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[Expositions 2.2 (2008) 231–238] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.231 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Robert Alter and the Art of Bible Translation

EVErEtt Fox

Jewish Studies Program 
Clark University

The success of a translation, in my view, is defined by the extent to which it 
is able to move an audience closer to its source text. The integrity of a trans-
lation, on the other hand, lies in the faithfulness with which the translator 
adheres to his or her particular principles. Since these principles—especially 
in the case of English translations of the Bible—are usually spelled out, seri-
ous readers are able to gauge just what a translator has accomplished.

In robert Alter’s case, he has made his goal clear in the articulate introduc-
tions to his Bible translations. In one passage, he characterizes his work as 
“an experiment in re-presenting the Bible—and, above all, biblical narrative 
prose—in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances 
and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same 
time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary English” (Alter 2004, xvi). 
Alter has long demonstrated that he is a perceptive reader of the Hebrew text, 
and his explanatory notes are often illuminating in their discussion of the 
text’s rhetoric, style, and tone. But literary criticism is not the same as transla-
tion. to put it another way, being a perceptive reader is not the same as being 
an accomplished performer in print. I have tried on numerous occasions to 
sit down with Alter’s translations and read them aloud, and to date I rarely 
experience them as echoes of the Hebrew text. My specific objections fall into 
several related categories. I will begin by examining narrative, focusing on The 
Five Books of Moses and The David Story.

Alter frequently speaks of “cadence” in both languages, which raises the 
question of how he hears the text. From the layout in these books, he appears 
to perceive it in fairly long blocs of material, occasionally broken up into 
paragraphs, not unlike narrative texts in English. Here is an example from the 
opening pages of Genesis (1:7-10), within the creation story:

And God made the vault and it divided the water beneath the vault from the 
water above the vault, and so it was. And God called the vault Heavens, and 
it was evening and it was morning, second day. And God said, “Let the waters 
under the heavens be gathered in one place so that the dry land will appear,” 
and so it was. And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering of waters 



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He called Seas, and God saw that it was good. (Alter 2004, 17–18)

In contrast to what Alter has done here, the Hebrew text of Genesis 1 is 
aurally quite dramatic. The “days” of creation divide up both logically and 
sonically, and reinforce a central point in this chapter, namely, that the crea-
tive activity of God brings order out of chaos. Some kind of break scheme 
that permits the hearer to perceive the embedded orderliness (here it should 
occur after “second day”) is therefore imperative, which Alter’s run-on Eng-
lish text ignores. In addition, the periodic refrains—Alter’s “And God said,” 
“and so it was,” “and God saw that it was good,” “and it was evening and it 
was morning”—punctuate the heard text, and should ideally be indicated in 
a printed form that facilitates reading aloud, as below:

God made the dome
and separated the waters that were below the dome from the waters that 

were above the dome.
God called the dome The Heavens.
There was setting, there was dawning: second day.
God said:
Let the waters under the heavens be gathered to one place,
and let the dry land be seen!
It was so.
God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called

Seas.
God saw that it was good. (Fox 1995, revised])

A second feature of Alter’s translational style is his constant use of “and” 
(Hebrew waw) to reflect the paratactic, co-ordinate style of biblical Hebrew. 
This was introduced into English by the first great Bible translator in the 
language, William tyndale, who used it judiciously, but was fully expanded 
in the famous rhythms of the King James Version. As Alter notes, virtually 
all modern English translations opt for a more hypotactic paradigm, mak-
ing use of subordinate clauses to provide a more congenial English style. 
Alter’s decision to restore parataxis in a contemporary translation rests on 
two arguments, which he develops at length especially in the “Introduction” 
to The Five Books of Moses (2004): first, that this style reflects biblical think-
ing, where it is left to the hearer/reader to establish the precise relationship 
between actions; and second, that one hears the “ands” in the text as they are 
read. Excising them in translation, he observes, “produces—certainly to my 
ear—an abrupt, awkward effect in the sound pattern of the language, or to 
put it more strictly, a kind of narrative arrhythmia” (Alter 2004, xxvii).

