The first thought of any reviewer, when faced with this volume, must be one of profound humility. Only a biblical scholar is properly able to form a judgment on such an undertaking. Here is an American scholar, Robert Alter, who has translated from the Hebrew the first five books of the Old Testament. That itself would be ambition enough for any writer, and how is the rest of the world supposed to analyse, interpret or criticise the achievement? We may look at some of his distinguished predecessors, and draw parallels with the work of William Tyndale or that corporate body who created the Authorised Version. But those of us without any knowledge of the Hebrew language are not able to come to any conclusion about its closeness to the words of the first writers. All we can do is test it as a working model of modern English prose, and see how far it continues the tradition of biblical translation in our language.
In that respect it succeeds. But it succeeds on its own terms. Consider the radiant opening of the Authorised Version, in that passage from Genesis that is perhaps the most famous in the entire Bible: “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. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
Professor Alter has rendered the passage thus: “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.”
It is, of course, difficult to be wholly dispassionate about the familiar words that are deeply ingrained in the religious imagination of the West; they have become a mantra or spell, a ritual invocation of sublimity infinitely more resonant than the opening words of the Aeneid or the Iliad (to name two works that have also been endlessly translated as sacred books of the culture). But we may note the differences in Alter’s version. The tone he adopts is immediately more informal, and closer to narrative than to incantation. The centuries of the novel have intervened between the two versions. (It is perhaps worth noting that, in the course of a long and brilliant career, Alter has written books on the novel in general and Henry Fielding in particular.)
Then there is the use of the word “welter”. Despite its relative unfamiliarity it is accurate and appropriate here. It means a state of chaos, but it can also mean a body of turbulent water, so that it precisely conveys the meaning required of it in this context. It may not be a word that is readily used in conversational speech, but that is the point. The Bible was not necessarily written in the language of people waiting at a bus stop; it is a book of inspired utterance, and it is proper that Alter has recognised the importance of striving beyond the demotic. There is nothing worse than a religious translation that reaches down to its intended audience with modernisms and colloquialisms; for one thing, modernisms and colloquialisms date so quickly.
In the same context we may note Alter’s use of alliteration; one of the consistent aspects of his translation. In that sense, too, he can be seen to breathe the spirit of the original. “Welter” and “waste”, for example, are explained in a footnote as an attempt to reproduce the Hebrew tohu wabohu. The Hebrew writer or writers have used internal rhyme to reinforce the meaning of the words, and the conscientious translator must find some means of conveying the same rhetorical or poetic effect. From the 18th century onwards there was a body of opinion that took the Bible to be a species of poetry rather than the transcription of literal truth. It was a way of maintaining its authority while placing in limbo such delicate matters as its apparently faulty chronology. The Authorised Version maintained that poetry largely by use of cadence and what even at the time was considered to be a deliberately “old-fashioned” species of phrasing. Alter has achieved a similar effect by the use of alliteration, which, in the English tradition, is the oldest available form of poetic speech. By so doing he has, in fact, connected his Bible with the Anglo-Saxon translation of the late 7th century and, perhaps without realising that he was doing so, maintained a tradition that has lasted for almost 1,500 years. And that is one of the pertinent facts about the Bible itself: it has become as much a record of English as of Christian or Hebraic culture. It is a token of the living language that is renewed and celebrated by each generation. The history of the Bible in English is a history of English literature itself. The Anglo-Saxon scribe Aelfric described the Bible as “gecyndbok”, or the book of beginnings, and in the story of its successive translations we can also chart the course of the language itself.
Alter’s translation is a necessary one, however, since for the first time in this century (by his own account) his English follows the “semantic nuances” and “lively orchestration of literary effects” that characterise the Hebrew original. He tells us, for example, that nahal in Hebrew does not mean brook or stream, as it is commonly translated, but a flow of water that appears and disappears in desert wastes according to the season. This may be a “nuance”, but it is of profound consequence in the creation of simile or metaphor. Alter also maintains the sequential flow and cadence of the Hebrew, with clause following clause in an integrated and grammatical sequence. This may sound like a dry process, but it is the best possible way of conveying what might be called the music of the Bible — that unforced and unstrained poetry of fact and event.
