How to Judge Robert Alter's Landmark Translation of the Hebrew Bible
Finished after decades of labor, this
one-man English translation is a stupendous achievement.
How does it
hold up against the masterpieces (and follies) that have come before?
From The Letter “Aleph” by the Israeli artist Mordecai Ardon, whose work is used for the cover of Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible
Mosaic Magazine, Hillel Halkin, Feb. 4 2019
However you look at it, Robert Alter’s
The Hebrew Bible
is a stupendous achievement. The result of decades of work, consisting
of over 3,000 pages of translated text and commentary, it includes every
one of the 35 books from Genesis to Chronicles that constitute Jewish
scripture. One might call it the translator’s equivalent of a solo
circumnavigation of the globe were it not that sailing a boat around the
globe takes far less time.
Of the over 100 English translations of the Hebrew Bible, many of
them revisions or adaptations of previous ones and most published
together with the Christian New Testament, almost all have been done by
teams or committees. The 1611 King James Bible, which was the Bible
for generations of English readers and retains for many a hallowedness
that no other English Bible has, was the work of 47 scholars pooling
their knowledge, skills, and judgments. All of the better-known modern
English Bibles—the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (1901), the Jewish Publication Society Bible (1917), the New English Bible (1946), the Good News Bible (1976), the New International Version of the Bible (1978), the New Jerusalem Bible (1985), the New Living Translation Bible (1996), the Holman Christian Standard Bible (2004), the New Jewish Publication Society Bible (1985), the ArtScroll English Tanach (1996), the Anchor Bible Series
(initiated in 1956 and now nearing completion)—have been joint efforts.
Not even the King James’s two great predecessors that were named for
single translators, the 14th-century Wycliffe Bible and the 16th-century
Tyndale Bible, were done single-handedly.
What English Bibles before Alter’s were done by one translator? The list includes Robert Young’s Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible (1862); Judith Smith Parker’s The Holy Bible (1876); Ferrar Fenton’s The Holy Bible in Modern English (1903); James Moffat’s The Old Testament: A New Translation (1924); George Lamsa’s Lamsa’s Bible (1933); and Eugene H. Peterson’s The Message Bible (2002). I know of no others.
Each of these translators had his or her reasons for undertaking the
task. Young, an autodidactic Scotsman and Christian missionary, thought
that prior translations of the Hebrew Bible had strayed too far from its
wording and misunderstood biblical Hebrew’s tense system; in fact, the
one to misunderstand it was he. Smith, also self-taught, was the
daughter of a Connecticut congregational minister. She said of the
Bible, “I do not see how anyone can know more about it than I do,” and
produced a grotesquely unreadable version of it.
Fenton was a London businessman with an interest in Oriental poetry
and the belief that that he had discovered the metrical principles
behind “the varied and beautiful forms of ancient Hebrew versification.”
Some of his translations of biblical poetry were quite good. Those of
biblical prose were less so. The King James Bible begins, “In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the Earth was
without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And
the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Fenton rendered
these verses, “By periods God created that which produced the Solar
Systems, then that which produced the Earth. But the Earth was
unorganized and empty, and darkness covered its convulsed surface while
the breath of God rocked the surface of its waters.”
Lamsa, an Assyrian Christian, espoused the theory that the Peshitta,
the ancient Syriac version of the Bible, was more accurate than the
Hebrew Masoretic text and should be relied on instead. Petersen, a
Presbyterian minister and popular author with an MA in Semitic
languages, intended his Bible to be English’s first thoroughly
colloquial one. His Genesis starts, “First this: God created the Heaven
and Earth—all you see, all you don’t see! Earth was a soup of
nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s spirit
brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.”
Of all these figures, Moffat alone was an academically trained
scholar. A professor of Greek and Bible at Oxford, Yale, and Union
Theological Seminary, he aimed for a modern translation in “effective,
intelligible English” that would reflect the latest advances in biblical
Source Criticism. Seeking to combine the so-called Yahwistic strand of
Chapter 2 of Genesis with the Elohistic strand of Chapter 1, he
commenced his Creation account: “This is the story of how the universe
was formed. When God began to form the universe, the world was void and
vacant, darkness lay over the abyss.”
