Intro

In this episode, I interview Professor Robert B. Alter.

One of the most influential Hebrew scholars of the century and tenured professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Alter is best known for revolutionizing the scholarly approach to the Bible with his 1981 magnum opus "The Art of Biblical Narrative" and producing a one-man translation of the entire Hebrew Bible from scratch (published 2018).

Alter accepts the "documentary hypothesis" (DH) - a critical approach to the Bible which posits the books are composites stitched from multiple sources - but argued the DH was incapable of providing (and as he explains in the episode, in some cases actively damaging) analytic value to biblical study; advocating instead for a "literary" approach where single authorship is assumed as an analytic strategy to unlock the meaning of the text.

Alter's approach is familiar to traditional Christians and Jews who attribute single authorship to the Pentateuch (and single divine authorship via inspiration to God) - but differ at the axioms, as Christians - such as myself - accept single authorship as a fundamental truth, while Alter views it as a useful fiction/analytic tool.

Alter and I discuss this in the podcast as well as his motivations for working on the Bible, whether he believes in God, the nuance and complexity of Ancient Hebrew, the difficulty of translating it to English, differences in across translations, and how his particular translation overcomes these difficulties. We also discuss the differences between his and Dr. Everett Fox's Hebrew Bible.

References:

Alter, R. (1981). The Art of Biblical Narrative. Basic Books.

Alter, R. (1985). The Art of Biblical Poetry. Basic Books.

Alter, R. (2018). The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. National Geographic Books.

Buber, M., & Rosenzweig, F. (1961). The Hebrew Bible in German.

Fox, E. (1997). The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken.

Fox, E. (2014). The Early Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings: The Schocken Bible: Volume II. Schocken.

Mahaney, M. (2018, December 20). Robert Alter in his office at home in Berkeley, California. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/hebrew-bible-translation.html

Steinberg, A. (2018, December 21). After more than two decades of work, a new Hebrew Bible to rival the King James. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/hebrew-bible-translation.html