The five books of Moses : a translation with commentary

by Robert Alter

Paper Book, 2004

Status

Available

Publication

New York : W.W. Norton & Co., c2004.

Description

"The Five Books is an enduring source of literary and spiritual renewal. In its narrative we find the primal stories of the Creation and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The intimacies of Genesis portray the tortuous relations between fathers and sons, husbands and wives. The grand historical narrative of Exodus and Numbers conveys a still-resonant drama of enslavement and liberation. Leviticus and Deuteronomy codify a culture and ensure its transmission over generations."--Jacket.

Media reviews

Robert Alter is a masterful scholar and a critic of exemplary sensitivity and tact who, both as translator and as commentator, has placed himself wholly in the service of the artfulness of the Torah. It is because he has been so attentive in his commenting that he can afford to be so daring in his
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translation, so immune to the “heresy of explanation,” so faithful to the literary details of the text that other translators either see as impediments or do not see at all. Conversely, it is his adherence to this specifically literary model of fidelity in representation that leads him into commentary that far exceeds the demands of mere annotation.
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A reader should, however, not shy from the rare but exact word, and none of Alter’s eccentricities of diction substantially undermine his attempt to deliver a strongly rhythmic and ruggedly direct equivalent of the Hebrew.
Alter's magisterial translation deserves to become the version in which many future generations encounter this strange and inexhaustible book.

User reviews

LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
"Two reviews down in twenty minutes! Hooray! Now ... what the fuck do I do about the bible."

"People have been asking themselves that for a long time, sweetheart." Hurr hur.

And, me reading Genesis to my niece: "And the human was with his woman in the garden, and they were naked, and they were not
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ashamed."

Lu: "And they aaaalllll lived happily ever after."

That makes me smile. This book breeds stories, and gets itself into everything, and contains so much of its own past and future it gives me a headache. And reading about how to build a tabernac' for 200 pages compunds that headache. And yet other parts of it are just so endless, sprawling out like forty years in the desert, sure, but a desert wshere you will be sustained by manna and encounter every so many interesting things.

Lots of this is boring and evil. Lots of it brings tears to your eyes it's so beautiful and we're so fragile. Alter's treatment is magnificent. I can't get into the details here--to have the proper time and space for that would require either a research chair or a conversion experience. But I will tell you that Genesis is a bill(marill)ion Silmarillions (Simlarillioni?) and if I manage to fucking squeeze out some kids one day I will think about the patriarchs every day and make sure I only bless them both at the same time. And Exodus has every other quest narrative beat all hollow because of the way Moses isn't just fighting Behemoth or founding Jerusalem, he's protecting his people from the mother of all abusive husband/father/pimp/strongmen the whole way.

And just when YHWH does something so vicious and contemptible that it makes you use a ridiculous word like "pimp" to describe him, he turns into a little fluffy cloud to guide you, and you're thinking back on your imaginary Christian childhood and didn't-happen loss of nonexistent faith, and yearning swallows you up and you want to go outside the bounds of the encampment for two weeks until you're clean again. But no, YHWH's a bad dude. Maybe he was great shits in the lost and forgotten old days, when he was doing the feats in the Book of the Battles of YHWH, but that book was lost and something happened to the LORD to turn him sour, and not only will he destroy you for just anything, sometimes even if you're keeping his covenant, not only does he do all the Old Testament boasting we came for and know how to let slide, but he also--no, okay, you know what turned me against him was Leviticus 26:29, "You shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters,” and more than that, the following discussion, where he dwells lovingly on how the trauma of this experience will break our minds and turn us into un-men. God doesn't just want to see us punished; he wants to see us unmade, which I guess makes sense for a maker. But I would have liked to know him when he was El-Shaddai or Elyon or those other old-timey names, an optimistic if rash demiurge on the move.

When there was something other than fear. Because that's all this book has in terms of promise: If you keep the covenant, maybe you'll find a place in the sun on the winning team and at worst you can eat other people's field-leavings until those Godless yet inexplicably mighty Babylonians cut you down or sweep you off. We think of the monotheists as future-oriented, and sure there's the promise of Israel, but there's also such a sense of sadness and loss that I think Ezra their compiler, whoever he was or were, must have felt very keenly as he was compiling this book of Law for the Persian emperor the wirght of the already sad and broken and bloodied old world. If Deuteronomy is basically a fascist rally-speech, we may consider that this fascism is different from the barbarism of a new world; it's duct-tape around the collective psyche of people who've seen and done awful things. (There's more than one type of fascism.)

So who can judge? The Judges don't come till later. But from any human perspective there's so much to keen and wail about here, and even Moses, the hero of these books if anyone is, fucks it up in the end, orders the needless slaughter of the Moabites and the Midianites (his own wife's people! Zipporah is my favourite biblical name, incidentally), making his character arc more Darth Vader than any of those guys I alluded to earlier. And if an ugly racist theocracy seems like an acceptabe price to pay for a land of milk and honey, well, I guess those were different times and I won't judge you too harshly. But I buy milk and honey at the store. (Our god is convenient access to cosumer products, it is well known.) Also they killed Balaam, who is my pet Bible character now and such a deft little character sketch.

