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In addition, Alter supplies the reader with detailed and insightful commentary along with the biblical text. While it is possible to quibble over his rendition of a Hebrew word or phrase here and there, most of the quibbling would be exactly that. In my judgment Alter has admirably - one could say miraculously - succeeded. "n the case of the modern versions," Alter writes in his excellent introduction, "the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James version a shaky sense of Hebrew." Thus his aim is to remedy defects in earlier translations and to give us a new and improved version. Biblical `future shock'Īlter believes that since the middle of the last century advances in biblical archaeology and increased understanding of ancient Hebrew have made older translations more or less outdated.
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His conviction is that the Bible, specifically the Torah, is first and foremost a literary document, indeed one of the world's greatest as well as one of its oldest in short, a book first, a holy book second. In Alter's view, earlier translations have been deficient in that respect.
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Why, then, these two new ones?įor the eminent translator, Hebraist and literary critic Robert Alter, the answer is simple, though the task anything but: to make the Hebrew Bible more readable, more accurate and, above all, more literary in other words, to convey in English some of the linguistic qualities of the original Hebrew. Both of these ancient texts have been translated into English many times, dozens in the case of the Torah, at least half a dozen in the case of Gilgamesh. Indeed, Gilgamesh is the oldest, preceding the earliest written parts of the Bible by around 1,000 years. The epic of Gilgamesh and The Five Books of Moses, aka Torah ("teachings," "instruction"), aka the Pentateuch ("five books" in Greek), are among the oldest works of recorded literature.