"I always objected, moreover, to the label [MS:Bible as Literature] because the Bible, while of course being a set of religiously impelled texts, is literature, which serves as the subtly fashioned vehicle for its religious vision. One would not after all, entitle a course, "The Divine Comedy as Literature," for all the seriousness of Dante's religious aims.
- I began to feel that writing a commentary was an especially Jewish thing to be doing.
- The Art of Biblical Narration, appeared in 1981, ... it has not been out of print in the 42 years since its publication.
- Conventions are something that becomes second nature in a culture. When a story begins with the words, "Once upon a time," no one needs to be told that this is not a novel by Philip Roth or Margaret Atwood but rather a tale in which there may be fairy godmothers, menacing giants, ...."
- Robert Alter (pp. 92-93; 152, 174)
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Excerpts from Alter's 2023 book: A Writing Life
[MS: Formatting, selections and edits are noted. Copyrights apply; available for purchase for under $20 - click the link.]
Bible as literature, pp92-93
"The one Comparative Literature course I constructed that traced something of a new curricular path was an undergraduate lecture course,
The Biblical Tradition in Western Literature." Most English departments offer a Bible as Literature course, often taught by professors with a sketchy knowledge of the Bible. I always objected, moreover, to the label because the Bible, while of course being a set of religiously impelled texts, IS literature, which serves as the subtly fashioned vehicle for its religious vision. One would not after all, entitle a course, "The Divine Comedy as Literature," for all the seriousness of Dante's religious aims.
My course was conceptually different from the Bible as Literature. I organized it around a series of novels that drew on biblical texts and necessarily transformed them. For each novel, from Fielding through Melville, to Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner, I would first spend a week or more reading with the students the relevant biblical text. My plausible assumption was that most of them had never read the Bible or read it only in Sunday school, and so I tried to act as a guide to biblical narrative, and with fewer examples, to biblical poetry as well, introducing students to the Bible's literary complexity. Then we considered the novel linked to the biblical text, following the often radical ways it used its ancient antecedent. ... It showed students something about how to read the Bible attentively, which every literate person ought to be able to do, while it also demonstrated how a literary tradition unfolds through time, wrestling with its own foundational texts, and inventively reusing them. ...
My engagement in this course is reflected in a good deal of my writing, most directly in my book, Canon and Creativity.”
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[MS: For ease of use, here is the link to that book}
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/9780300206524/canon-and-creativity
“In this illuminating book, one of our foremost literary critics views the much-debated question of the literary canon from an entirely new angle. Robert Alter explores the ways in which a range of iconoclastic twentieth-century authors have put to use the stories, language, and imagery of the paramount canonical text—the Hebrew Bible.
....
Focusing special attention on Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Haim Nahman Bialik’s The Dead of the Desert, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, .... [Alter] also offers new insights into the nature and range of modernism...."
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Beyond Translation: Notes and Commentary
Alter pp. 171-74.
"I have not yet mentioned how I came to write a commentary. …
My notion to begin with was that from time to time I would need to provide a translator's note, for an untranslatable pun in the original, or for a word certain meaning, or for a place where the text might corrupted. … First, I became quickly aware that there many points where my translation emphatically swerved from all previous versions, and that I had to explain on what grounds I thought the existing translations were wrong. …
A prime instance presented itself in Genesis, in the very first chapter. How do you translate "adam?" When it refers to the first human male, it cannot be "Adam" because it is not a name but a common noun, consistently prefixed by the definite article, “ the adam." When it is used generically, it may produce a nice ring to render it as "man" —see the short sentence, "God created man in His image" -but this cannot be right because it is almost immediately followed by "male and female He created them." In fact, though 'adam is a grammatically masculine noun (Hebrew has no neutral gender for nouns), its meaning is not gendered. And so I rendered the line cited as “and God created the human in His image." I am aware that "the human" is a bit awkward and may sound like a locution space aliens arriving on earth might use in a science fiction narrative, but I felt that sometimes felicity in English had to be surrendered for fidelity to the Hebrew meaning. All this needed explaining not in a one -line note, but in a short paragraph.
