The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary

This is a tour de force. Robert Alter has produced an extraordinary translation of the Hebrew Bible, accompanied by insightful introductions and outstanding study notes for each book. I believe Alter succeeds in a goal that many have attempted but few have achieved: creating a translation that is both deeply faithful to the Hebrew text and able to convey its literary beauty, sacredness, and even much of its subtle wordplay. His lifelong expertise as both a biblical scholar and literary critic is evident on every page. As a believer, I have found this translation to be both spiritually uplifting and intellectually honest—a rare and valuable combination. For me, it combines the scholarly rigor of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (New Revised Standard Version) with much of the poetic power of the King James Version, while avoiding the linguistic limitations and translation errors of the latter. Of the many English translations I have read over the years, this is the one I return to most often. I recommend it without reservation to anyone who wants to experience the Hebrew Bible as both great literature and sacred scripture.

This audioboook does not include footnotes, although it does include the author's notes before each book of the Bible and each section of the TaNaK. The footnotes are incredibly helpful but they are only in the print version, which is important to know.

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.

This is Amazing! I am so excited to read scriptures based on 2,000 year old manuscripts like the Septuagint, Latin Vulgate, Syriac Peshitta, & the infamous Dead Sea Scrolls! I also did a full unboxing and review video of this one-of-a-kind volume set on my Christian Youtube Channel: "Christian Content Creations."

The best English translation of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament currently available. The book sticks closer to the original Hebrew than other Bibles such as the JPS Bible, but at the same time is in clear readable English. That is a difficult accomplishment by the single translator, a professor of English Literature who grew up reading Hebrew texts. Robert Alter started by writing two books on the Hebrew Bible as literature, one on poetry in the Bible, and the other on narrative storytelling. He later translated Genesis as an example of his views. That sold well, so over a 40-year period he published translations of many other books of the Bible. This set is the culmination of that effort. The books contain extensive commentaries of many verses. They focus on translation and literary issues rather than religious perspectives, making the volumes acceptable to both Jewish and Christian readers.

Husbands study books! He loved them!

I bought this three volume set because I wanted to have a copy of Alter's translation of Nevi'im/Prophets. I already had his translations of other parts of the Hebrew Bible, but Prophets unfortunately was not printed as a free-standing book. This is unfortunate not only because of the high price of having to buy three books instead of just one, but also because this publication of Nevi'im (Prophets) is nearly 1400 pages, and is too heavy for me to hold up. I do wish that a separate volume of Alter's Nevi'im/ Prophets had been published, I took one star off for this. However as per these translations themselves, Alter tries as much as possible to maintain the syntax and flow of the original Hebrew, and his commentary along with the translation adds valuable insight into the text.

Go buy this! ... Congratulations and many thanks to Robert Alter on his complete Hebrew Bible - among the few translations and commentaries void of sectarian polemics. And, if I may add, a work of art, and of superior scholarship accessible to the laity. For nearly as many years as he has been working on his translation, many of us have been buying individually the long list of his translations, one by one, from "The Five Books of Moses," clear through "The Prophets" to "The Writings," that is, the Psalms and other Wisdom literature - now all compiled into three hefty volumes. In fact, only days before the long expected surprise announcement of the release of Alter's Bible, I had pulled from the shelf his volume entitled "Strong as Death is Love" (Song 8:6) given that Rabbi Peter Hyman and I will teach our Spring seminar on Esther and Ruth, those texts in the current volume, again, of "The Writings." … Many Christians will be unsettled with Alter's excision of apparent christologies from his works. Indeed, for centuries Jews have relied upon the KJV for reading in English, pleased with the cadences of the time of King James and his committee of translators - regardless of their distance, due to time and exclusion, from Hebrew literary meaning and studies. (Though not at my fingertips, The Oaks of Mamre Library has a fine volume of the KJV Psalms with rabbinic commentary printed, I believe in the 1890s, by Soncino, then the foremost UK Jewish publishing house.) The Christian perplexion here is the New Testament Pauline instruction that the Hebrew scriptures were to be read as prophetic of Jesus' messianic divinity. … That said, Alter salutes such previous translators as the KJV committee and Msgr. Ronald Knox (Roman Catholic convert, son and grandson of Anglican bishops) by retaining their finer moments within his work. Knox, to my mind, is the finest one-man-band Christian Bible translator of the earlier part of the 20th Century, who said that his work was a gift to Roman Catholics, so they could possess a Bible as beautiful as the Church of England's Authorized Version (read KJV). Alter in various forewords to his books, always goes out of his way to salute previous devotees to good scripture. Knox, whose work I have long loved, would enjoy Alter's elevated companionship for Hebrew understanding not available a century ago. … I am overjoyed with Alter's product. Publisher Norton, however, for a few dollars more could have produced fine cloth boards to compliment the otherwise excellent smith sewn bindery - very important because the next generation of scholars will dote over these books, vulnerable to the ravages of use. As for all of my earlier individual volumes of Alter, these may now become fine beach reads.

I purchased this to add to my library's holdings because it improves my comprehension of the Bible without overpainting the Hebrew vocabulary in the process of translating them into English. Because the three-volume volumes are hefty, the paper box must be handled very carefully. If the box is constructed of wood, it will look good and more durability as ornamental piece too.

Beautiful edition of a brilliant book. It looks even better in person, the listing photo doesn’t do it justice.

A fantastic translation. There are better evaluations among the other reviews.

Maravilhoso!

Bible readers have typically been forced to choose between a translation that is literary (such as the King James Version) or one rendered in contemporary English which is supposedly more “accurate”. Robert Alter persuasively argues that these later translations, however, are in fact far from accurate: in seeking to remove all ambiguity from the text modern translators have lost contact both with the innate mystery of the original Hebrew and with its poetic qualities, which are often based in the repetition & parallelism of a consciously pared-down vocabulary. This translation of the Old Testament (or, more properly, Tanakh) brings English speakers closer to the true nature of the text than ever before. The annotation (which I understand from another review here is missing from the Kindle edition) is absolutely essential, because it is only by reading the notes in conjunction with the body text that you can understand the sensitive choices that have been made in translation and how they relate to the language & artistry of the original writers. These three volume are beautifully bound and printed. The second physical book - containing the Prophets (Nevi’im) - is admittedly fairly hefty, but Bibles are typically unwieldy and overall this set is convenient for reading. Which is important, since this is a Bible worth reading rather than keeping as a reference volume. Although the NRSV translation is so ubiquitous that it is inescapable as a “copy text”, it is Alter's translation that I feel that I will consult more in the future. This Bible has no devotional orientation (i.e. it is not a “Bible for Jews”); it is a scholarly translation, for everyone. I would heartily encourage anyone reading this review to order a copy.