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Alter - Book of psalms - a translation with commentary

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Alter Book of psalms - a translation with commentary

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One of Newsweeks Best Books of the Year and winner of the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement.A cornerstone of the scriptural canon, the Book of Psalms has been a source of solace and joy for countless readers over millennia. This timeless poetry is beautifully wrought by a scholar whose translation of the Five Books of Moses was hailed as a godsend by Seamus Heaney and a masterpiece by Robert Fagles. Alters The Book of Psalms captures the simplicity, the physicality, and the coiled rhythmic power of the Hebrew, restoring the remarkable eloquence of these ancient poems. His learned and insightful commentary illuminates the obscurities of the text.

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CONTENTS
More praise for
THE BOOK OF PSALMS

One of the best outcomes of Alters translation is a sense of an abrupt, muscular intensity; he restores to the Psalms a kind of strangeness that emanates from an encounter with a culture we recognize yet is distinctly alien to us, far removed in time and frame of mind.

Mark Doty, Los Angeles Times

Alter stands out for his combination of scholarly accuracy with a poets ear.

Angels on Earth

Every reader of this translation will be led towards fresh thoughts and will discover favorites that inspire the imagination in new, rich ways.

Walter Brueggemann, Christian Century

In his compelling and swiftly moving translations, Alter has thrust the reader back to the place where the monotheistic religions were born out of even more ancient beginnings.

Jewish Book World

Alter is amazingly successful. [His] translations of many famous passages are primordially spare and dignified, the work of a scholar with an unusually sure ear for verse.

Christopher Tayler, Saturday Guardian

Alters translationoffers both clarity and fidelity to the meaning, meter, and nuances of the original Hebrew.

Library Journal

The achievement of this new translation is to present the Book of Psalms as a wonder of ancient literature.

The Tablet

A marvelous translation, unsurpassed in its accuracy and poetry. The publication of The Book of Psalms is a watershed event, and from the seeds Alter has sown we all reap in joy.

Joel M. Hoffman, Jerusalem Post

Alters Psalms is a heavy book, because of the large, easily readable printand the generous commentary. It is not the sort of book one would normally schlep to the hospital for distraction, but it proved the only one in those months that could absorb meas a poet, a scholar, and most of all, as a person in spiritual doubt and great need.

Karen Alkalay-Gut, Jerusalem Report

ALSO BY ROBERT ALTER

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

GENESIS : A TRANSLATION WITH 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

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

PARTIAL MAGIC: THE NOVEL AS SELF-CONSCIOUS GENRE

MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE

AFTER THE TRADITION

FIELDING AND THE NATURE OF THE NOVEL

ROGUES PROGRESS: STUDIES IN THE PICARESQUE NOVEL

THE BOOK OF PSALMS

A Translation with Commentary

ROBERT ALTER

Picture 1

W. W. Norton & Company NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright 2007 by Robert Alter

All rights reserved
First published as a Norton 2009

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bible. O.T. Psalms. English. Alter. 2007.
The book of Psalms: a translation with commentary / Robert Alter.
1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-33704-4
1. Bible. O.T. PsalmsCommentaries. I. Alter, Robert. II. Title.
BS1424.A48 2007
223'.2077dc22

2007013485

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

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, W1T 3QT

IN MEMORY OF TOM ROSENMEYER

(19202007)
staunch friend, scrupulous reader,
exemplary guide to antiquity

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T HE draft of this book was carefully scrutinized by two finely discerning readers of poetry, Carol Cosman and Michael Andr Bernstein. They labored heroically to prevent me from doing undue violence to the English language in my pursuit of fidelity to the Hebrew, and in most instances they succeeded. The eminent classicist T. G. Rosenmeyer read the revised draft and raised helpful questions pertaining to rigor and consistency. As with my translation of The Five Books of Moses , I have palpably benefited from the historically informed and philologically acute suggestions of my colleague in biblical studies, Ron Hendel. Steve Forman, my editor at W. W. Norton for more than a decade, raised a variety of helpful questions about the notes and the translation. Editorial assistance for this project was paid for through funds from the Class of 1937 Chair in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Janet Livingstone once again was patient and efficient in deciphering my handwriting (a reflection of my continuing attachment to archaic things) and converting it into orderly electronic text. I would like to thank Rabbi Israel Stein for catching many errors of reference and typographical errors in the hardcover edition and also for his intelligent interpretative suggestions. Beyond all these, I feel a kind of gratitude to the ancient Hebrew poets who have left us these wonderful poems that have been a joy for me to live with and attempt to convey in English.

INTRODUCTION

I. HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

T HROUGH the ages, Psalms has been the most urgently, personally present of all the books of the Bible in the lives of many readers. Both Jewish and Christian tradition made it part of the daily and weekly liturgy. Untold numbers have repeatedly turned to Psalms for encouragement and comfort in moments of crisis or despair. The inner world of major Western writers from Augustine, Judah Halevi, and George Herbert to Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan was inflected by the reading of Psalms. But for all the power of these Hebrew poems to speak with great immediacy in many tongues to readers of different eras, they are in their origins intricately rooted in an ancient Near Eastern world that goes back to the late Bronze Age (16001200 BCE ) and that in certain respects is quite alien to modern people.

The prose narratives of the Hebrew Bible, despite the sundry links with the surrounding literatures that scholarship has identified, are formally innovative in striking ways. Indeed, it is arguable that at least as a set of techniques and conventions, they constitute the most original literary creation of the biblical writers. Psalms, on the other hand, or psalm-like cultic hymns and celebrations of the gods, were common in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and in Syro-Canaanite literature. We know this literature chiefly through the trove of texts found at the site of Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Syria, dating roughly from 1400 to 1200 BCE several centuries earlier than the main body of biblical writings. As previously unknown texts in the various ancient Near Eastern languages have been unearthed and deciphered over the past century, it has become clear that the psalmists not only adopted the formal system of poetry (about which more is said later) from the antecedent literature of the region but also tapped their predecessors for verbal formulas, imagery, elements of mythology, and even entire sequences of lines of poetry. Some scholars have gone so far as to claim that a few psalms are essentially Hebrew translations of pagan poems, though a comparison with the proposed originals suggests rather that what the psalmists did was to adapt, briefly cite, or even polemically transform the polytheistic poems, which is, after all, what poets everywhere do with their predecessorsboth building on them and emphatically making something new out of them.

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