








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 2.2 (2008) 213–222] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.213 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

AcAdemic RoundtAble

Robert Alter and the Resistance to Theory

DAVID RIchtER

Program in English 
CUNY Graduate Center

Before there was Robert Alter the biblical translator and commentator, there 
was Robert Alter the literary critic, who published with Basic Books a pair of 
immensely stimulating and evocative monographs, The Art of Biblical Nar-
rative (1981, hereafter ABN) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985, hereafter 
ABP), along with a third book, The World of Biblical Literature (1992, hereaf-
ter WBL), a fascinating collection of largely occasional essays that extend his 
discussion of narrative and poetry and go on to critique specific works and 
methods of biblical scholarship and literary criticism, detailing the implica-
tions from his own perspective of views that differ from his. The translations, 
all published by W.W. Norton, begin in 1996 with his Genesis, and now 
include the Alter version of the book of Samuel (The David Story, 1999), the 
entire Pentateuch (The Five Books of Moses, 2004), and most recently The Book 
of Psalms (2007).

Everywhere the commentaries are richly detailed, whether original with  
Alter or carefully and generously attributed both to post-biblical commentar-
ies (the talmud and the Midrash, along with medieval annotators such as 
Ibn Ezra, Rashi, Nachmanides, and David Kimchi) and to more contempo-
rary scholars and critics writing in English or modern hebrew. In addition 
to enhancing our sense of the text’s meaning, Alter uses his below-the-line 
notes to discuss, in ways that will be appreciated by the general reader as well 
as the scholar, some of the textual and translational cruxes that complicate 
the smooth rendering of the Masoretic hebrew text into stately contempo-
rary English. Alter’s translation-commentaries are so judicious and extensive 
that teachers of Bible as Lit courses like me may feel they have little to add.  
Going through his annotations to one of my favorite episodes in Genesis, 
cain’s slaying of his brother Abel, the only verse Alter skips over where I tend 
to pause is 4:13, where cain’s reply to the LORD’s judgment, “gadol ‘avoni 
minso’ ” can mean either that cain’s “sin” or his “punishment” is greater than 



214 Robert Alter and the Resistance to Theory

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

he can bear, an ambiguity that suggests that cain may be the first guilt-ridden 
penitent as well as the first murderer.1 Alter evidently had less fun annotat-
ing the legal and ritual sections of the Pentateuch than the narratives and 
poetry, as indicated by the volume of commentary on different passages, but 
nowhere does he give short shrift to his texts. Even when Alter endorses a 
particular interpretation of some notorious crux (e.g. the vexed question of 
precisely what Moses and Aaron did at Meribah to be denied entry into the 
promised land, Numbers 20:12), he presents other solutions and arguments 
and leaves the reader with the sense of an open question. Alter’s great gift is a 
critical “negative capability”: he is willing to believe not only that he has not 
found the solution to all difficulties, but that the biblical authors may in fact 
not have meant for every narrative episode to be transparently clear.

Whatever giddy financial prospects may have induced Alter to undertake 
these arduous translations-with-commentary, they derive programmatically 
from his 1990 review of the first three volumes of The JPS Torah Commen-
tary, reprinted in WBL. There Alter elucidates the internecine warfare within 
that multi-volume work, where the learned commentators (Nahum Sarna 
on Genesis, Baruch Levine on Leviticus, and Jacob Milgrom on Numbers)  
implicitly argue against one another’s views of Jewish history and law, while 
all three commentators attack, on the basis of contemporary philological 
study, the 1962 JPS translation of the Pentateuch that was the occasion for 
bringing them together (WBL 136–137). In contrast, Alter’s The Five Books of 
Moses has the virtue of consistency and coherence: translation and the com-
mentary are mutually illuminating. My own interests being primarily theory 
of narrative rather than hebrew philology, what follows will concern prima-
rily the critical commentary to the first two translations and their relation to 
Alter’s biblical narratology as he presents it in ABN and WBL. And it is at this 
level, what we might call that of the theoretical crux, that we sometimes find 
incoherence and inconsistency in Alter’s readings and commentaries.