I. The Bible as Literature
And now we have Alter. Today a professor emeritus at the University
of California in Berkeley, he has, like Moffat, the solidest of academic
backgrounds, though not in biblical studies but in Hebrew and European
literature, on which he has published widely. His writings on the Bible
began with several essays in Commentary in the 1970s, which led to his The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981), The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), and The World of Biblical Literature (1991);
then came translations of Genesis in 1996 and the two books of Samuel
in 1999, gradually followed by the rest of the biblical corpus. A
leading advocate of the view, rarely voiced before the mid-20th century,
that the Bible needs to be read as great literature and not just for
its religious or historical content, he has sought to bring this
perspective to bear on its translation.
The authors of the great works of the Bible, Alter has consistently argued, most recently in a forthcoming new book,
The Art of Bible Translation,
were highly self-conscious poets and prose writers whose artistry has
been ignored or inadequately dealt with by nearly all of their modern
translators. Their choice of words; the construction of their sentences;
the cadences of their language; their use of word play and sound
play—attention to these and other literary elements has been unjustly
subordinated to the truths these authors were supposedly seeking to
convey and the times in which they sought to convey them.
The authors of the Bible, Alter argues, were
highly self-conscious poets and prose writers whose artistry has been
ignored by nearly all of their modern translators.
The first lines of Alter’s Bible are, “When God began to create
heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness
over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let
there be light.’ And there was light.” They illustrate several of his
main points about biblical language and its translation.
He preserves, because he thinks it stylistically crucial, the Bible’s
repetitive use of the coordinating conjunction “and” instead of varying
it with such alternatives as “while,” “then,” “but,” etc., or
eliminating it completely, as most modern translations do. He translates
ru’aḥ elohim as “God’s breath” rather than “God’s spirit”
because “breath” has more of what he calls the “Bible’s extraordinary
concreteness” and better evokes the mysterious force (ru’aḥ also
means “wind” in Hebrew) blowing back and forth over the depths. He
alliterates “welter and waste” to imitate the echo in the Hebrew rhyme
of tohu va-vohu, the King James’s “without form and void.” He
seeks to reproduce the Hebrew’s strong cadences, as in “and the éarth
then was wélter and wáste and dárkness over the déep.” He eschews all
rhetorical paraphrases like Petersen’s “inky blackness” and “brooded
like a bird,” which he considers a bane of modern Bible translation.
All of this works well, even if it doesn’t have quite the majesty we
have come to associate with the King James. Yet by now there are so many
translations of the Bible that it is impossible to be terribly
original. Alter’s decision, based on grammatical considerations already
discussed by the medieval exegetes, to translate the Hebrew’s b’reshit bara as
“When God began to create” rather than “In the beginning God created”
has its English predecessors, of whom Moffat may have been the first.
Moffat’s alliterative “void and vacant” anticipates Alter’s “welter and
waste.” Alter’s principled retention of the biblical “and” was also the
policy of the King James. His “breath” instead of “spirit” is found in
Fenton. And Fenton, while his Genesis 1:1-2 is atrocious, insisted on
the importance of rhythm in translating biblical Hebrew long before
Alter did.
The merit of these lines, therefore, lies less in any single feature
of them than in their overall configuration. They are sensitive to the
flow and texture of the Bible’s language; their choices are judicious;
there are no eccentricities or lapses of taste in them; no translator’s
“Look at me!” or “Can you beat this?” This holds true of the entire
Alter Bible. To call it the best solo English Bible is, given the
competition, not saying much. But one is also tempted to call it the
best modern English Bible, period—a judgment with which Alter appears to
agree. While he states his admiration for the King James often, his
criticisms of all the English Bibles that have come after it are
unsparing.