This volume has itself a unique status in the history of the world. It is known in the different religious traditions as the Pentateuch and the Torah, and is accompanied by the injunction from God that “if Israel accepts the Torah, it will continue to exist” with the provision that, if it rejects it, it will descend into chaos and night. So the five texts collected here — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — are essential to the preservation of the society itself. As such they have a moral and even political authority greater than that of any other book. To translate them is, literally, to meddle with words of power. It is a task to be entertained only with fear and trembling.
And so the final book, Deuteronomy, ends with an epic blessing and celebration. As Alter has it: “But no prophet again arose in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, with all the signs and portents which the LORD sent him to do in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and with all the strong hand and with all the great fear that Moses did before the eyes of all Israel.” It is a long sentence, but it is worth noticing the simplicity of its diction and, in particular, the use of monosyllables. Alter is once again associating his version of the text with the most enduring tradition of biblical translation in English where the Anglo-Saxon element, or what we might call without exaggeration the language of the land, has priority over Latinate complexities. It is the impetus behind the Wycliffe Bible, sometimes known as the Lollard Bible, and the Tyndale Bible; the Word of God should be known to “simple men ”, in the phrase of Wycliffe, and does not need to be mediated through priest or church.
In this sense the Hebrew language veers close to the English language in its concreteness and innate practicality. Alter notes for example that the Hebrew zera denotes seed, both in the vegetable world and in the human body where it means semen; only by indirection can it be translated as “progeny” or “offspring”. Yet modern translators have preferred these generalised euphemisms as a way of representing the great original.
Hebrew is a flexible language, like English, that can accommodate a range of varying effects. So we may note in Alter’s translation, too, the repetition of certain key words such as “all” in the passage quoted from Deuteronomy. This is not redundancy but, rather, amplification of effect. The idea is to set up a mood of rapt delivery or incantation so that the English itself has the authority of prophetic utterance.
The literary status of these books has been the subject of endless debate. Their origins are obscure and their chronology tentative, although the best guess seems to be that the four principal “strands” were written between the 8th and 6th centuries BC before being brought together as single narrative in the late 6th century BC. But what kind of narrative is it? It is comprised of individual stories, cultic regulations, patriarchal tales, lists of tribes, historical accounts and so many other varieties of prose that it seems almost to resist definition.
It is in a sense The Book, the source and origin of all the narratives of the world. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and their temptation by the serpent, is one of the shaping myths of the human imagination. The account of the creation of the world may have been called into question by the self-appointed prophets of more recent centuries, but who does not secretly still retain it as a possible and pertinent model of the universe? The myth is perpetual because it corresponds very deeply to some need or belief of humankind.
A word about the footnotes is necessary. They take up much of Alter’s text — more than half the space of the volume, itself of more than a thousand pages, is devoted to them — but they are a necessary part of his design. They are “notes” of a technical nature, concerned with the minutiae of translation, but they also make up a running cultural commentary that includes matters of history, scholarship, theology and literature. They are a gateway into the biblical imagination, and can, in fact, be read quite separately from the text. Alter’s account of the finding of the child Moses, for example, alludes to parallels in Hittite and Egyptian literature and finds material of some interest in psychoanalytical speculation. The episode of the child placed in a wicker ark and hidden among reeds is for him an example of intense and fruitful biblical symbolism, anticipating and recapitulating other aspects of the biblical narrrative. For Alter it inaugurates “a quasi-epic narrative of global scope”. The notes are of similar range. There are entries on Greek mythology and Mesopotamian culture, medieval commentatary and modern philology. It is in a true sense the achievement of a lifetime of scholarship.
If this book is to be welcomed as a vital part of literary culture rather than religious culture, that says a great deal about the current rate of secularisation. But it is not less to be celebrated. Alter has achieved the significant feat of refreshing English by taking it back to one of its sources of strength; he is not unworthy to follow in the distinguished line of Wycliffe, Tyndale and the “King James” committee as one who has made the language live again as an instrument of revelation and power.
The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter (W. W. Norton, £34; offer £27.20 plus £2.25 p&p; call 0870 1608080)
What's more ...
- The Bible: Authorised King James Version (Oxford University Press)
- Teach Yourself Biblical Hebrew by R. K. Harrison
- www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk Doorway to biblical studies
- The Pocket Canons Series II: a boxed set of biblical texts, with introductions by Peter Ackroyd, Joanna Trollope and others (currently out of print, but available on www.amazon.com)
