The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary

Please read the introduction. It is available free as part of the Read Sample. In it the translator explains his philosophy of translation and compares it, with examples, with other translations that tend to try to explain or paraphrase the text rather than translate it.The translator is a professor of Hebrew and he tries to keep much of the flavor of Hebrew in his translation. Repeated words, phrase and stories are important to Hebrew - which he tries to preserve. He addresses the rhythm of the text and other feature that can easily be lost in other translations.Where the translator cannot convey a feature directly, like puns in Hebrew, he presents them in his notes. I appreciate this.Only one negative issue, it comes as a three volume set - the Law, the Writings and the Prophets. The Writings is an extremely large volume and I believe would be better presented in two or three volumes.I have purchased a copy for me and for a friend. I highly recommend it.Again, read his introduction. It is available free as part of the Read Sample.

Where to begin? First, I love the Word of God. I have been a student of that Word for my whole life on a personal level and at a scholastic level for the past twenty years. This translation is serving as a game changer for me. Dr. Alter does his best to retain the style of the Hebrew and it produces some amazing passages. My favorite so far being Judges 2:11ff"11And the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD, and they served the Baalim. 12And they forsook the LORD God of their fathers Who had brought them out of the land of Egypt, and they went after other gods, of the gods of the peoples that were all around them, and they bowed to them and vexed the LORD. 13And they forsook the LORD and served Baal and the Ashtoroth. 14And the LORD’s wrath flared up against Israel, and He gave them into the hand of plunderers who plundered them, and He handed them over to their enemies all around, and they were no longer able to stand up against their enemies. 15Whenever they sallied forth, the LORD’s hand was against them for harm, as the LORD had spoken and as the LORD had vowed to them, and they were in sore straits. 16And the LORD raised up judges and rescued them from their plunderers."The retention of the many "ands," which would normally be smoothed out with commas or dropped entirely in English, reminds us that the fall of Israel was a process. Each "and" represents a choice to go further away from God or a corresponding deepening of God's anger.The notes which accompany the translation are gold, though Dr. Alter could use an archeology brush up and is very much invested in the late date, multi source theory of how we got the OT. Even then, he is gracious with such things. Dr. Alter has given us a valuable tool to better understand both Testaments.Worth every penny!

This translation is aimed at the general public rather than a specialized scholarly audience. In the introduction, Robert Alter addresses some of the same shortfalls that I have noticed over the years in the initial training in translation that I received at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (in the early 1980s). I was taught that translation is simply a matter of transferring Meaning X from Language A to Language B. Oh, how far this is from being the whole picture!On p. xv Alter says, "The unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for _explaining_ the Bible instead of representing it in another language, and in the most egregious instances this amounts to explaining away the Bible." One way I could express the problem is that the Hebrew Bible is a cornucopia, but English translations routinely present it as nothing more than a collection of one kind of food. It may be apples, it may be oranges, it may be white bread--but it's all the same and not a complete source of nourishment for the soul.Alter goes on at length about the importance of retaining Hebrew parataxis in English translations. This means keeping all the "ands" of Hebrew as "ands" in English. Modern translations tend to prefer changing a lot of these "ands" to subordinating conjunctions such as "because" and "when." In so doing, they destroy the structure of the Hebrew and erase the rhythm of the text. Biblical Hebrew does have subordinating conjuctions, but it chooses to use them rarely. It greatly prefers the age-old Semitic and Sumerian (pre-Semitic) device of stringing clauses together on the same syntactic level.For example, as Alter points out on pp. xxii-xxiv, the encounter of Abraham's servant with Rebekah at the well in Genesis 24 is full of "ands," but these are mostly eliminated in favor of subordination in modern translations. The result? "This tends to obscure what the Hebrew highlights, which is that she is doing something quite extraordinary. Rebekah at the well presents one of the rare biblical instances of the performance of an act of 'Homeric' heroism.... The chain of verbs tightly linked by all the 'and's' does an admirable job in conveying this sense of the young woman's hurling herself with prodigious speed into the sequence of required actions.... The parallel syntax and the barrage of 'and's,' far from being the reflex of a 'primitive' language, are as artfully effective in furthering the ends of the narrative as any device one could find in a sophisticated modern novelist" (pp. xxiii-xxiv).Alter makes the important point, "There is no good reason to render biblical Hebrew as contemporary English, either lexically or syntactically" (p. xxvii). In this translation, produced over a period of more than 20 years, Alter presents the Hebrew Bible in an English that preserves, as much as possible, the style and rhythm of the original text. He has provided copious notes with many kinds of information helpful to general readers as well as to scholars.