II. Alter vs. the King James
Can the Alter Bible compete with the King James? This is not an
entirely meaningful question because, like most other English Bibles, it
owes so much to the King James that comparing the two is often
comparing the King James with itself. Moreover, the contemporaneity of
Alter’s language as opposed to the antiquatedness of the King James’s is
simultaneously a plus and a minus. More comprehensible by today’s
reader, it lacks the sacralizing patina of age.
Suppose, for example, that we set the King James for Psalms 8:4,
“What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou
visitest him?” alongside Alter’s “What is man that You should note him,
and the human creature, that You should pay him heed?” One might say
that, “son of man” being a literal rendering of the Hebrew ben-adam and
not idiomatic English, and the verb “to visit” no longer having its
17th-century meaning of “to attend to” or “to succor,” the Alter
translation is more suitable to our times.
As compared with the King James, the
contemporaneity of Alter’s language is a plus and a minus: more
comprehensible by today’s reader, it lacks the former’s sacralizing
patina of age.
But it is also true that the very strangeness of “son of man,” whose
“man” is both the father each one of us has had and the first father of
us all, gives it a poetry that “human creature” doesn’t have, and that
there is a wondrousness about God’s “visiting” a man or a woman even if
we no longer use the verb in this fashion—in part, because we no longer use it in this fashion. After all, the Hebrew ki tifk’denu that
is translated by the King James as “that Thou visitest him” is archaic
today, too. Why should we read the Bible in an English that is more up
to date than the Hebrew?
Nevertheless, meaningful literary comparisons between the King James and Alter Bibles often can
be made—and when we make them, we find places in which one reads better
and places in which the other does, frequently in close proximity. Take
one of the best-known passages in the Bible, the theophany in chapter 6
of Isaiah. Here is the King James version of it:
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord
sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the
temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain
he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain
he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said: Holy, holy, holy, is
the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of His glory.
And here is Alter:
In the year of the death of King Uzziah, I saw the Master
seated on a high and lofty throne, and the skirts of His robe filled
the Temple. Seraphim were stationed over Him, six wings for each one.
With two it would cover its face, and with two it would cover its feet,
and with two it would hover. And each called out to each and said:
“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of armies. The fullness of all the earth
is His glory.”
Several things strike one as superior in the Alter translation:
(1) “In the year of the death of King Uzziah” suggests a
memorable year more than does “In the year that king Uzziah died.”
Uzziah ruled over Judah for four decades. The year of his death was a
milestone. Alter conveys this better.
(2) There is no good reason for the “also” in the King James’s “I saw
also the Lord.” It is not in the Hebrew text, and Alter’s omission of
it is justified.
(3) “On a high and lofty throne” is better than “upon a throne, high
and lifted up.” “Lifted up” implies that someone has lifted it. There is
no such implication in the Hebrew.
(4) The monosyllabically metrical “And éach called óut to éach” has a
more powerful impact than does “And one cried unto another.”
Such improvements, however, are offset by other things. Alter’s
choice of “Master” instead of “Lord” strikes one as a mistake. Hebrew adonai, the word in question, though formed from adon, “master,”
can only (and regularly does in the Bible and elsewhere) refer to God,
and the awesomeness of Isaiah’s divine vision is ill-served by a word
whose referents—one thinks of slave masters, schoolmasters,
housemasters, Zen masters, ḥasidic masters—are purely human.
Equally unfortunate is Alter’s “Lord of Armies” for the Hebrew’s adonai ts’va’ot in place of the King James’s “Lord of hosts.” True, the plural Hebrew noun ts’va’ot literally means “armies.” But the army in the common biblical expression ts’va ha-shamayim, “the
army of heaven,” is not a military force. It is a corps of celestial
bodies and beings, from stars to angels, enlisted in the service of God,
and “the host of the heavens” or “the heavenly host” is the ancient and
traditional term for it found in almost every English Bible starting
with Wycliffe.
Alter’s rejection of this term with its aura of solemn mystery makes
little sense, especially because it is opposed to his own guidelines.
With its driving rhythm and alliteration of “holy” and “hosts,” “Holy,
holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts” is acoustically faithful to the
Hebrew’s kadósh, kadósh, kadósh, adonái ts’va’ót, whose stressed final o-vowel in tsva’ot echoes the same vowel in kadosh.