Although I agree that parataxis is an important feature of biblical narrative 



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style,1 I do question how it may best be put into practice in translation. As 
Alter is well aware, and occasionally demonstrates in these books, the Hebrew 
particle waw frequently carries other, subtler meanings beyond “and,” includ-
ing “but,” “then,” “while,” and “now” (the latter in the sense of introducing 
a new fact or background into the narrative). It can also be an element in 
the construction known as hendiadys, where two nouns are joined to pro-
duce a meaning equivalent to adjective + noun. (Alter acknowledges this, for  
instance, in Gen. 23:4, where he renders a key phrase as “a sojourning settler,” 
and points out in a note that the literal Hebrew is “sojourner and settler” 
[Alter 2004, 113]). Additionally, one may question whether, in fact, an audi-
ence always hears the waw, which is typically the first element of consecutive 
verbs in biblical Hebrew. Is the common wayyomer (which begins virtually 
all biblical conversations) to be rendered every time as, “And he said,” often 
implying an afterthought or something added, or rather simply as, “He said”? 
Given these considerations, retaining “and” in the majority of cases is often to 
misconstrue the text. While Alter’s usage succeeds in conveying a sense of for-
ward movement and hurriedness in a number of places (e.g., his citation of 
Gen. 24:16-20 in his introduction to that book2), in other places, indeed, in 
many others, it internally connects passages in ways that sound muddled and 
even reminiscent of a small child’s way of telling a story—surely not what the 
biblical writers had in mind. Here are two examples from The David Story:

And Israel went out in battle against the Philistines, and they encamped by 
Eben-ezer, while the Philistines were encamped at Aphek. And the Philistines 
drew up their lines against Israel, and the battle forces were deployed, and 
Israel was routed by the Philistines, and they struck down in the lines about 
four thousand men. (1 Sam. 4:1-2; see Alter 1999, 21)

In Alter’s reading, the second sentence’s four “ands” tie the action together, 
but they hardly qualify as any kind of narrative style in English, however well-
meant may be the intention to reflect the “consecutive” nature of the Hebrew. 
The second example:

And David’s time to die drew near, and he charged Solomon his son, saying: 
“I am going on the way of all the earth. And you must be strong, and be a 
man....you yourself know what Joab son of Zeruiah did to me.... And you 
must act in your wisdom, and do not let his gray head go down in peace to 
Sheol.” (I Kings 2:2, 5-6; see Alter 1999, 374–376)

Here the translation has the effect of distorting the emotional content of 
David’s final advice to Solomon. The Hebrew which it represents by “And 
you must be strong” and “And you must act” would be better served by the 



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use of “So,” since Hebrew waw often signifies consequence and not merely 
sequence. A general approach to addressing this dilemma will thus involve 
the careful use of punctuation and of substitute words such as “then” or 
“but,” to preserve both the rhythmic balance and the connective aspect of 
the text.3 But passages such as the ones I have brought here appear constantly 
throughout Alter’s work and, to my ear, produce a flattened English text that 
often lacks the cadence he seeks to produce.

For a body of work that claims to produce readable English, I find lapses 
in Alter’s diction that are frequent enough to be jarring. Here is a sampling: 
“I am about to bring tomorrow locust in all your territory” (Ex. 10:5 [Alter 
2004, 366]); “Should a person offend errantly” (Lev. 4:2 [Alter 2004, 556]); 
“you shall not lie, no man to his fellow” (Lev. 19:11 [Alter 2004, 626]); “you 
shall put upon your garment an indigo twist” (Num. 15:38 [Alter 2004, 
759–760]); “he should lift up the fire-pans from the midst of the burnt-out 
zone” (Num. 17:1 [Alter 2004, 768]); “all the house of Israel keened for 
Aaron thirty days” (Num. 20:29 [Alter 2004, 786]); and lastly, describing 
Moses at his death, “His eye had not grown bleary and his sap had not fled” 
(Deut. 34:7 [Alter 2004, 1058–1059]). While one can justify some of these 
choices on philological grounds, English usage and style are casualties in most 
of them.