Sources and Redactors
From the very first page of his critical explication of the Bible, Alter has 
been leery of, or perhaps merely impatient with, the scholarly obsession with 
source criticism. Alter introduces his analysis of Genesis 38 (ABN, chapter 1) 
with a glance at Speiser’s commentary in the Anchor Genesis, which consigns 
the Judah/tamar chapter to limbo as a mere interruption to the Joseph story, 
which had begun with chapter 37 and is complete, really, only with Joseph’s 
death in Genesis 50. For Speiser, chapter 38 is a fragment of pure J-narrative, 
etiologically explaining the birth of Peretz, the remote ancestor of King David, 



Richter 215

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

intruded into a longer narrative about Joseph consisting primarily of two 
sources, J and E, edited together after the fall of the Northern Kingdom of 
Israel. Alter’s literary exegesis, by contrast, is an elaborate demonstration that, 
far from being an intrusion, the Judah/tamar story links up with the Joseph 
story on both verbal and thematic levels, and, more important, contributes 
to our ethical and psychological understanding of why it should be Judah, 
rather than any of the other brothers, who is capable of pleading for the life 
and liberty of Benjamin as he does in Genesis 44.

It isn’t exactly that Alter rejects the “Documentary hypothesis” as such (as 
many conservative and almost all Orthodox Jews would), although he does 
claim that “efforts to distinguish between J and E on stylistic grounds have 
been quite unconvincing.” Rather he contends that academic scholars have 
now gone far beyond the basic notion with which he would concur, that 
the book of Genesis is a composite of three documents (J, E, and P), and 
have begun to see temporal layers within each of these traditions (a J1, J2, 
J3, etc.), and have bickered with what he terms “diminishing returns” about 
where each source and each layer within the sources starts and leaves off (Gen-
esis xli). In place of this uninformative hairsplitting, Alter propounded an  
exegesis where “the weight of literary interest falls upon the activity of the 
final redactor” (ABN 20, quoting Joel Rosenberg).2

That would be a coherent position, except that, just one page earlier,  
Alter had attacked the analyses of Menahem Perry and Meir Sternberg, which 
operate on the reader’s interaction with the redacted text and ignore any  
hypothetical sources, arguing that “they tend to write about biblical narrative 
as though it were a unitary production like a modern novel that is entirely 
conceived and executed by a single independent writer who supervises his 
original work from first draft to page proofs. They turn their backs, in other 
words, on what historical scholarship has taught us about the specific condi-
tions of development of the biblical text and its frequently composite nature” 
(ABN 19). Accusing Perry and Sternberg of treating biblical narrative like a 
modern novel is not merely unfair, but ironic in the light of Alter’s own prac-
tice as a commentator on the narrative of Genesis and Samuel, whose success 
owes so much to his ability to illuminate the terse and subtle hints by which 
the biblical narrator portrays the complex personalities behind the rise to 
power and wealth of Jacob and David, the slow establishment of their family 
and line, and finally their pitiable degeneration into passivity, weakness, and 
senility, which in their different ways form the story arcs for both patriarchs.

Similarly, in his introduction to his translation and commentary on the 
Book of Samuel, Alter contends that “much of the richness and complexity 



216 Robert Alter and the Resistance to Theory

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

of the story is lost by those who imagine this book as a stringing together 
of virtually independent sources” (The David Story x). These hypothetical 
sources include an early “Ark Narrative” ending around 1 Samuel 7; a set of 
variously oriented traditions (some pro-Saul, most pro-David) concerning 
the accession of Saul and his adoption of and then conflict with the youthful 
David, ending with the establishment of the Davidic kingdom at 2 Samuel 
5:12; traditions about the wars of David; and finally a Succession Narrative, 
elsewhere known as the court history of David (2 Samuel 11–20 plus 1 
Kings 1–2). Alter is willing to grant the idea of an originary Ark Narrative, so 
long as one is not thereby blinded to how skillfully it has been integrated into 
the David story as a whole, in particular to the parallels Alter sees between the 
aged Eli waiting in the gate of Shiloh for news of the war with the Philistines 
(1 Samuel 4) and the aged David waiting in the gate of Mahanaim for news 
of the civil war with Absalom (2 Samuel 18). But that is as far as Alter is 
willing to go: “The argument for an independent Succession Narrative, long 
embraced by scholarly consensus, is shakier. [Leonhard] Rost’s contention 
that it is stylistically distinct from the preceding text is unconvincing, and his 
notions of style are extremely vague” (The David Story xi). And Alter ridicules 
the idea that there are “Saulide” and “Davidide” strands knitted together in 
the narrative of 1 Samuel.