“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of armies” wanders off and goes lame at
the end. And while “the fullness of the earth is His glory” for m’lo khol ha-arets k’vodo can
be defended on grammatical grounds, the King James’s simpler “the whole
earth is full of his glory” is equally defensible, supported by older
translations, and more expressive of the seraphs’ excitement.
Perhaps the only explanation of such decisions is what might be
called translator’s ennui—the feeling that, faced with a precedent so
universally accepted that it is boring to adopt it as everyone else has
done, one must do something new or different. There is no need to be a
partisan of committees to observe that, had Alter been on one, a fellow
member would have raised a red flag at this point and carried the day
for boredom.
III. A Case of Ands
The desire to be different, however, does not explain another case in
which Alter goes against precedent. Here, too, the passage is a famous
one, that of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac in the book of Genesis.
Alter translates this excruciating episode:
And it happened after these things that God tested
Abraham. And he said to him, “Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” And He
said, “Take, pray, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and
go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt-offering on
one of the mountains which I shall say to you.” And Abraham rose early
in the morning and saddled his donkey and took his two lads with him,
and Isaac his son, and he split wood for the offering, and rose and went
to the place that God had said to him. On the third day Abraham raised
his eyes and saw the place from afar. And Abraham said to his lads, “Sit
you here with the donkey and let me and the lad walk ahead and let us
worship and return to you.”
Here, by way of contrast, is the New Jewish Publication Society version:
Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test. He said
to him, “Abraham,” and he answered, “Here I am.” And he said, take your
son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of
Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights
that I will point out to you.” So early the next morning, Abraham
saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac.
He split the wood for the burnt offering and he set out for the place
of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham looked up and he saw
the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his servants, “You stay here
with the ass. The boy and I will go up there; we will worship and we
will return to you.”
A comparison of these two versions demonstrates how right Alter is
about the biblical “and,” which the New Jewish Society Publication
version omits in six places and changes in others to “so” and “then.”
The “and’s” create a series of discrete events, none of which blurs into
another or is more important or determinative. All are equal links in a
terrible chain that Abraham is free to break whenever he wishes but
does not. When we say, “So early the next morning, Abraham saddled his
ass,” we are saying: Well, of course. Abraham has decided to go to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son, so he has to saddle up. When we say, “And Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey,” we are saying: No! Abraham does not have to do this. He has a choice. He can stay home.
The “and’s” expand each moment to its maximum. At each, Abraham has to decide: am I going ahead with this or not?
The “and’s” expand each moment to its maximum. At each, Abraham has
to decide: am I going ahead with this or not? At each, he has the chance
to back out. At each, he must firm up his resolve all over again. At
each, he is that much closer to killing his son. At each, every step
becomes harder.
Father and son reach Mount Moriah. The Alter translation continues:
And Abraham took the wood for the offering and put it on
Isaac his son and he took in his hand the fire and the cleaver, and the
two of them went together.
The cleaver? Other English Bible translations say “the
knife.” With a knife, Abraham will slit Isaac’s throat as one slaughters
an animal. With a cleaver—but let’s look at the note in Alter’s always
helpful commentary:
the cleaver: [the Bible scholar] E.A. Speiser
notes, quite rightly, that the Hebrew term here is not the usual
biblical term for knife and makes a good argument that it is a cleaver.
Other terms for butchering, rather than sacrifice, are used [further on
in the story].
We turn to the commentary in Speiser’s Anchor series Genesis:
cleaver: the pertinent Hebrew noun (see also Judges 19:29 and Proverbs 30:14) is used expressly for butcher knives.
The “pertinent Hebrew noun” in the Isaac story is ma’akhelet, formed from the verb akhal, to
eat or devour. We turn to Judges 19:29. It comes at the end of a
chapter telling of the rape and murder of a traveling Israelite’s
concubine by the townsmen of Gibeah. In Alter’s translation:
And he . . . took a cleaver [ma’akhelet] and
held his concubine and cut her up limb by limb into twelve pieces, and
he sent her through all the territory of Israel. And so whoever saw her
would say, “There has not been nor has there been seen such a thing from
the day the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt.”
