Strata: In Their Own Words

Robert Alter is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written numerous books and is perhaps best known for The Five Books of Moses (2004), an artistic and scholarly translation of the Pentateuch. With the recent publication of his latest translation project, The Book of Psalms, Alter described in a piece for Jbooks.com (excerpted here) how his readers motivate his work.

My experience as a translator and a critical expositor of the Bible has taught me that one should not imagine a categorical split between literary readers of the Bible and those who come to the Bible for reasons of faith. The Biblical writers themselves were obviously impelled by religious concerns, but for most of the texts gathered in the Hebrew Bible, they chose to convey their religious vision in poetry and artful prose narrative; and I have long been convinced that in order to understand fully what they wanted to say about God, man, creation, history, and divinely dictated moral imperatives, you have to firmly grasp how they purposefully employed the vehicles of story and poem. If a person uses Psalms in his or her devotional life, my assumption is that an English version which gives a better feel for the rhythms, the diction and the stylistic contours of the Hebrew will speak to that reader more immediately, put such a reader more closely in touch with the spiritual intensity as well as the emotional urgency of the Biblical poems. By resisting, moreover, the temptation of imposing later theologies and worldviews on the Psalms, in the choice of English equivalents for Hebrew terms,