginning") or a clause ("When God began")? Together with current scholarship, Alter votes for the clause. Where the King James Version introduces stops, breaking up the Hebrew into recognizable English sentences, Alter follows the uninterrupted flow of the original, subverting conventional English grammar, so that for a moment we are borne along with Joycean rapidity. For ruah, which can mean breath or wind or spirit, Alter chooses breath, the more physical—the more anthropomorphic—word. These in themselves are small and unsurprising innovations. What genuinely startles is the inspired coupling of "welter and waste," with its echoes of Beowulfian alliteration perfectly conjoined, in sound and intent, with the Hebrew tohu-vavobu. A happening of this kind is one translator's own little miracle; no committee could hope to arrive at it.
But Alter's choice of "hovering," and especially the evocative footnote it triggers, may possibly lead to a muddling of one of his salient principles of translation. "Hovering," Alter notes, "the verb attached to God's breath-mind-spirit, elsewhere describes an eagle fluttering over its young and so might have a connotation of parturition or nurture as well as rapid back-and-forth movement." There is nothing to complain of in this valuable footnote; quite the opposite. It deepens, it enlarges, it leaps to associative imagery in the intuitive manner of poetry, and it is one of hundreds of equally illuminating glosses in a volume of more than a thousand pages. Nor are these copious amplifications all that Alter supplies for the sake of enriching the pristine text; besides the overall introductory essay, each of the Five Books has its own prefatory exposition.
Leviticus, for instance, lacking appealing human characters and a story, is often classed as an arid collection of rites and legalisms. But after reminding us that "small Jewish boys were introduced to the Torah not through the great story of creation and the absorbing tales of the patriarchs in Genesis but through Leviticus," Alter drills through this off-putting customary view to a distilling insight central to understanding the Hebrew Bible. "There is a single verb," he tells us, "that focuses the major themes of Leviticus—'divide' (Hebrew, hivdil).... What enables existence and provides a framework for the development of human nature, conceived in God's image, and of human civilization is a process of division and insulation—light from darkness, day from night, the upper waters from the lower waters, and dry land from the latter. That same process is repeatedly manifested in the ritual, sexual, and dietary laws of Leviticus." And he concludes: "God's holiness, whatever else it may involve and however ultimately unfathomable the idea may be, implies an ontological division or chasm between the Creator and the created world, a concept that sets off biblical monotheism from the worldview of antecedent polytheisms." This is why tradition required little children to begin with Leviticus. Here Alter cites Rashi, a seminal exegete of the eleventh century: "Let the pure ones come and study the laws of purity."
In the light of Alter's declared opposition to "the heresy of explanation," what are we to infer from his vast and formidable critical engines? He has not chosen to publish his translation in the absence of embellishing footnotes and conceptual elaborations. He cleaves to interpretation, he does not eschew imaginative commentary, explication is zealously welcomed. Yet what is amply permitted outside the text is considered heresy within the text. This makes a muddle of sorts. Every translator knows, often despairingly, that accommodation must be allowed for, simply because the ruah—the spirit, indeed the respiratory apparatus—of each language is intrinsic and virtually unduplicable. Even when there are cognates (and there are none between Hebrew and English), the related words have their own distinctive character. In fact, not to accommodate can sometimes set off misdirection toward an implausible meaning.
Alter objects to the Revised English Bible's substitution of "offspring" for "seed" in God's promise to Abraham (Genesis 22:17): "I will greatly bless you and will greatly multiply your seed, as the stars in heaven and as the sand on the shore of the sea, and your seed shall take hold of its enemies' gate." (Both the Revised Standard Version and the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh give "descendants.") If selecting the stronger noun were the only consideration, there could be no demurral. "Seed" yields a concrete image; it is of the earth; it in
cludes, in the most literal way, the generative function {semen, Latin for seed); and it denotes the multiplicity of generations. "Offspring" is clumsy, even ugly, and is as far from God's dazzling stretches of stars and sand as this morning's newspaper is from William Blake. The difficulty is that the contemporary reader's linguistic expectations, long estranged from biblical idiom, is more attuned to the New York Times than to the "Songs of Innocence"; and if seed is not readily understood to mean progeny, who can make sense of "his seed shall take hold of his enemies' gate"? ("His enemies' gate" may be bewildering enough: to capture a "gate," the approach to a city, was to subjugate the city itself.) Despite Alter's reasoned liking for "a limited degree of archaization," his purpose in bringing ancient Hebrew into American English is, after all, to decrease the distance between Scripture and our quotidian lives. A modicum of textual accommodation—Alter's "heresy"—may cause poets and sticklers to sigh; but there are instances when a sigh must trump a muddle. And if Alter did not believe in enlightening twenty-first-century readers, he would have given us a translation as bare of the interpretive luxuriance of his scholia as a tree denuded of its innate verdancy.
The Din in the Head Page 19