Frightful! The traveler wishes to incite all the tribes of Israel
against the inhabitants of Gibeah, and he succeeds, whereupon a war
breaks out between them and the tribe of Benjamin, in whose territory
Gibeah is located.
And Abraham?
Alter doesn’t ask in his commentary why Abraham has brought
along a cleaver instead of a knife; nor does Speiser. This forces us to
ask: is Abraham about to go berserk? Will he, having saddled his donkey,
and split wood for an offering, and gone to Mount Moriah, and
sacrificed Isaac on the altar he builds . . . chop him into pieces? Will
all his terrible resolve, now that Isaac is dead, erupt in an orgiastic
fury?
And what will he do with the pieces of Isaac? There are no tribes of
Israel to send them to. Will he send them to the seven peoples of
Canaan, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Amorites, the
Perezites, the Jebusites, and the Girgasites, for them to say, “There
has not been nor has there been seen such a thing from the day crazy
Abraham listened to his God and came to this land”?
In all likelihood, ma’akhelet does not mean “cleaver,” or
else sometimes means “cleaver” and sometimes means “knife.” Contrary to
Alter’s assertion, there is no “usual” biblical term for a knife. Sakin, the
rabbinic and modern Hebrew word, occurs in the Bible only once. The
earliest Bible translation, the Greek Septuagint, translates ma’akhelet as “knife.” So does the Targum, the earliest rabbinic translation into Aramaic. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate has glaudium or
“sword,” but Jerome may have been thinking of a long slaughterer’s
knife with a curved tip such as is portrayed in the 6th-century CE
synagogue mosaic of the binding of Isaac at the Israeli site of
Beyt-Alpha.
This certainly seems more plausible than a cleaver. As Alter writes in The Art of Biblical Translation, “You
cannot determine the meaning of biblical words without taking into
consideration their narrative or poetic contexts.” He might have heeded
his own advice in this case.
IV. In What Style of Hebrew is the Bible Written?
But the problem of determining what the Bible is trying to tell us so
as to be able to convey it in translation goes far beyond the meaning
of specific words. Alter makes an important point when he writes in his
introduction to The Hebrew Bible, “Beyond issues of syntax and
local word choice lies a fundamental question that no modern translator I
know of has really confronted: what level, or perhaps levels, of style
is represented in biblical Hebrew?”
Though the Bible is the most studied book in history, we often simply don’t know.
Let’s take another biblical story thematically related to the
sacrifice of Isaac, that of Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter in the
book of Judges.
Jephthah is an Israelite warrior, or perhaps one should say gang
leader, living east of the Jordan, beyond the mountains of Gilead. (The
son of a prostitute, he has gathered around him, the Bible says, a
fighting force of “no-account men.”) When the Gileadites, his fellow
Israelites, appeal to him to rescue them from their Ammonite enemies, he
agrees and leads his men into battle. First, though, in Alter’s
translation,
Jephthah made a vow to the Lord and said,
“If You indeed give the Ammonites into my hands, it shall be that
whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return safe
and sound from the Ammonites shall be the Lord’s, and I shall offer it
up as a burnt offering.”
Like every translator of this passage, Alter had to make a difficult
call, because the words rendered by him as “whatever comes out of the
door of my house”—v’hayah ha-yotsey asher yetsey mi-daltey veyti, literally, “the comer-out that comes out of the doors of my house”—can also be translated, as he notes in his commentary, as “whoever
comes out of the door of my house.” This ambiguity, on which the story
hangs, cannot be preserved in English, in which the translator must come
down on one side or the other. Wycliffe opted for “whoever” and “I
shall offer him up”; Tyndale for “that thing that cometh out” and “I
will offer it”; the King James for “whatsoever” and “it”; modern
translators have gone both ways, with Alter following Tyndale and the
King James.
