Robert Alter's Translation of the Torah: Ma Nishtana?
Sermon, December 17, 2004
Rabbi Bruce Kadden

Those of you who have been in my office know that I have a few books.  And among those books I have quite a few translations and commentaries on the Torah.  These include the old and new Jewish Publication Society translations, the Hertz, Stone, Plaut and Etz Hayim chumashim, each with its own translation, and the recent translations by Richard Elliott Friedman and Everett Fox, not to mention a couple of Christian Bibles which of course contain the Torah.

So why would I be so excited about the publication of Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses: a Translation with Commentary?  Why would anyone other than rabbis and biblical scholars take note of this recent addition to the realm of biblical translation and commentary?  Or in the words of the Passover seder:  Ma nishtana?  Why is this translation and commentary different from the many other that our available to the English reader?

Alter, who is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley and the author of many books on the bible as literature, anticipates this question and addresses it in the lengthy introduction.  “Why, after so many English versions, a new translation of the Five Books of Moses?”  he asks.

Alter is uncompromisingly critical of English translations of the bible, both modern and classical.  “Broadly speaking,” he writes, “one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew.” 

“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, he charges.  His harsh conclusion: “modern English versions of the Bible provide unfortunately persuasive evidence” of the saying “that translation is always a betrayal.”

Alter admits to two exceptions to his disparagement:  the King James Version and Fox’s modern translation.  However, each has its drawbacks, according to Alter.  The King James, as we have seen, often misunderstands and misrepresents the Hebrew; and Fox, who modeled his translation after Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s German translation, so closely follows the syntax and literary style of the original Hebrew that it is not “fluently readable” English. 

Alter describes his translation as, “an experiment in re-presenting the Bible…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.”

These are two challenging goals, which Alter accomplishes.  The English is quite readable and understandable and does an excellent job of conveying the sense of the original Hebrew.  The translation is accompanied by substantial commentary, mostly explaining the literary nuances of the text.  In this way, it is as much a text for Torah study as it is for reading. 

A couple of examples from the Joseph narrative will illustrate Alter’s approach.  He is particularly sensitive to the repetition of words and phrases.  For example, when Joseph’s brothers decide to sell him rather than kill him, they throw him into a pit, bor in Hebrew.  In Egypt, Joseph ends up in prison, beit sohar in Hebrew.  However, the final time it is mentioned it is not called a beit sohar, but a bor, bringing obvious resonance to the pit in which his brothers placed him.  Most translations, however, call it a prison or dungeon, missing the opportunity to connect to the earlier narrative.

Alter is also interested in respecting biblical Hebrew’s concreteness and preciseness.  Whereas many modern translations often change “concrete language into more abstract terms,” Alter preserves the concrete language in his translation.

For example, the word yad, hand, is often used in the Joseph narrative.  When his brothers want to kill Joseph, Reuben rescues him “from their hands.”  He says:  “Lay not a hand upon him.”  Elsewhere in the story, Judah says, “Let not our hand be against him.”

The word hand is also often used in the Joseph narrative when one person or object is placed into the hands of another, and the careful reader will notice this word which serves in part to tie the story together as a literary whole.  However, most translations fail to consistently translate yad as hand, preferring for example to have Reuben and Judah to say “do away with him,” rather than “laying a hand on him.”

In so doing the reader misses the repetitive use of the word throughout the story.  More importantly, the reader also misses this intended irony:  though Reuben pleads with their brothers not to lay a hand on Joseph, meaning not to kill him, the brothers obviously need to lay a hand on him in order to throw him into the pit.  Furthermore, in the Joseph story hand is used both “as the agency of violent impulse” and “as the instrument of scrupulous management.”  So when translators fail to render yad as hand in each of these instances, the reader is unable to recognize this important contrast.

Alter concludes, “a translation that respects the literary precision of the biblical story must strive to reproduce its nice discrimination of terms, and cannot be free to translate a word here one way and there another, for the sake of variety or for the sake of context.”

However, Alter admits that it is not always possible to consistently translate the same Hebrew word the same way because some words have a multiplicity of meanings and a word’s meaning in one context is clearly different from its meaning in another context.  So, even Alter’s principles of translation have their limits.

Another area in which Alter demonstrates particular literary sensitivity to the Hebrew text is in the word order.  While the majority of biblical verses start with a verb followed by the subject and then the object, frequently the order is changed to call attention to a particular word or phrase.  For example, God often affirms the covenant by saying, “To your seed I will give this land,” placing the phrase “to your seed” first to emphasize it.

In the Joseph story, Jacob, upon learning that Simeon is being held in Egypt and that the Egyptian official has demanded the brothers bring Benjamin down there, cries out, “Me you have bereaved” (Genesis 42:36).  As Alter points out placing “himself as the object of suffering at the very beginning of his utterance…beautifully expresses Jacob’s self-dramatization as anguished and resentful father continually at the mercy of his sons.”

These are just some of the ways in which Alter uses his literary insights in translating and commenting upon the text of the Torah.  The real value of such a work is that it helps the reader appreciate the beauty of the text and the skill of the editor in creating such a literary masterpiece.  Furthermore, rather than trying to break the text down into its original components, as biblical scholars often do, Alter’s approach serves to point to its flow and wholeness.

It is doubtful that the casual biblical reader will appreciate much of this.  But for readers who enjoy literary nuances and insights, and for serious students of Torah who want to try and understand the meaning of the text without having a strong Hebrew background, this work is a treasure.  It is a welcome addition to the world of modern Bible translation, as well as the world of Jewish biblical scholarship.

There is indeed much different in this translation and commentary to give it a place of importance on the bookshelves of rabbis, students of Torah, and those who want a fresh appreciation of the biblical narrative.

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