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Specialised articles written on poetry in the book of Daniel

Here follows some specialized analysis already done on poetry in the book of Daniel. The list is not exhaustive and classified in chronological order: 
-. W. Sibley Towner, “Poetic Passages of Daniel 1-6,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 31 (1969): 317-326;  
-. Jonas C. Greenfield, “Early Aramaic Poetry,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 11 (1979) 45-51;  
-.  William H. Shea, “Poetic Relations of the Time Periods in Dan 9:25,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 59-63;
-. Alexander A. Di Lella, “Daniel 4:7-14: Poetic Analysis and Biblical Background,” in Mélanges Bibliques et Orientaux en l’Honneur de M. Henri Cazelles, ed. A. Caquot and M. Delcor, Alter orient und Altes Testament 212 (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1981), 247-258; 
-. Alexander A. Di Lella, “Strophic Structure and Poetic Analysis of Daniel 2:20-23, 3:31-33, and 6:26b-28,” in Studia Hierosolymitana III: Nell’ottavo centenario Francescano (1182-1982), ed. G. C. Bottini, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum: Collectio maior, no. 30 (Jerusalem, Israel: Franciscan Printing Press, 1982), 91-96; 
-. Daud Soesilo, “Translating the Poetic Sections of Daniel 1-6,” The Bible Translator 41, no. 1 (1990): 432-435; Accessed January 20, 2014, http://www.ubs-translations.org/tbt/1990/04/TBT199004.html?num=432&x=-365&y=-78&num1=;
-. James W. Watts, “Daniel's Praise (Daniel 2.20-23), ” Psalm and Story: Inset Hymns in Hebrew Narrative, JSOTSup 139 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), 145-154;  
-. Gert Thomas Marthinus Prinsloo, “Two Poems in a Sea of Prose: The Content and Context of Daniel 2.20-23 and 6.27-28,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 59 (summer 1993): 93-108;  
-. Pieter M. Venter, “The Function of Poetic Speech in the Narrative in Daniel 2,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies 49, no. 4 (1993): 1009-1020; accessed January 20, 2014, http://www.hts.org.za/index.php/HTS/article/viewPDF Interstitial/2535/4348;
-. Stanislav Segert, “Poetic Structures in the Hebrew Sections of the Book of Daniel,” in Solving Riddles and Untying Knots: Biblical, Epigraphic, and Semitic Studies in Honor of Jonas C. Greenfield, ed. Z. Zevit, S. Gitin, and M. Sokoloff (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1995), 261-275; 
-. Stanislav Segert, “Aramaic Poetry in the Old Testament [in Dan 2-7],” Archív Orientální 70 (2002) 65-79; 
-. Géza G. Xeravits, “Poetic Passages in the Aramaic Part of the Book of Daniel,” Biblische Notizen 124 (2005): 29-40. 
-. John F. Hobbins, “Aramaic Poetry in the Book of Daniel,” (Mar 28, 2007); accessed on January 20, 2014, http://www.google.com.ph/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCQQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com%2Fancient_hebrew_poetry%2Ffiles%2Faramaic_poetry_in_the_book_of_daniel.pdf&ei=y5wFU9izHunliAevtoH4BQ&usg=AFQjCNGzaz1sDKU10REVpXbpADJJAvNCQw&sig2=2OFi3BOM8Hy1aq4vcRO9yg&bvm=bv.61725948,d.aGc&cad=rja

What C. S. Lewis thought of Biblical Critics...

"Whatever these men may be as Biblical Critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading ..."

"These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight."

C. S. Lewis, Fern-seed and Elephants (Glasgow: Collins, 1975), 106, 111.

Is Atheism Irrational? By GARY GUTTING

from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/is-atheism-irrational/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

This is the first in a series of interviews about religion that I will conduct for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, and the author, most recently, of “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.”
 

Gary Gutting: A recent survey by PhilPapers, the online philosophy index, says that 62 percent of philosophers are atheists (with another 11 percent “inclined” to the view). Do you think the philosophical literature provides critiques of theism strong enough to warrant their views? Or do you think philosophers’ atheism is due to factors other than rational analysis?