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"There was still another way in which annotation turned into commentary. Although Genesis has been the subject of innumerable and often highly copious commentaries, these have focused on philological, anthropological, historical, theological, and other issues, with at most only a passing glimmer of literary observation.
As someone reading the Bible carefully with literary eyes, I quickly realized that there were all sorts of things going on in the prose narrative that had been ignored in the scholarly exegesis.
….
Then, toward the end of Genesis Chapter 2, I observe that the narrative offers us reported speech for the first human "only when there is another human to whom to respond," and that this speech takes the form of a poem proclaiming the creation and origin of the first woman. This again is not a feature that my predecessors would have stopped to notice because for them, the differences between narrative and reported speech or between prose and poetry are of no great significance.
I do not want to suggest that the focus of my commentary is exclusively on issues of style, narrative presentation, poetic form, and the proper meanings and nuances of terms.
The Bible, after all, is the product of a civilization in many ways unfamiliar to modern readers. Consequently, there is much to be explained: social, legal, and political practices, references to the literature and lore of the surrounding cultures, glitches in the scribal transmission of the text, interpolation of materials not intrinsic to the primary texts. All this has been grist for the busy mills of traditional Bible commentary, and much of it surely has to be laid out as a guide for modern readers.
Nevertheless, I do think that the attention to the literary fashioning of the stories and poems, largely neglected in the scholarly work on the Bible, is a distinctive emphasis in the commentary I wrote.
….
Becoming a commentator on the Bible suddenly altered my own sense of the nature of my project. Although I never intended my translation to be directed to a primarily Jewish audience, I began to feel that writing a commentary was an especially Jewish thing to be doing. My two favorite medieval exegetes were Rashi (eleventh-century France), and Abraham ibn Ezra (twelfth-century Spain, though he wandered all over Western Europe). They are among the great close readers of the Middle Ages in any language. I suppose you would have to call them both rabbinical sages. Rashi produced an indispensable commentary on the Talmud in addition to his work on the Bible. Ibn Ezra, a polymath, wrote on astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and other topics in his itinerant, hand-to-mouth existence, and he was a rather good Hebrew poet, writing, among other things, a couple of droll poems on his own ineluctable condition of poverty, and even a poetic fomulation of the rules of chess. I sometimes have fancied myself as their colleague in writing a Bible commentary as a Jew, though theirs were, of course, in Hebrew—elegant, wonderfully concise Hebrew-and mine in a language they would have regarded as "the tongue of an alien people"
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Art of Biblical Narrative. Celebrating 42 years in Print (p.159)
If the conventions I have just described are so pervasive, why had they not been seen before? This is, after all, the most studied set of texts in the Jewish and Christian world.
What has evolved over the centuries is a process of what I would call cultural amnesia.
As the Bible came to be regarded by the communities of believers as a source of moral instruction and theological truth, and, for many, as the literal word of God, minimal attention was paid to the literary vehicle through which any of this may have been conveyed. The conventions and techniques were generally ignored and forgotten. The ancient audience, by contrast, as a natural and unreflective reflex of their culture, understood that the religious vision was focused and conveyed through literary means.
It strains credence, for example, to think that the Hebrew writers were playing with all those interesting variations in the verbatim repetitions just to amuse themselves …
Conventions are something that becomes second nature in a culture. When a story begins with the words, "Once upon a time," no one needs to be told that this is not a novel by Philip Roth or Margaret Atwood but rather a tale in which there may be fairy godmothers, menacing giants, ...."
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260+ Days:
MS: Least we forget. We do not forget. 260+ days - May we come together to study our Bible in Strength and Compassion
One of the 300+ IDF soldiers lost:
Commander Arnon.
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