Jephthah wins his battle against the Ammonites and returns
triumphantly home. The book of Judges relates, in Alter’s translation,
And Jephthah came to his house at Mizpah, and, look, his
daughter was coming out to meet him with timbrels and with dances, and
she was an only child—besides her, he had neither son nor daughter. And
it happened when he saw her, that he rent his garments, and he said,
“Alas, my daughter, you have indeed laid me low and you have joined
ranks with my troublers, for I myself have opened my mouth to the Lord,
and I cannot turn back.” And she said to him, “My father, you have
opened your mouth to the Lord. Do to me as it came out from your mouth,
after the Lord has wreaked vengeance for you from your enemies, from the
Ammonites.” And she said to her father, “Let this thing be done for me:
let me be for two months, that I may go and weep on the mountains and
keen for my maidenhood, I and my companions.” And he said, “Go.” And he
sent her off for two months, her and her companions, and she keened for
her maidenhood on the mountains. And it happened at the end of the two
months, that she came back to her father, and he did to her as he had
vowed, and she had known no man.
This is heart-wrenching. And our hearts go out to both of them, the
daughter who must die and the grieving father who must put her to death.
It is only on second thought that we think: “Just a minute! Must she die? And does her father grieve for her at all?”
First of all, Jephthah’s vow. It is thoughtlessly phrased, his
intention having been, one may presume in giving him the benefit of the
doubt, to sacrifice a “what” and not a “who,” a farmyard animal rather
than a human being. Only when his daughter is the first to emerge from
the house does he realize that he has been trapped by his own words.
But there is a difference between being thoughtless and being
inhuman. Which is the Jephthah who says, “Alas, my daughter, you have
indeed laid me low and you have joined ranks with my troublers”?
You have indeed laid me low and you have joined ranks with my troublers? What kind of language is this? Who talks this way to a daughter when telling her he is going to kill her?
In the Hebrew, Jephthah’s exclamation is, “Aha, biti! Hakhre’a hikhra’tini, v’at hayit b’okhrai.”
This is difficult. If one were to try to translate it literally, one
would arrive at something like, “Ah, my daughter! To bring to knee have
you brought me to my knees, and you have been one of my troublers.”
The “to bring to knee have you brought me to my knees” construction, formed in this case from the verb kara’, to
kneel, is a common biblical one, known as the infinitive absolute, that
consists of using a verb twice, first in its infinitive form and then
in an inflected one, thus making it more emphatic; it is often
translated as “surely,” as in “Surely, you have brought me to my knees.”
As for okhrai, “my troublers,” it comes from the verb akhar, to muddy or trouble, as in the muddying or “troubling” of water; hence the King James’s and Alter’s renditions.
Yet when Ahab says to Elijah in the book of Kings, “Is that you, you okher of Israel?” he is clearly calling him a troublemaker, which is what Jephthah appears to be calling his daughter. He is also, however, engaging in word play, since hakhre’a hikhra’tini and okhrai have the same sounds and share the same three root letters, kaf, reysh, and ayin, though not in the same order.
How should this be translated?
As Alter does?
As: “Ah, my daughter, you surely have undone me. You have done what no enemy could do”?
As: “Damn it all, child! You’ve tripped me up, you have, and trouble is all you are”?
We can’t speak with confidence about the levels
of style in biblical Hebrew because we simply don’t know what Israelite
speech was like 3,000 years ago.
To answer the question, we would have to be able to say in what
“level of style” Jephthah is speaking—and we can’t with any confidence
do this. We simply don’t know what Israelite speech was like 3,000 years
ago. Jephthah could be talking “high” or “low,” in high-flown rhetoric
or in the lively language of the street. His wordplay could be the
literary flourish of an author or the spontaneous outburst of a man
blurting out words of which one leads unthinkingly to another.
It’s anyone’s guess—and rather than guessing, translators in such
situations have often preferred the safety of following in their
predecessors’ footsteps. Hence we have Tyndale (“Alas, my daughter,
thou hast made me stoop and art one of them that trouble me”); the King
James (“Alas, my daughter! thou has brought me very low and thou art one
of them that trouble me”); and Alter, with little difference among
them, even though the potential for difference is great.
