Take the alter treatment from the cycle of stories in which the first two matriarchs, Sarah and Rebekah, conspire against the older children for the benefit of the younger ones. sarah insists that abraham take her firstborn son ishmael and ishmael’s mother, Hagar, to the desert to die, to protect the inheritance of sarah’s son, isaac. rebekah tells her son jacob to trick her father, the now elderly isaac, into giving her a blessing that she rightfully owes to esau, jacob’s slightly older twin brother. the behavior of the matriarchs is indefensible, but god defends it. he instructs abraham to do as sarah says, and after jacob flees from an enraged esau god comes to jacob in a dream, blesses him and tells him that he too, like abraham and isaac before him, will father a great nation .
alter does not try to explain the paradox of a moral god sanctioning immoral acts. Instead, let the Bible convey the seriousness of the problem. When Abraham is reluctant to leave Ishmael and Hagar, God commands, “Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to his voice.” Rebekah, while instructing Jacob on how to dress like Esau to steal his blessing, echoes God’s phrase – listen to my voice” – not one but two in an effort to reassure him. As we read into the alter translation, we we realize that the word “voice” (“kol” in Hebrew) is one of his “key words”, which if we could keep track of all the ways it is used would unlock new worlds of meaning.and ishmael, the messenger of god, will tell him that god will save them because he has heard the voice of the crying child and the almost blind isaac will recognize the sound of jacob’s voice, so that although his youngest son is facing him with his arms Covered in goatskin (to make them as hairy as Esau’s), and even wearing his brother’s clothes (to smell more like a hunter), Isaac almost realizes the deception being played against him.
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if the voices help those who know how to hear them to penetrate the illusion, if the voices express or summon the will of god, what should we think when god says to listen to the voices of the matriarchs as they advance their nefarious plans? ? that his truth is the truth of God? Does the biblical author mean that the ethical restrictions that govern family and tribal life fade before the importance of choosing a person capable of carrying the blessing to the next generation? what kind of anti-family message is that?
alter does not answer such questions; he doesn’t even raise them. But by allowing us to see for ourselves how the Bible embeds its sharpest ironies in puns and repetition, it gives us a fuller view than we are usually given of the dark and often startlingly ungodly sensibility that essentially invented the Bible. Western religious life. the great philologist e. a. Speiser, by contrast, whose 1962 translation of Genesis offered the best textual analysis of the time, did not see or communicate this startling vision of deity as God told Abraham to “do as Sarah tells you.” The translators of the Jewish Publication Society’s New Genesis Edition missed it when they translated Rebekah’s echo of God’s phrase as, first, “listen carefully to what I instruct you,” then “do as I say.” (king james version cunningly preserves the “voice” at all times, although it doesn’t pick up rebekah’s echo; god tells abraham to “hear” sarah’s voice, but rebekah tells jacob to “obey” hers ). , he knew exactly what was going on in these passages. he saw that they led the reader directly into the chilling mystery at the heart of the Hebrew Bible. as he wrote in 1992, “divine choice is a demanding and perhaps cruel fate that often involves violating the most intimate biological ties.”
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alter, it must be said, is not the only recent translator of the Hebrew Bible attuned to its awesome power. Another recent English translation of the Five Books of Moses, published in 1995 by Jewish studies scholar Everett Fox, also retains its key words and archaic texture. Fox pays explicit homage to Buber and Rosenzweig in his introduction, and his “five books” are in some ways more faithful to the Hebrew – in all its strangeness – than Alter’s. but the translation of alter is better. his brilliant commentary, in footnotes in the bottom half of each page, draws on the insights of rabbis and modern scholars, adding depth to his own readings. and his biblical prose is fresher and more immediate. Wanting to capture the intense aurality of Biblical Hebrew (originally intended, after all, to be read aloud), as well as the dense array of meanings that individual words carry, Fox ended up inventing a long winded, heavily hyphenated gerund-heavy English that can cast a strange ancient spell on the reader but lacks the beautiful conciseness, what alter calls the “balance and power” of the original. by contrast, alter’s mostly Anglo-Saxon English, neither too colloquial nor ornate, musical but direct, sounds as if it could be spoken today.
alter stumbles on occasion, most often when trying to reproduce some Hebrew pun in English. for example, paralleling the play on words in the creation story that plays on “adam” and “adamah”, human and soil, an echo that conveys the humility of humanity’s origins, alter gives us “humus” and “human”, which is instructive but not happy. however, fumbles like these are minor when compared to his usual touch security. alter’s masterful translation deserves to become the version in which many future generations will encounter this strange and inexhaustible book.
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