There are periodic inconsistencies in Alter’s usage, despite his desire to point 
out how the repeation of certain Hebrew terms is almost always significant 
in the text. For example, Ex. 13:21-22 uses a single Hebrew word, ‘ammud, 
which Alter inexplicably renders as “pillar...pillar... column...pillar” (Alter 
2004, 389). More serious are some of his structural inconsistencies relating 
to word order, in cases such as Ex. 4:10, where Moses rejects God’s call to 
lead the people out of Egypt. Alter’s “no man of words am I, not at any time 
in the past nor now since You have spoken to Your servant, for I am heavy-
mouthed and heavy-tongued” (Alter 2004, 327) does not echo the Hebrew, 
in which anokhi, “I” or “I myself,” ends both clauses. I would suggest instead 
a rendering which also speaks to the text’s strong rhythms:

No man of words am I,
not from yesterday, not from day-before, not (even) from when you first

spoke to your servant;
rather, heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue am I! (Fox 1995, 277, revised)

Similarly, in a shorter phrase, Alter represents the Egyptian magicians’  
expression of wonder at the Plagues in Ex. 8:15, etzba’ elohim hu, with the 
Yoda-like “God’s finger it is” (Alter 2004, 354), despite the fact that biblical 
Hebrew really has no regular way to say, “It is God’s finger” other than this 



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somewhat emphatic construction. Perhaps a simple exclamation point would 
do better than an awkward inversion.

These types of translation practices, which are repeated throughout Alter’s 
translations of biblical narratives, produce a text which, despite its rootedness 
in an often sensitive understanding of the Hebrew, does not adequately fol-
low through as performance.

With the Psalms, all translators enter a different realm. Not only is the book 
of Psalms weighty in its length and variety, and not only does it contain dif-
ficult and often obscure language, but it also illuminates the human situation 
in ways that are unforgettably rich and profound. The translator therefore has 
a double task: to reflect the character and conceptual world of the Hebrew, 
and at the same time to create sonorities that speak directly to human emo-
tions. No book in the Bible has been part of people’s lives as much as Psalms, 
whether in congregational life or private devotion. A translation must reflect 
this personal tone, or else it cannot be deemed a success.

For a book aimed at a general audience, Alter’s Psalms volume is certainly 
impressive in its sheer scope. As with his previous translation work, his com-
mentary is detailed and helpful. He has done us a service in emphasizing 
the concreteness of the Psalms’ language, eliminating such well-known but 
textually misguided terms as “soul” and “salvation.”4 In the light of these and 
other contributions, and given his skills as a close reader of the Bible’s poetry, 
Alter might have been expected to produce something new and striking in 
the translation itself. Yet, as in the case of narrative, I find the results disap-
pointing. Some of the same shortcomings that I noted above—over-reliance 
on “and” and inconsistencies, odd turns of phrase, and lapses in rhythm—
also make their appearance in his version of Psalms.

Questions arise from the very beginning. Alter renders 1:6 with, “For the 
LorD embraces the way of the righteous, / and the way of the wicked is 
lost” (Alter 2007, 4). Here “and,” once again, does not convey the force of 
the Hebrew, which would be better echoed by the more commonly-used 
“but” or even “while.” The entire poem, after all, is built on  contrasting the 
behavior and fate of the righteous and the wicked (the same exact situation 
and structure are found in Psalm 145:20). Similarly, when Psalm 78:67-68 
describes how God treats the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel, Alter 
translates “Yet He rejected the tent of Joseph, / and the tribe of Ephraim he 
did not choose. / And He chose the tribe of Judah…” (Alter 2007, 279–280). 
I am at a loss to discern his reason for eschewing “but” in the last sentence, 
which appears in the climactic lines of one of the Bible’s longest self-con-
tained poems about the lessons to be learned from the past. The illustrations 