Much of the Bible is like this. Its translators work in a closed
circle. To understand the nuance of a line, they must understand the
passage in which it occurs, but they often cannot understand the passage
without understanding each line’s nuance. Before objecting that “Damn
it all, child!” can’t possibly be the tone in which Jephthah is
speaking, we need to consider the monstrously self-centered person he
can be viewed as being. He has made a rash vow that his daughter had no
way of knowing about; she runs out to greet him when he returns from
battle; for this, he decides she must die—and all he can do is blame her
while thinking of his own predicament. It’s her fault. How could she
have done this to him? Just look at the trouble she’s gotten him into!
Jephthah’s subsequent behavior does not cause us to think any better
of him. When his daughter tremulously asks for a two-month stay of her
sentence so that she may mourn in the mountains with her friends, all he
can manage is a gruff “Go!” Not once during those months does he go to
see her. He simply waits for her to come back, certain that she will,
and then, we are told, “he did to her as he had vowed.”
And this isn’t the worst of it. The worst is that it never occurs to
Jephthah that he needn’t keep his vow—that he can swallow his pride or
sense of honor, admit he’s made a foolish mistake, and spare his
daughter’s life. He wouldn’t have been the first Israelite to have
broken a vow, or the last.
Ah, says another translator, that’s the whole point! Jephthah isn’t
just another Israelite. He is a God-fearing one, and he has made a
promise to God that he must keep. He is a tragic victim of fate, not a
monster. He puts his own feelings first because he is devastated by
them—why else would he rend his clothes? He says “Go!” and no more
because he is emotionally unable to say another word. He lets his
daughter wander for two months in the mountains in the hope that she
will flee and not return. She comes back anyway because she is her
father’s daughter and thinks like him that a vow is a vow. Our hearts go
out to them both.
V. Translating the Ten Commandments
The ancient rabbis blamed not only Jephthah. In the Midrash Tanḥuma we read:
Because Jephthah the Gileadite had no knowledge of Torah,
he lost his daughter. . . . When he sought to sacrifice her, she wept
and said: “Father, I came out joyously to greet you and you would
slaughter me? Did God say in his Torah that we should sacrifice human
life to Him?”
Pretending to go with her friends to the mountains, she then,
according to the midrash, went to Jerusalem to ask the Sanhedrin (which
historically, of course, did not yet exist at the time) to absolve her
father of his vow but could not get it to do so because it, too, failed
to interpret the law correctly. When she was offered up on the altar,
God’s Holy Spirit cried, “Did I ask for human sacrifice? I
never commanded it. . . . I never intended Abraham to slaughter his son
. . . or asked Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter.”
Much of the Bible is about God’s commandments and the choices men
make in obeying or disobeying them. Many of them are purely ritual.
Alter translates these faithfully, even though one would be hard-pressed
to find literary merit in passages like
And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying to them,
“Speak to the Israelites, saying, ‘These are the beasts that you may eat
of all the animals that are on the land. Everything that has hooves and
that has split hooves, bringing up the cud, among beasts, this you may
eat.’”
But what about the following?
And it happened on the third day as it turned morning,
that there was thunder and lightning and a heavy cloud on the mountains
and the sound of the ram’s horn, very strong. . . . And Mount Sinai was
all in smoke because the Lord had come down on it in fire, and its smoke
went up like the smoke from a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled
greatly. And the sound of the ram’s horn grew stronger and stronger. . .
. And the Lord came down on Mount Sinai, to the mountaintop, and the
Lord called Moses to the mountaintop, and Moses went up. . . .
And God spoke all these words, saying: “I am the Lord your God who
brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves. You
shall have no other gods beside Me. You shall make you no carved
likeness and no image of what is in the heavens above or what is on the
earth below or what is in the waters beneath the earth. . . . You shall
not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not
acquit whoever takes His name in vain. . . . Remember the Sabbath day to
hallow it. . . . Honor your father and your mother. . . . You shall not
murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall
not bear false witness against your fellow man. You shall not covet your
fellow man’s house. You shall not covet your fellow man’s wife, or his
male slave, or his slavegirl, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that
your fellow man has.”
