Alter - The Hebrew Bible: a translation with commentary. Volume 1, The five books of Moses: Torah

Publisher's Notice: Superscript note numbers in the ebook correspond to verse numbers. Only verse numbers with corresponding footnotes will be linked.

Table of Contents

• • 1 Samuel
  • 2 Samuel
• • 1 Kings
  • 2 Kings
• • Hosea
  • Joel
  • Amos
  • Obadiah
  • Micah
  • Nahum
  • Habakkuk
  • Zephaniah
  • Haggai
  • Zechariah
  • Malachi
• • • Ezra
    • Nehemiah
  • • 1 Chronicles
    • 2 Chronicles

Strong As Death Is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel: A Translation with Commentary

Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings: A Translation with Commentary

The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary

Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary

Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel

The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary

Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture

The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel

Genesis: Translation and Commentary

Hebrew and Modernity

The World of Biblical Literature

Necessary Angels:Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem

The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age

The Literary Guide to the Bible

(coeditor with Frank Kermode)

The Invention of Hebrew Prose:Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism

The Art of Biblical Poetry

Motives for Fiction

The Art of Biblical Narrative

A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal

Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis

Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre

Modern Hebrew Literature

After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing

Fielding and the Nature of the Novel

Rogues Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel

VOLUME 1

Detail of Tsadi Pe from The Creation, ca. 1978-1980, a series of ten tapestries designed by Mordecai Ardon (1896-1922). The tapestries, executed at the Georges Goldstein Atelier, Jerusalem, were donated by Ardon to Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem, where they are permanently exhibited. Mordecai Ardon / Courtesy Ardon Estate / Photo: Courtesy Shaare Zedeck Medical Center, Jerusalem.

VOLUME 1

THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES

TORAH

A TRANSLATION WITH COMMENTARY

ROBERT ALTER

Copyright 2019 by Robert Alter

Portions previously published in Genesis: Translation and Commentary by Robert Alter, Copyright 1996 by Robert Alter; The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel by Robert Alter, Copyright 1999 by Robert Alter; The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter, Copyright 2004 by Robert Alter; The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter, Copyright 2007 by Robert Alter; The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter, Copyright 2010 by Robert Alter; Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter, Copyright 2013 by Robert Alter; Strong as Death Is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter, Copyright 2015 by Robert Alter.

All rights reserved

First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

Book design by JAM Design

Production manager: Julia Druskin

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

ISBN: 978-0-393-29249-7

ISBN: 978-0-393-29250-3 (ebk.)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

For Jonas, Judah, Amos, and, especially, Michael, dear friends now gone whose presence in my life made a difference in all this.

About the Author

Robert Alters translation of the Hebrew Bible, the magnificent capstone to a lifetime of distinguished scholarly work, has won the PEN Center Literary Award for Translation and the Koret Jewish Book Award. His immense achievements in scholarship ranging from the eighteenth-century European novel to contemporary Hebrew and American literature earned Alter the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Alter is Emeritus Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

W hy, after so many English versions, a new translation of the Hebrew Bible? There is, as I shall explain in detail, something seriously wrong with all the familiar English translations, traditional and recent, of the Hebrew Bible. Broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew. The present translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bibleand, above all, biblical narrative prosein 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. I shall presently give a more specific account of the kind of English I have aimed for and of the features of the Hebrew that have prompted my choices, but I think it will be helpful for me to say something first about why English translations of the Bible have been problematicmore problematic, perhaps, than most readers may realize.