This would sound like an argument for a pure redaction criticism, except 
that the ultimate redactor of Samuel was the editor of the Deuteronomistic 
history (the five books of the hebrew Bible from Deuteronomy through 
Kings), and it is precisely this set of editorial contributions that Alter both 
minimizes and wants nothing to do with.3 Alter in fact wants us to separate 
out the Deuteronomistic moralizing in David’s last words to Solomon—that 
he “keep what the LORD your God enjoins, walk in his ways, keep his 
statutes, his commandments, and his dictates and his admonitions, as it 
is written in the teaching of Moses…”—from the practical content, urging 
Solomon to execute on his accession both Joab, David’s general and nephew, 
and Shimei ben Gera, an opponent in the civil war whose life David had 
promised to spare. Alter argues in the introduction (The David Story xiii) 
and all over again in a lengthy note to 1 Kings 2:3-4 (374) that the phraseol-
ogy quoted is taken direct from Deuteronomy and that no one else in the 
David story talks in such terms. Alter sees this as an editorial intrusion, with 
David’s “real” last words found in verses 5-9. Alter seems to have lost track 
of the fact that the David story is not factual but textual, not reported but 
constructed, and that we experience no reality apart from the reality-effect 
generated by the narrative.4 Another problem that arises, once one begins 



Richter 217

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

questioning the narrative, asking whether dialogue in a private moment is 
genuinely historical, is deciding where to stop. If the first part of David’s last 
words are Deuteronomistic moralizing, the second part may be considered 
Solomonic propaganda, laying on David the guilt for the execution of Joab, a 
powerful man whom Solomon had ample reason to hate and fear, since Joab 
had supported the accession of Solomon’s elder half-brother Adonijah.

here, as with Genesis, we see a preference for redaction criticism over source 
criticism but with fatal reservations that render Alter’s position incoherent. 
I don’t doubt that the Deuteronomist had a hand in 1 Kings 2:3-4, but my 
own feeling, reading the redaction we have, is that David’s last words are even 
more horrifying in their combination of hypocritical moralizing with brutal 
raison d’état. But I can say this partly because I take far more seriously than 
Alter does the dreadful things we learn about David and his reign in what is 
sometimes called the Samuel colophon (2 Samuel 21–24), which Alter calls 
“stylistically distinct” from the rest, an unusual claim coming from him, and 
one which, turning the tables, I myself find less than convincing.5

Twice Told Tales

A similar incoherence operates wherever Alter deals with the biblical narra-
tive elements that are often called “doublets”: episodes that seem to happen 
more than once in slightly different ways, as in Genesis 20 and 26, where 
Abraham and Isaac each tells King Abimelech that his wife—Sarah and  
Rebekah, respectively—is actually his sister, or as in Genesis 27 and 28, where 
Isaac transmits the Abrahamic blessing to Jacob twice, the first time by mis-
take, deceived by Jacob’s masquerade as his elder brother Esau, and the sec-
ond time with full intention. Doublets are usually explained in terms of the 
composite text: Jacob’s deception belongs to the J document, about which 
P, from which the start of chapter 28 derives, knows nothing. But why does 
the redactor of these documents allow implicit contradictions to stand? Some 
biblical scholars argue that the redactors included as much as possible of each 
of their original documents. But Alter ridicules the idea that “the redactors” 
of Genesis or Samuel “were in the grip of a kind of manic tribal compulsion, 
driven again and again to include units of traditional material that made no 
connective sense” (ABN 20). Alter’s lengthy note on the double blessing of 
Jacob in Genesis argues that the “tension” between chapters 27 and 28 is not 
necessarily a contradiction, that the two blessings agree with Isaac’s character, 
accommodating what he cannot change, and that the Priestly writers have 
artfully combined two strands of tradition (Genesis 147). This accords with 



218 Robert Alter and the Resistance to Theory

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

Alter’s chapter on “composite Artistry” (ABN 131–154), which contends 
more generally that doublets can be complementary rather than contradic-
tory, explicating a complex truth by seeing it from different directions. Thus 
the creation story of Genesis 1:1–2:3 evokes God as the transcendent order-
ing principle and man as made in God’s image, while the complementary 
creation story of Genesis 2:4ff evokes God as an immanent principle of moral 
choice and man as a flawed moral and social being (ABN 141–147).

