The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary

Ok. I only gave this 4 stars because of the inability to navigate with this Bible.The translation, commentary, and just everything the author did has been above reproach. This is the standard others try and mimic. But there’s quite a few out there while lacking in content make up for it by having a navigation system that is quite useable.As you know, this tome is not inexpensive. So you would kinda think the publisher could match the author in its presentation. Just ain’t happening.As an example, let’s say you wanted to jump into the story of Issac in Bereishit (Genesis). This basically gets kicked off in chapter 26-28 of Genesis. So you open this on your Kindle or iPad and find Genesis (Bereishit) and find a table of contents that lists the Tanach (Old Testament) and click on our desired book. Well, that’s it folks. No way to drill down further than that. If we wanted to get to Chapter 28 we are required to start at chapter 1 and it’s commentary and then scroll through every chapter and verse until we find our chapter 28.It is so frustrating to have the Gold Standard in content but you can’t move around in it.And I guess, since I’m on a roll and venting at the publisher I might as well bring this up. This is one of the finest Tanach’s out there. And yet there is no way to navigate to the weekly Parashiyot. The Parsha is what is read by most Jewish and Messianic folks every week. This allows us to read thru the Torah in a year. The Torah are sometimes called The Books of Moses and a list of other names. But it is the first 5 books in your bibles.Most ALL publishers that have products that are usually bought and read by the Christians, the Jewish, and the folks of Islam put a very simple list of the Parsha and it’s accompanying chapter and verse. You can then click on the name or another reference pointing to our needed book, chapter and verse. But once again our publisher has failed to do anything about making this not only a pleasure to read and study…….But impossible to move easily around in.So once again our publisher (W. W. Norton) has failed the public in producing a quality Bible that is impossible to navigate around in.P.S…….I waited for over a year to post this because I didn’t want it to be an emotional knee-jerk reaction. So I waited and felt that prospective buyers should know this tidbit. And if the publisher would read these reviews they would see they have work to do………ShalomUPDATE: I have since I wrote this review found that there is a Table of Contents and it will drill down to the chapter. If this has been that way and I never found or saw it, I still owe the publisher an apology. And if it’s been a more recent change then I want to say thank you. So, I apologize for the rough review and say thank you for providing the Table of Contents

This translation is aimed at the general public rather than a specialized scholarly audience. In the introduction, Robert Alter addresses some of the same shortfalls that I have noticed over the years in the initial training in translation that I received at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (in the early 1980s). I was taught that translation is simply a matter of transferring Meaning X from Language A to Language B. Oh, how far this is from being the whole picture!On p. xv Alter says, "The unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for _explaining_ the Bible instead of representing it in another language, and in the most egregious instances this amounts to explaining away the Bible." One way I could express the problem is that the Hebrew Bible is a cornucopia, but English translations routinely present it as nothing more than a collection of one kind of food. It may be apples, it may be oranges, it may be white bread--but it's all the same and not a complete source of nourishment for the soul.Alter goes on at length about the importance of retaining Hebrew parataxis in English translations. This means keeping all the "ands" of Hebrew as "ands" in English. Modern translations tend to prefer changing a lot of these "ands" to subordinating conjunctions such as "because" and "when." In so doing, they destroy the structure of the Hebrew and erase the rhythm of the text. Biblical Hebrew does have subordinating conjuctions, but it chooses to use them rarely. It greatly prefers the age-old Semitic and Sumerian (pre-Semitic) device of stringing clauses together on the same syntactic level.For example, as Alter points out on pp. xxii-xxiv, the encounter of Abraham's servant with Rebekah at the well in Genesis 24 is full of "ands," but these are mostly eliminated in favor of subordination in modern translations. The result? "This tends to obscure what the Hebrew highlights, which is that she is doing something quite extraordinary. Rebekah at the well presents one of the rare biblical instances of the performance of an act of 'Homeric' heroism.... The chain of verbs tightly linked by all the 'and's' does an admirable job in conveying this sense of the young woman's hurling herself with prodigious speed into the sequence of required actions.... The parallel syntax and the barrage of 'and's,' far from being the reflex of a 'primitive' language, are as artfully effective in furthering the ends of the narrative as any device one could find in a sophisticated modern novelist" (pp. xxiii-xxiv).Alter makes the important point, "There is no good reason to render biblical Hebrew as contemporary English, either lexically or syntactically" (p. xxvii). In this translation, produced over a period of more than 20 years, Alter presents the Hebrew Bible in an English that preserves, as much as possible, the style and rhythm of the original text. He has provided copious notes with many kinds of information helpful to general readers as well as to scholars.