Although all of God’s commandments demand to be obeyed, Jephthah is
forced to choose between two of them. One tells him he will not be
acquitted if he fails to obey it and the other doesn’t, and so he obeys
the first and murders his daughter. He cannot, as does
Abraham, put his trust in God because God does not speak to him. He must
judge for himself and he, one of Israel’s judges, judges badly. This is
a story that can be read as literature.
But can the Ten Commandments? And why in Alter’s translation do they
not affect us as they do in the King James? The latter reads:
And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that
there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount,
and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud. . . And Mount Sinai was
altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and
the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole
mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long,
and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by voice.
And the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai, on the top of the mount: and
the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up. . .
. And God spake all these words, saying,
I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is
in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. . . .
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain.
Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy. . . .
Honor thy father and thy mother. . . .
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s
house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor
his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy
neighbor’s.
The King James has the advantage of what earlier in this essay I’ve
called “the sacralizing patina of age.” This includes such usages as
“exceeding loud” instead of “very strong,” “spake” instead of “spoke,”
“graven” instead of “carved,” “manservant” and “maidservant” instead of
“male slave” and “slavegirl,” and so forth. More importantly, it
includes the now archaic “thou,” “thee,” and “thy” of the
second-person-singular English pronoun.
“You shall not steal” and “Thou shalt not steal”
are not quite the same thing. “You” is addressed to everyone. “Thou” is
addressed to me.
Why English lost the intimate form of “you” that is still possessed
by other European languages need not concern us here. Suffice it to say
that “You shall not steal” and “Thou shalt not steal” are not quite the
same thing. “You” is addressed to everyone. “Thou” is addressed to me. I
am the person in the crowd to whom it points a finger and calls out,
“You there, I mean you!”
One can’t fault Alter for not doing what the English language can no
longer do. One can fault him, however, for not following the King James
in giving every commandment a line of its own:
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Thou shalt not steal.
This has an effect like that of the Hebrew Torah scroll, in which
each of the Ten Commandments, though not occupying a separate line, is
set off by an empty space on either side of it. It is into these spaces,
as it were, that the verse immediately following the final commandment
comes crashing: “And all the people were seeing the thunder and the
flashes and the sound of the ram’s horn and the mountain in smoke, and
the people saw and they drew back and stood at a distance.” Thou shalt not kill. Thunder! Lightning! The ram’s horn! Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thunder! Lightning! The ram’s horn! Thou shalt not steal. Thunder!
Lightning! The ram’s horn! “And they said to Moses, Speak you with us
that we may hear, and let not God speak with us lest we die.”
Is this literature? If so, it is a very special kind. No one has put
it better than Erich Auerbach. It was Auerbach, then a Jewish refugee
from Nazi Germany living and teaching in Istanbul, who in the early
1940s wrote the first serious literary analysis of biblical narrative
style. In the opening chapter of his great book Mimesis, in comparing Homer’s Odyssey with the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, he comments:
One can perfectly well entertain historical doubts on the
subject of the Trojan War or of Odysseus’ wanderings, and still, when
reading Homer, feel precisely the effects he sought to produce; but
without believing in Abraham’s sacrifice, it is impossible to put the
narrative of it to the use for which it was written. Indeed, we must go
even further. The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent
than Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. . . . The
Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not
flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject
us, and if we refused to be subjected, we are rebels.
Reading the Bible as literature—if that is all we read it as—remains
an act of rebellion today, if not against a divine giver of the Bible
who no longer commands our credence, then against the Bible itself,
which does not wish to be read in this way. It is regrettable that, in
his excellent introductions to, and commentaries on, the literary
qualities of the books of the Bible, Alter has not dealt with this
issue, which is ultimately a translator’s as well. Perhaps he still
will.
