The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary

Written by Robert Alter

Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

A landmark event: the complete Hebrew Bible in the award-winning translation that delivers the stunning literary power of the original. A masterpiece of deep learning and fine sensibility, Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Bible, now complete, reanimates one of the formative works of our culture. Capturing its brilliantly compact poetry and finely wrought, purposeful prose, Alter renews the Old Testament as a source of literary power and spiritual inspiration. From the family frictions of Genesis and King David's flawed humanity to the serene wisdom of Psalms and Job's incendiary questioning of God's ways, these magnificent works of world literature resonate with a startling immediacy. Featuring Alter's generous commentary, which quietly alerts readers to the literary and historical dimensions of the text, this is the definitive edition of the Hebrew Bible

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781980046158

Reviews for The Hebrew Bible

[bradjersak · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Best translation of the Hebrew Scriptures available. Very well narrated!

[raizel_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've only seen the first volume, The Five Books of Moses - Torah, and only read the many introductions and a large part of Deuteronomy and related texts, but I've found the translation and commentaries and explanations very informative. I'm happy to see that, while he disapproves of most modern translations, he's OK with Everett Fox's. I do have one concern, and that is not with book, but with the Common Knowledge aspect of LibraryThing! Characters and Events have been listed that are not in The Hebrew Bible. Just as I would not include, say, Abraham smashing the idols in his father's store, because, while the Midrash (Genesis Rabbah) notes this important event in Abraham's life, it is not mentioned in the actual text of the Torah, similarly, no one should include Jesus or Timothy and use as a proof text a reference from the New Testament. I must confess I'm not sure how to handle this: do I delete names and events I don't think are relevant? This is quite different from wondering if I add a middle name to a character who appears in several books.

[arosoff-513117 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reviewing the Bible itself is somewhat superfluous, so this is really a review of the translation.

I've always been interested in Bible translation and the differences between translations. I can read the Bible in Hebrew, but I'm not fluent, so if I want detail and nuance, I need the English. That's aside from the historical and literary importance of various translations. My go-to for years has been the JPS translation. (The KJV has literary value for its influence on the English language, but not as a working translation for understanding source text.) I prefer it to the Artscroll, which is prone to ideological bias.

Alter's translation makes use of the Septuagint as well as the Masoretic text and he uses historical evidence outside of traditional Jewish sources to determine meaning, which will be controversial for some Jews. However, his commentary is extremely informative regarding his choices and his reasoning, and was enlightening. He does consider himself to be *the* expert--there's a touch of arrogance--but his opinions are interesting.

His style strikes a good balance. It has an appropriate feel of formality, unlike some contemporary Christian translations, but is not archaic, and he seeks to preserve a sense of the Hebrew--for example, by preserving the conjunctions and long sequences of verbs that are used for narrative flow.

I've read the Bible before, though I don't think I've ever managed to read it all in order rather than one book at a time, but I enjoyed the re-read. I would have liked to have seen it paired with the Hebrew source for easy comparison, but given the length of the text as is, that would be quite the set.