But of course there are more intransigent doublets whose contradictions 
can be harmonized thematically but which fail the test of story logic. David 
may be both the warrior king and na‘im z’mirot Yisroel, the sweet singer of 
Israel, but, if David first meets Saul on the battlefield just before slaying 
Goliath (1 Samuel 17:31), then he cannot also have first met Saul earlier 
on, as a musician brought in to assuage the king’s melancholy who becomes 
his armor-bearer (16:21). Alter suggests at one place that the solution lies in 
understanding that doublets function as alternatives, like conflicting sources 
in contemporary historiography. “We may still not fully understand what 
would have been perceived as a real contradiction by an intelligent he-
brew writer of the early Iron Age, so that apparently conflicting versions of 
the same event set side by side, far from troubling their original audience, 
may have sometimes been perfectly justified in a kind of logic we no longer  
apprehend” (ABN 20). This notion of a paleo-postmodern version of spatial 
form sounds like fun, to me at least, but the harmonizing maneuvers of the 
Samuel redactor suggest that in fact temporal contradictions were perceived 
then precisely as we perceive them now. The redactor’s solution was to make 
the positions of shepherd, court musician, and armor-bearer into part-time 
jobs. “And David would go back and forth from Saul’s side to tend his father’s 
flock in Bethlehem,” we are told at 1 Samuel 17:15, and later at 18:2, the 
redactor brings the Bethlehem job to an end: “And Saul took [David] on that 
day and would not let him go back to his father’s house” (The David Story 
103, 112).

The really problematic crux comes at 1 Samuel 17:55, when Saul seems not 
to know who David is, even after meeting him twice for the first time. Alter 
rejects pathological solutions like amnesia, and returns in his commentary 
to the argument that for the audience and for the redactor the contradiction 
was “inconsequential” because thematically justified (The David Story, 111). 
he who dares this far might dare further, though, by more closely reading the 
form of the question Saul chooses: it is, “Whose son is the lad?” (ben mi zeh 
ha-na‘ar), repeated twice more at verses 56 and 58. Given that Saul already 
knows who David is, his insistent question about the identity of David’s  



Richter 219

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

father may be taken as expressing a wish to become the father of David, which 
he accomplishes, in the only way he can do so retroactively, by marrying one 
of his daughters to David.6 That desire is of course highly ambivalent, as one 
might expect from a man welcoming his already-anointed successor into the 
royal family. Saul first offers his elder daughter Merab, then reneges and gives 
her to Adriel, then offers his younger daughter Michal, who becomes David’s 
first wife until she too is taken away after David’s defection from Saul’s court 
and given to Palti ben Laish. Nevertheless, Saul several times thereafter refers 
to David as “my son” (1 Samuel 24:16, 26:17, 26:25) although David recip-
rocates by calling Saul “my father” only once, at 24:11.

Against Theory
Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) may have founded the practice of analyz-
ing the biblical text on an equal footing with secular narrative and poetic 
literature, but Robert Alter has surely been one of its earliest and greatest 
exponents. It was reading Alter’s ABN that sparked my own fascination with 
the Bible, which has taken me down paths I could not have foreseen. And 
his readings of individual passages, whether I find his arguments compelling, 
as I usually do, are always phrased so as to bring the text to life in ways I 
can only envy. I have been concerned here with inconsistencies and incoher-
encies in Alter’s theoretical position with respect to the biblical text,7 but I 
cannot explain them. Alter may be ambivalent about source studies because 
the fragments that the source scholars leave us with are not by anyone’s defi-
nition literature, as the redacted text is. But at the same time he may feel a 
need to acknowledge the importance of source studies because this research 
project anchors the biblical text in history, dispersing the cloudy fantasies of 
orthodox fundamentalists who want to believe that Moses wrote the torah 
at YhWh’s dictation on Sinai or that David wrote all the Psalms, including 
ones that refer to an era over three hundred years after his death. That is only 
a guess, though, and perhaps a better guess is that Alter would wonder why 
I would suspect him of anything so out of character as having a theoretical 
position, since to Alter theory in most of its manifestations is anathema.

The last essay in WBL, “Scripture and culture,” first published in 1985 at 
the height of the “culture wars,” attacks feminists, Marxists, deconstruction-
ists in general, and for some reason Jonathan culler in particular as “a prod-
uct of the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] of the 1960s who has set-
tled in comfortably as a successful member of the academy at an Ivy League 
institution, carrying the banner of deconstruction as his own equivalent of 
the QUEStION AUthORItY bumper sticker, and of late channeling the 



