Robert Alter Research Articles

Are Metaphors Getting Lost? – The Usefulness of Linguistic-Poetic Analysis of Old Testament Poetic Texts for Theological Interpretation

This paper presents an interdisciplinary experiment. The core of the experiment is to examine the Hebrew poetic text of the Old Testament through a textual analysis of its textuality prior to theological interpretation and to ask why and which linguistic-literary solutions, i.e. poetic procedures, are used in the construction of meaning. On this basis, a research design can be created that asks how linguistic-poetic analysis can help in the exegesis of Old Testament poetic texts (or of any other textual genre). Poetics is about the production of meaning: all of our verbal utterances are made with some kind of poetics or speech strategy in mind – our communications are not formulated randomly. The linguistic analysis proposed here examines not only whether a word or phrase in a particular poetic text of the Hebrew Bible is written correctly or not but also the poetic role of that phrase, word, sentence, and grammatical or other structure in the larger textual unit (i.e. the poem) under study. Keywords: linguistic-poetic analysis, Walter Brueggemann, Robert Alter, trial metaphor, laboratory translation, metaphor, conceptual metaphor, background metaphor, context, Leningrad Codex, massoretes

Imagining the Hebrew Ode: On Robert Lowth’s Biblical Species

Abstract: The subject of this article is the reception history of biblical genres, or the metapoetics of genre-making. It argues that the seemingly fixed presentations of the genres of biblical poetry in the twentieth century—as in Robert Alter’s classic guide to biblical Hebrew poetry—emerge from an eighteenth-century encounter: the English exegete Robert Lowth’s dramatic attempt to fit Greek and Roman generic models to the Hebrew text. Lowth’s resulting genres, or what he called the “species” of biblical poetry, were shaped both by the parallels he discovered between classical and Hebrew traditions, and by the small and large aberrations he faced in his process of translation. The article focuses on the characterization of a poetic form that never existed: the ancient Hebrew ode. Although, in this case, Lowth fails in his biblical scholarship, his Hebrew ode demonstrates the spirit of his creative project. By fitting Hebrew poetry to neoclassical models, Lowth subtly transformed neoclassical categories and possibilities, opening up new imaginative expanses within the lyrical mode and preparing the way for a more flexible, complex, and emotionally sophisticated Romantic lyric.

Translational Discontent: Robert Alter’s Tanakh , Daniel Matt’s Zohar , and the Scepter of Translation in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible and Daniel Matt’s The Zohar: Pritzker Edition mark a new stage in the continued evolution of the reception, interpretation, and translation of Jewish Scriptures. This article offers a conceptual framework for reflecting on the translation of Jewish scriptures in the twenty-first century, positing the translations by Alter and Matt as the foremost achievements in this field. The proposed framework draws on Freud’s notion of personal discontent in order to reflect on the reasoning, aspirations, and drives underlying the decision to embark on translation projects such as those undertaken by Alter and Matt in the first place.

Jeffrey Pulse. Figuring Resurrection: Joseph as a Death and Resurrection Figure in the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism

Jeffrey Pulse. <i>Figuring Resurrection: Joseph as a Death and Resurrection Figure in the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism</i>

Robert Alter's New Translation of the Hebrew Bible: An Assessment for Translators

In the introduction to his new translation of the Hebrew Bible, Robert Alter is quite explicit about the task he set himself: “The present translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bible in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary English.” Alter explains this in more detail in the introduction and in his book, The Art of Bible Translation, with explicit criticisms of other English translations. In this paper I will explore Alter's own norms for translation and how he has applied them, paying special attention to parallel syntax, language level, repetition, wordplay, Hebrew and English word order, poetry in prose, rhythm, names of God, textual criticism, chapter division, and textual structure, as well as what Bible translators can learn from Alter’s translation.

Robert Alter’s Translation of the Hebrew Bible: A Response to Lénart de Regt

This paper responds to Lénart de Regt's discussion (in this issue of TBT) of Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Bible. First is a summary of de Regt's discussion of Alter's translation. The second part presents the driving points of Alter's norms for reading the Bible as literature. The third part discusses the application of Alter's norms to translation and ends with a few examples and observations.

The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source

The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source

The Holy Book Which Is a Book

Abstract For more than two centuries, publishers and critics have tried to design an English Bible that would be easy to hold and a delight to read. This essay tracks various attempts to design such a bible, beginning with early nineteenth-century printings that sought to declutter the bible page and to break the thick book into multiple volumes, before turning to early calls to revise the Authorized Version (a.k.a. the King James Version) so that it would be easier for modern audiences to comprehend. The latter half of the essay examines two recent efforts to reform the English Bible physically and textually, Adam Lewis Greene’s Bibliotheca (2016) and Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (2018), arguing that each makes important strides toward producing the long-awaited “readable Bible.”