So how do you rate these guys? Genesis is world-was-young cosmology, Exodus is Hollywood epic, Leviticus is boring and has God showing his true dark face, Numbers is not a guy you'd wanna meet in a dark alley, and Deuteronomy gives you the greatest-hits version and a lot more exhortations to bloodshed (although God does try to redeem himself with the best dis in the book, about how you will be sold as slaves, "and there will be no buyer."

I'm focusing too much on the morality. Vicious and evil, but the kind that you can just about stomach coming as it does from a herd of pastoralists just hoping to eat and live to see 30. (As for you modern literalists, I suspect we're enemies; at the very least, I wonder what happened in your life to make you like this.) There are some small gestures toward a kind of rudimentary justice, and protection for the marginalized, but not much. (It's funny too how Scripture so often brings out the secular positivist in the most anti–absolute truth among us.) I do think it's cute how they don't ever want to cook animals with their young, although Alter figures that's more of a fear of muddying binaries, which I can believe.

As literature? Many glories here. I look back fondly on the books that were full of narrative. The language comes alive when you force yourself to read slooow, like with your finger on each word, or aloud. It enchanted my niece supra immediately and I hope and don't hope she becomes a charismatic preacher one day.

There are a lot of parts that drag too, of course, but they're not really "literature"--more religious instruction manuals, useful for Levites and other people who aren't me.

And as scholarship, and as anthropology, it's superlative. Plush footnotes you could disappear into.

So how do I grade this pretty hate machine? I stop trying to apply modern categories to it. I think about what an enjoyable desert journey it's been, and how it feels to taste one of our greatest beginnings. I feel grateful for this draught of learning, to Alter, Moses, my friend Dan Chaikin, who led our group read, but sorry, man, not God. Can't go there.

As an accomplishment, Alter's book deserves a regular five stars, and the original Torah of course deserves one of those five starses that are actually six stars because without it we wouldn't even be us or rate things in stars but probably spend nights erecting giant umbrellas to back them out because we think they're how the Living Tribunal sees our misdeeds and the Mighty Ain promised he'd protect us if we obseved the sacrament of the umbrella. Or whatever. Anyway, I recommend this to anyone, or at least you should just spend a bit of time with a Bible story that intrugues you and learn more about what happened before and after it and the people who made it. But I don't give it five stars, because I don't trust its motives and I guess Satan something something.
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LibraryThing member lyzadanger
I'm prematurely rating this book, as I am only just finishing Genesis—the first of the five eponymous books here. But I can already tell this work has finally broken my "bible barrier": I have been trying to read the bible from a literary-history perspective for most of my life, and until now
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have never gotten a toehold. Alter's translation reminds me of what Seamus Heaney did for Beowulf. Here the language is brilliant, not a single passage done sloppily, a fantastic melding of heightened tone (archaic and lofty) with readable English. It is a text one can grapple with. And his commentary! Granted, I feel as if I should, for due diligence, also compare notes with another translator, another commentator, but I feel like Alter is my teacher through all of this, neither hyper-religious nor disdainful of the faith and metaphors contained. This book will sit with pride in my ancient/classical reference section and will get picked up often.
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LibraryThing member nosajeel
Robert Alter's translation of the Five Books of Moses is stunning. There is something wonderful about reading them translated from scratch by a single person so that it embodies a fresh, singular vision rather than a committee that builds on previous translations (although the New Standard Revised
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Version has a lot to be said for it, and the other work of a single translator I once tried to read--Everett Foxx--was borderline unreadable). It is also a beautiful edition, nicely printed with excellent and detailed footnotes that focus on the literary qualities of the text but also provide explanations and context for much of the text as well. It is also nice to have a large volume devoted just to the Torah. I read this over the course of a number of years, next up is Robert Alter's just published "Ancient Israel" which covers Joshua through Kings.
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LibraryThing member Bibliophial
Alter shows his subtle, resourceful, nuanced depth-reading skills here in a suggestive translation of the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures. Bible as literature!
LibraryThing member jamescostello
Genesis is great and Alter makes it greater with his scholarly and poetic translation. The footnotes take up more page space than the text, and every note is outstanding. This should be in every library alongside Homer and Ovid.
LibraryThing member MarthaJeanne
Robert Alter's commentary makes the Hebrew more accessible.
LibraryThing member cstebbins
Well, I've finished Genesis, and I really don't see what all the excitement is about. For beauty, this new translation is so far behind the King James as not even to be in the same race. For meaning, I have not yet seen that any of Prof. Alter's changes makes much difference. That leaves the notes.
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Some of these are rather technical and contain interesting information. Many if not most, however, are just Prof. Alter's opinions on history and literature. I suppose these have some interest, considering that the Professor is an accomplished scholar, but one gets tired of reading a text of this importance to the counterpoint of reductionist comments. Mr. Alter's point as to the integrity and sophistication of the text doesn't sit very well with his whole-hearted acceptance of the documentary hypothesis. Our old, shadowy friend the Priestly Redactor makes frequent appearances, with his usual combination of genius and ham-handedness.

Maybe there will be more scope for the Professor's method in Exodus.
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Language

Original language

Hebrew
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