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given here are symptomatic of the entire book.
I also find that inelegancies crop up far too frequently. A walk through the 

book reveals such phrases as “LorD, my God, in You I sheltered” (7:2 [Alter 
2007, 18]); “let me hymn the LorD’s name, Most High” (7:18 [Alter 2007, 
21]); “I am impassioned of You” (18:2 [Alter 2007, 52]); “my tongue was 
annealed to my jaw” (22:16 [Alter 2007, 73]); “And now, what I expect, o 
Master, / my hope is in You” (39:8 [Alter 2007, 139]); and “our crimes but 
You atone” (65:4 [Alter 2007, 221]). If Alter had set out to stretch English to 
unusual limits in order to mimic the Hebrew, these might be understandable, 
or at least justifiable. But his choices of wording at times contradict his goal 
of being English-friendly; instead what we find is  vocabulary that is strained 
and unnecessarily refined. For example, do we really need “anneal” for a com-
mon Hebrew verb that means “cling, stick to”? Surely a better solution could 
have been found. In the process, the all-important emotive power of the 
Psalms, which does surface at points in his translation, is measurably reduced. 
Could this version be used devotionally? I’m not quite sure.

A final area for consideration is the Bible’s use of syntactical inversion as 
a rhetorical device of emphasis, which Alter discusses  in his introduction 
to Genesis. Now it is one thing to note a language’s rhetoric, but what hap-
pens when the attempt to reproduce it runs aground? For example, when the 
writer in Psalm 93:2 praises God by putting the descriptor before the subject 
(Hebrew mei-‘olam attah), we are left with three choices: “from forever are 
You,” Alter’s awkward “from forever You are” (Alter 2007, 328), or simply 
and seemingly in defeat, but clearly, “You are from forever.” This last is con-
ventionally done in translation, and parallel to the “God’s finger” passage 
cited above. In the case of biblical poetry, it may not always be possible or 
even necessary to reproduce every feature of the original language in order to 
convey its force, and attempting to do so may lead in directions that are less 
than mellifluous.

Any careful reader of such massive volumes, especially another translator 
such as myself, can nit-pick. My purpose in choosing a few examples from 
Alter’s biblical translations has been to suggest that he has not realized his 
admittedly elusive goal. The kind of miraculous hieros gamos5 he advocates, 
where the unique flavor of the original is wedded to the strengths of English, 
has not yet been attained in our time. For me, Alter’s skills as a literary critic 
are far superior to his skills as a translator.



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Notes

1. See the discussion in (Zevit 1998); on page 1, he endorses Alter’s way of repre-
senting biblical narrative through parataxis in English.

2. See Alter 2004, xxvi: 
 And she came down to the spring and filled her jug and came back up. And the servant 

ran toward her and said, “Pray, let me sip a bit of water from your jug.” And she said, 
“Drink, my lord,” and she hurried and tipped down her jug on one hand and let him 
drink. And she let him drink his fill and said, “For your camels, too, I shall draw water 
until they drink their fill.” And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and 
she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels.

3. This is the approach taken by Alviero Niccacci (1990 and 1997).

4. The following essay by taylor discusses this identical point on page 242.

5. The term was applied to Bible translation by Franz rosenzweig (1994, 53).

References

Alter, robert
1999 The David Story. New York: W. W. Norton.
2004 The Five Books of Moses. New York: W. W. Norton.
2007. The Book of Psalms. New York: W. W. Norton.

Fox, Everett
1995 The Five Books of Moses. New York: Schocken Books.

Niccacci, Alviero
1990 The Syntax of the Verb in Classical Hebrew Prose. JSot Supplement 86. 

Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
1997 Basic facts and Theory of the Biblical Hebrew Verb System, and Work-

shop: Narrative Syntax of Exodus 19-24. In Narrative Syntax and the 
Hebrew Bible, ed. Ellen Van Wolde, 162–202 and 203–228. Leiden: Brill.

rosenzweig, Franz
1994 Scripture and Luther. In Martin Buber and Franz rosenzweig, Scripture 

and Translation, ed. Laurence rosenwald and Everett Fox, 47–72. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.

Zevit, Ziony
1998 The Anterior Construction in Classical Hebrew. SBL Monograph Series 50. 

Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.