Book Review: Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation

Book Review: Robert Alter, <i>The Art of Bible Translation</i>

Cormac McCarthy in Context

Cormac McCarthy in Context

Holocaust Memory and Restorative Justice: Competition, Friction, and Convergences

Holocaust Memory and Restorative JusticeCompetition, Friction, and Convergences Björn Krondorfer (bio) Keywords Holocaust, transitional justice, memory, restorative justice, Jewish and Christian responses, trauma, uniqueness, reconciliation, politics of difference, national entrenchment, dialogical engagement In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Michael Rothberg argues for the value of overlapping and intersecting Holocaust memory with other collective memories. He traces how the history and memory of the Holocaust have been evoked, adopted, and employed as a way of making sense of political struggles and group identity in various colonial and postcolonial contexts. For Rothberg, the concept of multidirectional memory recognizes that remembrances of cataclysmic events do not cancel each other out but are venues through which meaningful moral and political decisions can be formed in the present. In a time when momentous collective (and often traumatic) memories flow freely and rapidly across national borders, they are often pitted against each other competitively. But, Rothberg argues, the idea of "competitive memory" must be abandoned since it assumes a public sphere that cannot hold "different collective memories"—as if it were "a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources."1 While Rothberg's study largely focuses on how the Holocaust has figured as a political, cultural, and moral trope in negotiating the meaning of the Algerian War (in which Algeria eventually won independence from France), it transcends any specific cultural location. His frame is global in perspective and rests on an ethical foundation that pursues the "notion of transnational, comparative justice."2 Consequently, Rothberg disagrees with claims that view the Holocaust (or any other calamity, for that matter) as a unique and incomparable event. [End Page 373] In this essay, I use Rothberg's critical intervention—multidirectional memory—and its application as a "shared moral and political project"3 to probe the dichotomizing language of uniqueness/universality when applied to memorable events of great harm. By eschewing competition among collective memories, I seek new pathways of justice-oriented, dialogical engagement. I do so by tracing, on the one hand, the rhetorical weight of Holocaust uniqueness claims (particularly in American and occasionally German contexts) and, on the other, the universalist claims of transitional justice as they evolved after 1945. I will read uniqueness claims through and against a transitional justice genealogy, eventually arriving at the concept of restorative justice. I will argue that neither uniqueness nor universality is a helpful mechanism for thwarting the entrenchment of partisan political memory. I propose, instead, to speak of "singularity" with respect to the gravity of each injurious history and collective memory. Creating a framework that averts competition among narratives of suffering will be "inevitably dialogical," as Rothberg suggests.4 It supplants the competitive deployment of political memory with an ethical vision of engaged relationality. UNIVERSAL, UNIQUE, SINGULAR: PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATIONS "The question of the uniqueness and universality of the Holocaust," writes Michael Berenbaum, "is being considered with increasing frequency not only in scholarly quarters with a focus on historiography but also in communities throughout the United States where Holocaust memorials and commemorative services raise a consciousness of the Holocaust."5 Berenbaum wrote those lines before the 1993 opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, at a time when Jewish American and Israeli scholars were debating the place of the Holocaust along the oppositional poles of uniqueness and universality. In his 1981 essay, Berenbaum briefly reviewed the positions of some of the major participants in the debate, including Yehuda Bauer, Lucy Dawidowicz, Emil Fackenheim, Elie Wiesel, Richard Rubenstein, Ismar Schorsch, Eliezer Berkovits, Robert Alter, and Henry Feingold. Berenbaum, who had been a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, sided with a restrained embrace of the uniqueness claim, arguing that neither the perceived threat of a so-called Americanization of the [End Page 374] Holocaust nor the attempt to compare Jewish victims to other victim groups or other genocides would diminish the historical uniqueness for the Jewish community. To Americanize the Holocaust, he suggested, is just a way of telling "the story . . . in such a way that it resonates" with an American audience; to compare the Holocaust to other events, he continued, is no cause for fear since they are "analogous...