Alvin Plantinga: If 62 percent of philosophers are atheists, then the proportion of atheists among philosophers is much greater than (indeed, is nearly twice as great as) the proportion of atheists among academics generally. (I take atheism to be the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions.) Do philosophers know something here that these other academics don’t know? What could it be? Philosophers, as opposed to other academics, are often professionally concerned with the theistic arguments — arguments for the existence of God. My guess is that a considerable majority of philosophers, both believers and unbelievers, reject these arguments as unsound.

Still, that’s not nearly sufficient for atheism. In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence. 

G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?

A.P.: Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.

I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism. For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism. So if, à la Russell, theism is like teapotism, the atheist, to be justified, would (like the a-teapotist) have to have powerful evidence against theism.

G.G.: But isn’t there also plenty of evidence against theism — above all, the amount of evil in a world allegedly made by an all-good, all-powerful God?

A.P.: The so-called “problem of evil” would presumably be the strongest (and maybe the only) evidence against theism. It does indeed have some strength; it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given the existence of all the suffering and evil our world contains, is fairly low. But of course there are also arguments for theism. Indeed, there are at least a couple of dozen good theistic arguments. So the atheist would have to try to synthesize and balance the probabilities. This isn’t at all easy to do, but it’s pretty obvious that the result wouldn’t anywhere nearly support straight-out atheism as opposed to agnosticism.

G.G.: But when you say “good theistic arguments,” you don’t mean arguments that are decisive — for example, good enough to convince any rational person who understands them.

A.P.: I should make clear first that I don’t think arguments are needed for rational belief in God. In this regard belief in God is like belief in other minds, or belief in the past. Belief in God is grounded in experience, or in the sensus divinitatis, John Calvin’s term for an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God in a wide variety of circumstances.

Nevertheless, I think there are a large number — maybe a couple of dozen — of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.

G.G.: Could you give an example of such an argument?

AP: One presently rather popular argument: fine-tuning. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. For example, if the force of the Big Bang had been different by one part in 10 to the 60th, life of our sort would not have been possible. The same goes for the ratio of the gravitational force to the force driving the expansion of the universe: If it had been even slightly different, our kind of life would not have been possible. In fact the universe seems to be fine-tuned, not just for life, but for intelligent life. This fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.

G.G.: But even if this fine-tuning argument (or some similar argument) convinces someone that God exists, doesn’t it fall far short of what at least Christian theism asserts, namely the existence of an all-perfect God? Since the world isn’t perfect, why would we need a perfect being to explain the world or any feature of it?

A.P.: I suppose your thinking is that it is suffering and sin that make this world less than perfect. But then your question makes sense only if the best possible worlds contain no sin or suffering. And is that true? Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story.

Think about it: The first being of the universe, perfect in goodness, power and knowledge, creates free creatures. These free creatures turn their backs on him, rebel against him and get involved in sin and evil. Rather than treat them as some ancient potentate might — e.g., having them boiled in oil — God responds by sending his son into the world to suffer and die so that human beings might once more be in a right relationship to God. God himself undergoes the enormous suffering involved in seeing his son mocked, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. And all this for the sake of these sinful creatures.

I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.

G.G.: O.K., but in any case, isn’t the theist on thin ice in suggesting the need for God as an explanation of the universe? There’s always the possibility that we’ll find a scientific account that explains what we claimed only God could explain. After all, that’s what happened when Darwin developed his theory of evolution. In fact, isn’t a major support for atheism the very fact that we no longer need God to explain the world?

A.P.: Some atheists seem to think that a sufficient reason for atheism is the fact (as they say) that we no longer need God to explain natural phenomena — lightning and thunder for example. We now have science.

As a justification of atheism, this is pretty lame. We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified. A-moonism on this ground would be sensible only if the sole ground for belief in the existence of the moon was its explanatory power with respect to lunacy. (And even so, the justified attitude would be agnosticism with respect to the moon, not a-moonism.) The same thing goes with belief in God: Atheism on this sort of basis would be justified only if the explanatory power of theism were the only reason for belief in God. And even then, agnosticism would be the justified attitude, not atheism.

G.G.: So, what are the further grounds for believing in God, the reasons that make atheism unjustified?