220 Robert Alter and the Resistance to Theory

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

revolutionary impulse of his early years into a strident version of feminism” 
(WBL 198–199). Alter sees in academic culture “the tendency…to deny the 
privileged status and the very distinctiveness of literary discourse, putting the 
plays of Shakespeare on a level with menus, graffiti, and bureaucratic direc-
tives” (202). With the literary canon gone, Alter goes on, the Bible, as the 
canonical text par excellence, is clearly in danger as well, since it will keep its 
authority only with fundamentalists who will use it to shore up their bigoted 
prejudices, while losing traction with liberal humanists for whom it used to 
be the bulwark of a civilizing culture.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, the culture wars seem to have quieted 
down to occasional sniper fire, and it may be possible to separate the bad 
manners of some of the exponents of theory who offended Alter from the 
trenchant questions they provoked. The Bible is one of the great wellsprings 
of what feminists decry as patriarchy, but many feminists are now turning to 
the Bible, perhaps brushing it against the grain as Mieke Bal does in Lethal 
Love, in order to understand some of the voices and silences that emerge from 
the women who are there represented. Marx may have called religion the opi-
ate of the people, but Marxists too have interesting questions to ask of the 
Bible, about the class structure of ancient Israel, for example, and how that 
structure is represented and critiqued in texts by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Sec-
ond Isaiah. And even deconstruction, Alter’s particular “abomination of the 
desolation,” may have something to teach us about the knotted and gnarled 
quality of biblical passages that may seem to encourage, and then punish, 
suspicious readings.8 Doing theory can be advancing a radical social program, 
but it can also be nothing more radical than asking yourself hard questions 
about the readings and interpretations that make a text live for you, and your 
assumptions about texts, about reading, about history, that underlie those 
interpretations. Greatly as I admire Alter’s readings, I think there is no danger 
in it for him if he were also to ask himself some of those hard questions.

Notes

1. There are only four widely scattered passages in the tanach where ‘avon seems 
to mean “punishment” for a civil crime or a sin against religious law, and several 
hundred where it clearly means “wrongdoing” or “sin.”

2. Alter cites “Meanings, Morals and Mysteries: Literary Approaches to the torah,” 
Response 9:2 (Summer 1975): 67–94. This Joel Rosenberg is the scholarly author 
of King and Kin: Political Allegory in the Hebrew Bible (Bloomington: Indiana 
University Press, 1986), not to be confused with the neoconservative evangelical 
Joel c. Rosenberg.



Richter 221

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

3. Alter “strenuously disagrees” with Robert Polzin, who finds the final editor’s hand 
manifested all through the book of Samuel (The David Story xii).

4. A differently constructed reality-effect entirely favorable to David is found in 
1 chronicles 11–29, which leaves out of the narrative or reworks all of David’s 
morally questionable deeds.

5. See Richter (2005). Alter does not explain what he means by “stylistically dis-
tinct,” but I hope he is not merely pointing to the fact that the Samuel colophon 
contains lists and psalms, which are found elsewhere in the Deuteronomistic 
history, even elsewhere in Samuel.

6. Saul’s insistent question “Mi” (who?) may be connected as a form of wishful 
thinking to the biblical idiom “Mi yiten li”—literally, “Who will give me,” but 
best translated as the optative,“Would that I were….”

7. A third issue I have not space to take up is Alter’s position on whether the nar-
rative portions of the Bible are best read as prose fiction or as history. Alter opts 
for fiction (ABN 24), whereas Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative 
(1985), opts for history, more consistently and defensibly, I think, because the 
biblical text usually makes truth-claims, whether or not we take them seriously.

8. See, for example, my own analysis of the readerly paradoxes inherent in 1 Samuel 
15 (Richter 2005, 289), which, I should add, is not in any strict sense decon-
struction.

References

Alter, Robert
1981 The Art of Biblical Narrative.  New York: Basic Books.
1985 The Art of Biblical Poetry.  New York: Basic Books.
1992 The World of Biblical Literature.  New York: Basic Books.
1996 Genesis: Translation and Commentary.  New York: Norton.
1999 The David Story: A Translation with Commentary. New York: Norton.
2004 The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York: Nor-

ton.
2007 The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary. New York: Norton.

Bal, Mieke
1987 Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Blooming-

ton: Indiana University Press.

Richter, David
2005 Genre, Repetition, temporal Ordering: Some Aspects of Biblical Narra-

tology. In The Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phe-
lan and Peter Rabinowitz, 285–298. New York and London: Blackwell. 
doi:10.1002/9780470996935.ch19

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9780470996935.ch19


222 Robert Alter and the Resistance to Theory

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

Sternberg, Meir
1985 The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of 

Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.


