Hillel Halkin's home in Israel
[MS: Hillel Halkin is among the best Jewish public intellectuals of a generation. An American who made aliyah in the 1970s, he has seen it all. As a translator, author, journalist and commentator on all manner of Jewish texts or literature, and as a thinker about Jewish issues, especially Israel and Zionism, he is deemed an essential reference by many, myself included.]
Table of Contents [Selected 18 essays]
Preface: A Complicated Jew
The Road to Naybikhov
Rooting for the Indians
Either/Or
The Great Jewish Language War
Holy Land
Driving Toward Jerusalem
My Pocket Bible
My Uncle Simon
Israel & the Assassination: A Reckoning
The Translator’s Paradox
Feminizing Jewish Studies
How Not to Repair the World
If Israel Ceased to Exist
Endless Devotion
The Robert Alter Version p. 226
Sailing to Ithaca
Law in the Desert
Working One’s Way Out
"The Robert Alter Version" p.226-244 [MS: Copyrighted material; formatting, emphasis and excerpts added]
p. 226-44 -
"Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible is a stupendous achievement. The result of decades of work and consisting of over three thousand pages of translated text and commentary, it encompasses every one of the Bible’s thirty-five books from Genesis to Chronicles. 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 one hundred English translations of the Bible (many revisions or adaptations of previous ones), almost all have been done by teams or committees. The 1611 King James Version, 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 forty-seven 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), and the Anchor Bible Series (initiated in 1956 and now nearing completion), to mention some—have been joint efforts. Not even the King James’s two great predecessors that were named for single translators, the fourteenth-century Wycliffe Bible and the sixteenth-century Tyndale Bible, were actually done single-handedly. What English Bibles before Alter’s were? The brief list includes Robert Young’s Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible (1862), Julia E. 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: The Bible in Contemporary Language (2002). I know of no others. Each of these translators had his or her reasons for undertaking the task. ...
p.234 - Re Alter's Notes: "Alter's always helpful commentary, which is one of his Bible's best features..."
Critiques:
One reason that Alter’s rendering is weaker is that it does not, as does the King James, allow each commandment its own space. Such spacing goes back to the Masoretic text and the traditionally written Torah scroll, in which every commandment, while not occupying a separate line as in the King James, is set off by an empty half line on either side of it. ...
Into this emptiness, a moment’s lull, as it were, in the roar of the thunder and the bellowing of the ram’s horn, God’s voice comes crashing. Thou shalt not kill. Lightning! Thunder! The ram’s horn! Thou shalt not commit adultery. Lightning! Thunder! The ram’s horn! The people are terrified. “Speak you with us that we may hear,” they say to Moses, “and let not God speak with us lest we die.” There is no reason why Alter could not have followed the King James in this or reproduced the Masoretic format. ...
Even if he wanted to, however, he could not have compensated for English’s loss of the pronoun “thou,” the intimate form of “you” still possessed by most European languages. “You shall not steal” and “Thou shalt not steal” are not quite the same thing. “You” can be either singular or plural and addressed to everyone. “Thou” is addressed to me alone. ... The Bible points to each one of us. It says, I may be masterfully written, but this is only a means to an end. The end is your obedience. Do not mislead yourself into thinking it is anything else.
....
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 wrote, in the 1940s, the first serious literary analysis of biblical narrative style. In his great book Mimesis, the opening chapter of which compares the prose of Homer’s Odyssey to that of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, he writes: 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 remains an act of rebellion today, if not against a divine giver of it who no longer commands our credence, then against the Bible itself, which does not wish to be read in this way.
It is to read the Bible not so much without faith as in bad faith, although what better faith can be hoped for from the faithless than the faith in literature, which alone holds that every word in the Bible counts even if it is not God’s, would be hard to say.
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[MS: The last paragraph is confusing and unusually roundabout. Bad faith, as a phrase, is rarely used; it implies dishonesty. Who is Halkin talking about?
The sentence refers to the "faithless." In other words, those who have only faith in literature; that is, those who deny the Bible has any valid God, Divine Plan or Jewish religious messages. That is not Alter.
Alter has never stated the "Bible is only literature" like a novel. He thinks about the Bible in its own terms, which are, obviously "religious."
It is worth stating that what is truly "religious" does have a core of meaning. But it is a vexing question of bottomless controversy, hardly a common sense term of general agreement. Are theology, dogma, zealotry or legal codes also religious messages? What about religious controversies in the Bible itself - much less among Jews or Christians through the eons? What about people who do good things but suffer anway? Are they the "faithless"? What is the definition of faith inside the term "the "faithful"? Who are acceptable readers of the Bible by this definition?
Alter is consistent in stating that the Bible has religious messages about the Divine Plan, and how humans and human history are mysteriously and inextricably intertwined. (Alter, to my knowledge, does not express his own religious views which might be the same as in the Jewish Bible, or a variation of it, or something else.)
In his books, Alter explicates, accurately and sincerely the Bible's viewpoint on God and the Divine Plan. Alter repeatedly argues that this Biblical narration is actually enhanced by the Bible's unique literary style; it helps readers discover and embrace the Bible's complexes messages with clarity and conviction. For references see link MS Sefaria Collection Robert Alter.
MS Revised Hanukah - December 16, 2022]