A.P.: The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience. Many people of very many different cultures have thought themselves in experiential touch with a being worthy of worship. They believe that there is such a person, but not because of the explanatory prowess of such belief. Or maybe there is something like Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Indeed, if theism is true, then very likely there is something like the sensus divinitatis. So claiming that the only sensible ground for belief in God is the explanatory quality of such belief is substantially equivalent to assuming atheism.

G.G.: If, then, there isn’t evidence to support atheism, why do you think so many philosophers — presumably highly rational people — are atheists?

AP: I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t have any special knowledge here. Still, there are some possible explanations. Thomas Nagel, a terrific philosopher and an unusually perceptive atheist, says he simply doesn’t want there to be any such person as God. And it isn’t hard to see why. For one thing, there would be what some would think was an intolerable invasion of privacy: God would know my every thought long before I thought it. For another, my actions and even my thoughts would be a constant subject of judgment and evaluation.

Basically, these come down to the serious limitation of human autonomy posed by theism. This desire for autonomy can reach very substantial proportions, as with the German philosopher Heidegger, who, according to Richard Rorty, felt guilty for living in a universe he had not himself created. Now there’s a tender conscience! But even a less monumental desire for autonomy can perhaps also motivate atheism.

GG: Especially among today’s atheists, materialism seems to be a primary motive. They think there’s nothing beyond the material entities open to scientific inquiry, so there there’s no place for immaterial beings such as God.

AP: Well, if there are only material entities, then atheism certainly follows. But there is a really serious problem for materialism: It can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe that humans are the product of evolution.

GG: Why is that?

 AP: I can’t give a complete statement of the argument here — for that see Chapter 10 of “Where the Conflict Really Lies.” But, roughly, here’s why. First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.

But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.

GG: So is your suggestion that a neurophysiological structure can’t be a belief? That a belief has to be somehow immaterial?

AP: That may be, but it’s not my point here. I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.

But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.

GG: Why do you say that?

AP: Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.

GG: That does seem to be a hard conclusion to accept. But won’t evolution get the materialist out of this difficulty? For our species to have survived, presumably many, if not most, of our beliefs must be true — otherwise, we wouldn’t be functional in a dangerous world.

 

AP: Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine.

Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.

 

GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.

AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.

This interview was conducted by email and edited.

---

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.

Probably The Most Hilarious Ping Pong Match In History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS3O0OOn0a0

Conversation with… Dr. Robert Alter

Found in http://www.jewishledger.com/2013/07/conversation-with-dr-robert-alter/

Posted by JudieJacobson on July 3, 2013 in Feature Stories,

 

Hebrew language scholar reignites the beauty of the Bible
By Cindy Mindell

Award-winning author and scholar Dr. Robert Alter has been translating the Hebrew Bible since 1999. His latest work, Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets – Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, has unleashed a torrent of critical acclaim. Malcolm Jones wrote in Newsweek, “You think you know these texts, or you do until you read Alter, who reignites their beauty in bracing and unexpected ways.” And Cynthia Ozick wrote, “The poets will rejoice. Alter’s language ascends to a rare purity through a plainness that equals the plainness of the Hebrew.”

Alter will discuss his work in Greenwich on Thursday, July 11.

Robert Alter is a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. In 2009, he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters.

Alter has translated more than two-thirds of the Hebrew Bible since 1999, when he published The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (W.W. Norton), followed over the next decade by the publication (all by W.W. Norton) of the Five Books of Moses, the Book of Psalms, and the Wisdom Books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes). His translation of Genesis was illustrated by Robert Crumb in a 2010 publication.

Alter spoke with the Ledger about the tools and passion that fuel his translation work.

Q: How did you begin your translation work involving the Hebrew Bible, and how is a translator born?

A:  It was by accident. There’s somebody at W.W. Norton who then became my editor who suggested a certain project to me that might have involved the book of Genesis and supplemental material. I said that I could do the project but only if I did my own translation because there’s something wrong with all the translations that existed at the time. So I ended up becoming a translator of the Bible.

