Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew language and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, has published masterful translations of the Five Books of Moses, Psalms, the Wisdom Books and, most recently, the Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Rather than approaching Biblical stories with great solemnity, Alter suggests that it is better to embrace them as works of literature in this excerpt from his book The Art of Biblical Narrative.1
As one discovers how to adjust the fine focus of those literary binoculars, the biblical tales, forceful enough to begin with, show a surprising subtlety and inventiveness of detail, and in many instances a beautifully interwoven wholeness. The human figures that move through this landscape thus seem livelier, more complicated and various, than one’s preconceptions might have allowed.
This, I am convinced, was at the heart of the authors’ intentions: the Hebrew writers manifestly took delight in the artful limning of these lifelike characters and actions, and as a result they created an unexhausted source of delight for a hundred generations of readers. But that pleasure of imaginative play is deeply interfused with a sense of great spiritual urgency. The biblical writers fashion their personages with a complicated, sometimes alluring, often fiercely insistent individuality because it is in the stubbornness of human individuality that each man and woman encounters God or ignores Him, responds to or resists Him. Subsequent religious tradition has by and large encouraged us to take the Bible seriously rather than to enjoy it, but the paradoxical truth of the matter may well be that by learning to enjoy the biblical stories more fully as stories, we shall also come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history.
Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew language and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, has published masterful translations of the Five Books of Moses, Psalms, the Wisdom Books and, most recently, the Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Rather than approaching Biblical stories with great solemnity, Alter suggests that it is better to embrace them as works of literature in this excerpt from his book The Art of Biblical Narrative.1 As one discovers how to adjust the fine focus of those literary binoculars, the biblical tales, forceful enough to begin with, show a surprising subtlety and inventiveness […]
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