Robert Alter - The Book of Psalms

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.

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.