To do translation, you have to have an intimate relationship with each of the two languages, the language of the source and the language into which you’re translating, and you have to have a kind of love affair with both of them.  I really got a serious handle on Hebrew after my bar mitzvah. I grew up in Albany and by good luck, a small class was formed for a handful of boys post-bar mitzvah. The teachers began instructing us in a different way than they had, immersing us seriously in the language; the teacher spoke Hebrew to us and we learned Hebrew grammar. I went to Camp Ramah, which in those years was a totally Hebrew-speaking environment and I became quite fluent in speaking. When I was an undergraduate at Columbia, I took courses in the evening at Jewish Theological Seminary, not in the rabbinical school but in a kind of college of Jewish studies, and everything there was conducted in Hebrew – Talmud, Bible, literature, Jewish history. At that point, I developed this crazy idea to master Hebrew.

Q: You mentioned in a 2012 lecture at Rutgers,  “Anybody who translates a great work and thinks that he or she ‘has it’ is suffering from serious delusions. You have to accept that you’re only going to approximate; the question is, how good an approximation it is.” Why is that, and what tends to trip you up when you’re translating?

A:  Every great work of literature – and there’s much great writing in the biblical Hebrew – has a mastery of means in its own language. It’s not only the kind of perfect word choice and subtle shifts from one level of the language to another, but also the rhythms, the lengths of words, etc. When you’re translating, you can’t possibly get all of those, while all the different features come together in perfect harmony in the original language. In most cases, you decide what’s less important and you sacrifice something: maybe you don’t focus on the order of the words in order to achieve some other effect of the original that’s important; maybe I can get the rhythm of the language but not quite the English equivalents that have the exact same resonance as the original.

In translating poetry, for example, every once in a while you produce a line of poetry where you just manage to get a terrific equivalent in English, but that only happens once in a while. I often get stuck on the rhythm. Biblical Hebrew, and especially biblical poetry, is very compact. You can sort of make certain efforts to tamp down the English language and get it closer to the compactness, for example, if there are three words and six syllables in the Hebrew, you may end up with nine words and 10 and 11 syllables in English. Then there are words that have no exact equivalent in English so you have to come up with approximations and you know it’s not exactly the same.

Sometimes you cannot find a decent English equivalent. In the Book of Ruth, Boaz is described as “goel.” The direct translation is “redeemer,” but the Hebrew word refers particularly to a member of your family who has the legal obligation to pay a debt that you cannot pay. “Redeemer” sounds like Jesus Christ; if you use “kinsman,” you lose the “redeemer” part. So I would say “redeeming kin.”

There are other places where, simply by remaining faithful to what is going on in the Hebrew, you get the literary effects of the Hebrew. In Exodus chapter 2, in the beginning of the Moses story [after Moses has struck down an Egyptian taskmaster and tells two Hebrew men to stop brawling], Moses asks the Hebrew man who is in the wrong, “Why should you strike your fellow?” The man says, Mi samcha l’ish sar v’shofet aleinu, “Who set you as a man, prince, and judge over us?”

The Hebrew word ish, a very simple word that means “man,” occurs maybe half a dozen times in four verses and I’ve reproduced each of those repetitions. One way you can see that the writer is going out of his way to repeat it is in the phrase, “Who set you as a man, prince and judge over us?” That is, you don’t need to say “a man;” you can just say, “Who made you prince and judge?” But it was important to the writer to say ish because there’s something haunting about the way the word “man” is repeated. It leads us to ponder what is a man, what is a Hebrew man who’s one of Moses’s brothers, what is an Egyptian man, what is a man who is set up as a prince and a judge?

In the next few verses, when Moses flees and shows up in Midian, he is identified because of his clothing as ish mitzri, an Egyptian man, and that too has a sort of double meaning. In one sense, he is an Egyptian and in another sense he isn’t at all, and all that wonderful richness of ambiguity comes through the simple repetition of one of the most basic words in the Hebrew language.

Q: Why do Bible translators not transliterate biblical names exactly from the Hebrew, for example – “Yoel” is translated and pronounced as “Joel” in English versions.

A:  It’s a matter of the tradition of the European languages. For example, “Michael” is a Hebrew name, pronounced in Hebrew “Mi-kha-el.” All the translations into English, French, and German simply use the English form of the name rather than the transliteration of the Hebrew. Adoniahu, the son of David, comes out as “Adonija.”

