Robert Alter: Modern Hebrew Literature and "Reading Genesis as a Book"

From My Jewish Learning, here are five articles by Robert Alter.

The Pioneers of Modern Hebrew Literature

Modern Hebrew Literature: Early Challenges

The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Literature

Choosing Hebrew

Reading Genesis As A Book (See below)

Alter is the rare grand master of both Western Literature and Hebrew Literature. After a lifetime of teaching , commentary and foundational books, he is without peer in breadth and creative insights, in the estimation of many, a view I share. [MS: See the collected reviews and articles in the Robert Alter - MS Sefaria Sheet Collection.]

Four of the essays above explain how literature for Jews became primarily "Modern Hebrew Literature" over about the last 200 years. (The story of Yiddish in Choosing Hebrew, is complex and is a work in progress.) The Hebrew Bible, the Tanach, has been translated, and even appropriated by others for their own aims, (for example, as Alter frequently writes about, the 1600s King James Bible translation, Shakespeare and KJB-based modern literature). However, the Bible nonetheless kept its unique status, which Alter explains and affirms.

The Bible is a kind of mixed "literature/national history/text of religious faith" like no other, connecting and reconnecting the Jewish People to themselves and their extraordinary civilization. The Bible of the Jewish people is over 3000 plus years old. Alter helps find the reconnection for moderns, in particular after the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel.

Alter is uniquely positioned to bring insights from literature itself to the study of the Bible which as he repeatedly and consistently explains is a national history and a religious text with profound content, that has a unique, non-modern literary style suited to its these concerns.

The essay Reading Genesis As A Book explains the overall structure of Genesis and why it is cohesive like a "conceived book", as we moden readers may come to see and value.

Follow this link to the article:

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/author/robert-alter/

The story of the family that will become the people of Israel is seen as the focus of a larger, universal history.

"Genesis comprises two large literary units–the Primeval History (chapters 1-11) and the Patriarchal Tales (chapters 12-50). The two differ not only in subject but to some extent in style and perspective.

The approach to the history of Israel and Israel’s relationship with God that will be the material of the rest of the Hebrew Bible is undertaken through gradually narrowing concentric circles: first an account of the origins of the world, of the vegetable and animal king­dom and of humankind, then a narrative explanation of the origins of all the known peoples, from Greece to Africa to Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, and of the primary institutions of civilization, including the memorable fable about the source of linguistic division.....[MS: Below is the last paragraph summary. The complete article is available on the link above at My Jewish Learning.]

....

Genesis begins with the making of heaven and earth and all life, and ends with the image of a mummy–Joseph’s–in a coffin. [MS: See the commentary in Robert Alter MS Sefaria Sheet Collection, about the ending of Genesis with a "coffin" of death but Alter's hopeful connection to Noah and Moses' "Ark"of life.) But implicit in the end is a promise of more life to come, of irrepressible procreation, and that renewal of creation will be manifested, even under the weight of oppression, at the beginning of Exodus.

Genesis, then, works with disparate materials, puts together its story with two large and very different building blocks, but nevertheless achieves the cohesiveness, the continuity of theme and motif, and the sense of completion of an archetectonically conceived book. Although it looks forward to its sequel, it stands as a book, inviting our attention as an audience that follows the tale from beginning to end."

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