Review

Review

Reading Genesis: A Literary and Theological Commentary

Reading Genesis: A Literary and Theological Commentary

The Art of Bible Translation. By Robert Alter

The Art of Bible Translation. By Robert Alter

The Trope of the Mirror in Contemporary Experimental Literature

The Trope of the Mirror in Contemporary Experimental Literature Saloua Karoui-Elounelli Ever since M. H. Abrams used the metaphor of the mirror in his theorizing of mimetic literature, the trope has been invested in communicating opposed tendencies of literary creativity and largely antithetical conceptions of the literary art. Indeed, from Abrams’ seminal work The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), and up to the theoretical rethinking of mimetic and anti-mimetic literary narrative, in works such as Narcissistic Narrative (1980) by Linda Hutcheon, Silverless Mirrors (1983) by Charles Caramello, or also Postmodernist Fiction (1987) by Brian McHale, the trope of reflection and mirroring have abounded in the critical discourse. Whether in the theoretical delineations of mimetic fiction or avant-gardist metafiction, such tropes have often prompted a questioning of literature’s relation to aesthetic and cultural paradigms, which, in turn, has directed scholarly research to a vital reconsideration of the notion of experimentation. Indeed, the persistent debate, and even controversy, in the discourse of literary criticism, around the idea of the experimental is partly grounded in the divergent approaches to the terms of the relationship that connects literary creativity to an apprehension of its poetics, as well as to the politics of culture. In the context of the modern and postmodern literary production, the debate around the experimental vein in literature has often acknowledged the relevance of the issue of literary self-reflexivity which is not assumed to be a (post)modern invention, but rather to have gained prominence since James Joyce’s Finnegans’ Wake (1939) and Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim Two Birds (1939). The argument that the thematic and aesthetic significance of self-reflexivity in the poetics of experimental literature induces a rethinking of the two concepts of mimesis and representation has contributed a great deal to the critical interest in scrutinizing the metadiscursive, and often self-ironic, quality of such literature. In the context of the present issue, the term “experimental” is conceived of in line with what Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale posit when they argue that “all literary experiments share is their commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself” [End Page v] (1). Experimentation and avant-gardism are both conceived of as interrelated qualities of the kind of literary texts that question and demystify their own formal constructs as much as they reinvigorate a critique and a skeptical outlook of cultural and ideological discourses alike. The radicalism of such critique and / or skepticism ranges from the aestheticism of literary self-irony—with an invocation of a sense of crisis with regard to the notions of creativity and representation that the verbal art can neither trust nor do without—to the engagement with the politics of representation and the unmasking of the ideological (and, possibly, hegemonic) implications of literary conventions and systems.1 The rhetorical turn in the discourse of literary criticism and in the critical dimension of self-reflexive literature, whereby the trope of the mirror becomes connotative of a metacritical, metadiscursive move, allows the trope to mediate a critical rethinking of literature’s representational processes. As Caramello puts it: “texts have turned their reflecting planes inward, towards one another, and they have skewed these planes even further by incorporating a metalinguistic discourse on that turning” (48). Far from being mere pointless solipsism, or expressing a predilection for aestheticism, the inward move of literary self-reflexive texts tends to be associated with a continuous interest in raising key conceptual questions that hinge upon the paradoxes of the creative process, or pinpoint, in the very play of self-reflexivity, issues of cultural encounter, traumatic experience, or the act of resistance. In fact, the essays gathered in the present volume / issue go each in either one of those directions, arguing either for the substantial metacritical thematics in metafictional narratives (Elounelli, Dridi) or for the significance of cultural and historiographic critique (Bueher, Souissi, Bouhlila, and Fekir). Critical works on self-reflexive fiction in the scene of experimental postmodern and postcolonial literary writing were mostly published in the late 1970s (Robert Alter, Robert Scholes) and the 1980s (Linda Hutcheon, Margaret Rose, Patricia...

Review

Review

Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation

Robert Alter, <i>The Art of Bible Translation</i>

Genesis by the Numbers: A Reassessment of the Years of the Patriarchs, Beginning with the Joseph Story

AbstractDo the numbers of years in Genesis add up? Biblical scholars have learned to attend to the art of biblical narrative. Is there also an art of biblical numbers? If so, could its rediscovery lead to a better understanding of the contours of the biblical text, and its complex meanings, as well as its reception history prior to the Enlightenment? This article’s provisional answer to these questions is yes. It looks at two key numbers associated with the Joseph Story: a span of twenty-two years, which a variety of readers calculate as the time that Joseph lived away from his family in Egypt; and a double span of seventeen years, which the Bible suggests is the length of time that Joseph lived under his father’s protection in Canaan, and that Jacob in turn lived under his son’s care in Egypt. The study finds that, since Spinoza, modern assessments of these numbers have been constrained by a strongly linear view of time, as may be seen in the work of Robert Alter, among many others. It criticizes linear time as reductive insofar as it flattens the numbers of Genesis into chronologies and timelines. It also draws attention to an aspect of figural time, which it describes as symmetrically folded time, to help characterize the non-linear, isotropic way that numbers seem to behave in the Bible and in the Bible’s pre-modern reception. The findings about figural time in the Joseph Story raise significant questions about the compatibility of narrative, literary-critical, and theological approaches to the time-denominated numbers of Genesis.

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

A Father’s Lament Doubly Received: Robert Alter, Nigel Butterley, and David’s Lament for Absalom

Abstract David’s lament in 2 Sam 18:33, on hearing of Absalom’s death, has been an extremely popular text for composers to set to music. The traditional English language settings utilise a text that begins ‘When David Heard’, though these words are absent from the 1611 King James Bible, and the 1560 Geneva bible, and no other extant text supports this rendering. However, a cluster of some thirteen settings of the text in the seventeenth century which appropriated this translation established somewhat of a ‘tradition.’ Settings through to the twenty-first century have continued to utilise this text, with one prominent composer assuming that the textual tradition came from the King James Bible. However, Australian composer Nigel Butterley has produced a setting which makes use of Robert Alter’s translation of the David story. Rather than focus on the single verse, Butterley redacts four chapters of Alter’s translation into a comprehensible narrative, punctuated by the refrain ‘Beni Avshalom. Beni, veni Avshalom’ which appears three times, and the full lament which occurs on the last two occasions. This paper examines Butterley’s appropriation of Alter’s translation, and the musical vocabulary which is employed in conveying this deeply moving text. Interested as it is in issues of interpretation, it reveals Butterley as a both sensitive and powerful reader of scripture.