There is one translator, Everett Fox, who represents all the Hebrew names in transliteration. The problem is that we have a certain tradition of reading the Bible in English that goes back to the sixteenth century, at least a century before the King James version. As a translator, I didn’t want to make the names sound too weird or to put readers off too much. If they’ve always been used to encountering “Solomon,” “Shlomo” will be weird to them.

Q: In a recent interview with the Forward, you spoke about the “tedious sections” in the Bible. While perhaps boring to a modern audience, what was their original purpose, and who was the ancient audience they were meant for?

A:  In the early part of Kings, when Solomon builds the Temple and his palace, you have about four long chapters in which there is an elaborate catalog of the furnishings of the Temple and the furnishings of the palace. A lot of that we only have a hazy idea of because the architectural and interior design drawings have been lost. This is not anything that would fascinate the modern reader, but it’s quite possible that if you go back to the 8th century BCE, an audience would have reveled in all these details as instances of the glory that was Solomon.

Literacy is a very early phenomenon in ancient Israel and the whole ancient Near East, so it’s reasonable to assume that only a learned elite would be literate. In any case, even if others were literate, it would have been very expensive to own a scroll; these are painstakingly labor-intensive hand-crafted products.

If somebody wanted to deliver the written form of the David story to an audience, he would have read it out to a group of people and the group probably was perfectly mixed – aristocrats, literate scribes, sheepherders and farmers and so forth.

In my own work, whenever I say, “This conveyed such and such a signal to the original audience,” I’m working by inference. If I see a recurring formal technique in the biblical narrative and it occurs again and again, I have to assume that this technique was not just built into this story for the amusement of the writer but was a signal that the writer wanted the audience to pick up. It’s akin to a device in our culture: when a storyteller says, “Once upon a time in a land far away,” the listener knows it’s a folktale.

Q: How do you decide what to translate? With your Bible work, have you gone in order?

A:  I have followed my own order. I translated Genesis as a kind of experiment to see whether my concept of translation is viable, and it turned out to be more viable than I’d thought. Then I jumped to David’s story in the Book of Samuel, my other favorite biblical narrative. Then I started getting a little more serious about doing more of the whole, so I went back to the Torah and did all of that. My next two choices, in terms of what I was drawn to do at that point and what would be meaningful to readers, was Psalms, which attracted a lot of interest, and then the three “Wisdom Books” – Job, Proverbs, and I particularly wanted to translate Kohelet (Eccesiastes).

I then went back to the order: the Former Prophets is a continuation of the five books, but now I won’t necessarily go in order. I’m almost through with a book of translated poems of [Israeli poet] Yehuda Amichai; I translated 100 poems, recruited some translations, and used some existing translations. My involvement in Hebrew literature began with the modern period, and I still teach it and have a great love for modern Hebrew literature. Yehuda Amichai is one of the great poets of the 20th century, for my money, in any language. He also happened to have been a dear friend of mine, so I have a sense of personal connection. I’d like, if possible, to get all the way through the whole Hebrew Bible, but I don’t consider that to be my only scholarly translator’s task.

Comments? email cindym@jewishledger.com.

Caption:
Dr. Robert Alter

The Scholars Hebrew Bible Project

The Oxford Hebrew Bible 

http://ohb.berkeley.edu/

The Scholars Hebrew Bible will be a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible featuring a critical text and extensive text-critical introduction and commentary. Each book of the Hebrew Bible will be addressed in a separate volume, with a single volume each for the Minor Prophets, the Megillot, and Ezra-Nehemiah. This project represents a departure from the other major textual editions (the Biblia Hebraica Quinta and the Hebrew University Bible), which are diplomatic editions.   

The project has now changed its name to "The Scholars Hebrew Bible Project." According to Daniel O. McClellan: "many professors at Oxford express concerns with the name, given the fact that not a single professor from Oxford was involved and they broadly disapproved of an eclectic edition. It seems something has now been done about it."

 Some samples of the Scholars Hebrew Bible (in PDF format) can be found here (Genesis 1:1-13; Leviticus 22; Deut 32:1–9,  1 Kgs 11:1–8; 2 Kings 1:1-6; Jeremiah 27:1-10; Ezekiel 2:1-10; and Proverbs 9:1-18)