[lyzadanger · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

 I'm prematurely rating this book, as I am only just finishing Genesis—the first of the five eponymous books here. But I can already tell this work has finally broken my "bible barrier": I have been trying to read the bible from a literary-history perspective for most of my life, and until now have never gotten a toehold. Alter's translation reminds me of what Seamus Heaney did for Beowulf. Here the language is brilliant, not a single passage done sloppily, a fantastic melding of heightened tone (archaic and lofty) with readable English. It is a text one can grapple with. And his commentary! Granted, I feel as if I should, for due diligence, also compare notes with another translator, another commentator, but I feel like Alter is my teacher through all of this, neither hyper-religious nor disdainful of the faith and metaphors contained. This book will sit with pride in my ancient/classical reference section and will get picked up often.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Two reviews down in twenty minutes! Hooray! Now ... what the fuck do I do about the bible.""People have been asking themselves that for a long time, sweetheart." Hurr hur.And, me reading Genesis to my niece: "And the human was with his woman in the garden, and they were naked, and they were not ashamed."Lu: "And they aaaalllll lived happily ever after."That makes me smile. This book breeds stories, and gets itself into everything, and contains so much of its own past and future it gives me a headache. And reading about how to build a tabernac' for 200 pages compunds that headache. And yet other parts of it are just so endless, sprawling out like forty years in the desert, sure, but a desert wshere you will be sustained by manna and encounter every so many interesting things.Lots of this is boring and evil. Lots of it brings tears to your eyes it's so beautiful and we're so fragile. Alter's treatment is magnificent. I can't get into the details here--to have the proper time and space for that would require either a research chair or a conversion experience. But I will tell you that Genesis is a bill(marill)ion Silmarillions (Simlarillioni?) and if I manage to fucking squeeze out some kids one day I will think about the patriarchs every day and make sure I only bless them both at the same time. And Exodus has every other quest narrative beat all hollow because of the way Moses isn't just fighting Behemoth or founding Jerusalem, he's protecting his people from the mother of all abusive husband/father/pimp/strongmen the whole way.And just when YHWH does something so vicious and contemptible that it makes you use a ridiculous word like "pimp" to describe him, he turns into a little fluffy cloud to guide you, and you're thinking back on your imaginary Christian childhood and didn't-happen loss of nonexistent faith, and yearning swallows you up and you want to go outside the bounds of the encampment for two weeks until you're clean again. But no, YHWH's a bad dude. Maybe he was great shits in the lost and forgotten old days, when he was doing the feats in the Book of the Battles of YHWH, but that book was lost and something happened to the LORD to turn him sour, and not only will he destroy you for just anything, sometimes even if you're keeping his covenant, not only does he do all the Old Testament boasting we came for and know how to let slide, but he also--no, okay, you know what turned me against him was Leviticus 26:29, "You shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters,” and more than that, the following discussion, where he dwells lovingly on how the trauma of this experience will break our minds and turn us into un-men. God doesn't just want to see us punished; he wants to see us unmade, which I guess makes sense for a maker. But I would have liked to know him when he was El-Shaddai or Elyon or those other old-timey names, an optimistic if rash demiurge on the move.When there was something other than fear. Because that's all this book has in terms of promise: If you keep the covenant, maybe you'll find a place in the sun on the winning team and at worst you can eat other people's field-leavings until those Godless yet inexplicably mighty Babylonians cut you down or sweep you off. We think of the monotheists as future-oriented, and sure there's the promise of Israel, but there's also such a sense of sadness and loss that I think Ezra their compiler, whoever he was or were, must have felt very keenly as he was compiling this book of Law for the Persian emperor the wirght of the already sad and broken and bloodied old world. If Deuteronomy is basically a fascist rally-speech, we may consider that this fascism is different from the barbarism of a new world; it's duct-tape around the collective psyche of people who've seen and done awful things. (There's more than one type of fascism.)So who can judge? The Judges don't come till later. But from any human perspective there's so much to keen and wail about here, and even Moses, the hero of these books if anyone is, fucks it up in the end, orders the needless slaughter of the Moabites and the Midianites (his own wife's people! Zipporah is my favourite biblical name, incidentally), making his character arc more Darth Vader than any of those guys I alluded to earlier. And if an ugly racist theocracy seems like an acceptabe price to pay for a land of milk and honey, well, I guess those were different times and I won't judge you too harshly. But I buy milk and honey at the store. (Our god is convenient access to cosumer products, it is well known.) Also they killed Balaam, who is my pet Bible character now and such a deft little character sketch.So how do you rate these guys? Genesis is world-was-young cosmology, Exodus is Hollywood epic, Leviticus is boring and has God showing his true dark face, Numbers is not a guy you'd wanna meet in a dark alley, and Deuteronomy gives you the greatest-hits version and a lot more exhortations to bloodshed (although God does try to redeem himself with the best dis in the book, about how you will be sold as slaves, "and there will be no buyer."I'm focusing too much on the morality. Vicious and evil, but the kind that you can just about stomach coming as it does from a herd of pastoralists just hoping to eat and live to see 30. (As for you modern literalists, I suspect we're enemies; at the very least, I wonder what happened in your life to make you like this.) There are some small gestures toward a kind of rudimentary justice, and protection for the marginalized, but not much. (It's funny too how Scripture so often brings out the secular positivist in the most anti–absolute truth among us.) I do think it's cute how they don't ever want to cook animals with their young, although Alter figures that's more of a fear of muddying binaries, which I can believe.As literature? Many glories here. I look back fondly on the books that were full of narrative. The language comes alive when you force yourself to read slooow, like with your finger on each word, or aloud. It enchanted my niece supra immediately and I hope and don't hope she becomes a charismatic preacher one day.There are a lot of parts that drag too, of course, but they're not really "literature"--more religious instruction manuals, useful for Levites and other people who aren't me.And as scholarship, and as anthropology, it's superlative. Plush footnotes you could disappear into.So how do I grade this pretty hate machine? I stop trying to apply modern categories to it. I think about what an enjoyable desert journey it's been, and how it feels to taste one of our greatest beginnings. I feel grateful for this draught of learning, to Alter, Moses, my friend Dan Chaikin, who led our group read, but sorry, man, not God. Can't go there.As an accomplishment, Alter's book deserves a regular five stars, and the original Torah of course deserves one of those five starses that are actually six stars because without it we wouldn't even be us or rate things in stars but probably spend nights erecting giant umbrellas to back them out because we think they're how the Living Tribunal sees our misdeeds and the Mighty Ain promised he'd protect us if we obseved the sacrament of the umbrella. Or whatever. Anyway, I recommend this to anyone, or at least you should just spend a bit of time with a Bible story that intrugues you and learn more about what happened before and after it and the people who made it. But I don't give it five stars, because I don't trust its motives and I guess Satan something something.

[jamescostello_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Genesis is great and Alter makes it greater with his scholarly and poetic translation. The footnotes take up more page space than the text, and every note is outstanding. This should be in every library alongside Homer and Ovid.

[bibliophial · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alter shows his subtle, resourceful, nuanced depth-reading skills here in a suggestive translation of the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures. Bible as literature!