The Wisdom Books [Paperback]

Alter's translation of the Wisdom Books is very impressive. Highly recommended. It is a great improvement on his translation of the Psalms, where every literary effect was subordinated to carrying over the compactness of the Hebrew. Alter is generally thought to be a better translator of prose than poetry, but he does a very good job here. There is new insight into these books on every page. The commentary too is always illuminating.

"The strong disparities among these Wisdom books vividly illustrate how the Hebrew Bible, contrary to popular preconception, is not a book but an anthology ...incorporating widely different views of human nature, God and history and even the natural world."
--Robert Alter, 2010
Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley

* Why another translation?
** Comparative selections and commentary
*** Conclusion

* Why another translation?

Scholarship matters. It really does. Scholarship matters just like Integrity matters. Correspondingly, such efforts are the only defense against literalism and fundamentalist fanaticism. Prof. Robert Alter, like many of his contemporaries in Religious Studies (Jewish, Christian and Muslim, alike) share the belief that many of the stories canonized were common tales that the Ancient Israelites and their surrounding neighbors (perhaps even extending into the reaches of central Europe and The Far East) told and re-told for generations before being transcribed. These homogenized stories appeared to have been morality tales before cultural reconstruction transformed them into insular and sacred pieces. In addition to Job, The Creation Story through Noah, Esther, Ruth and even The Tobit all reflect a Judaizing/ Monotheistic rendering when compared to the older source material found in such texts as The Book of The Jubilees or The Epic of Gilgamesh, to name a few.

**
---Job ("Iyov") 3:3

JPS (1917): "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night wherein it was said: 'A man-child is brought forth.' "

NAB (1969): "Perish the day on which I was born and the night when they said, `The child is a boy!' "

Alter's (2010): "Annul the day that I was born and the night that said, `a man is conceived.'

"The initial verb means to die or to be lost, and therefore `perish,' used by King James and several modern translations. [A] Couple of modern translators have opted for `damn,' but `yo'vad' is neither an expletive nor does it imply damnation, which is not a biblical idea. The force of what follows is that Job would like to expunge the day of his birth from the calendar, which is the contextual justification for `annul.' "

---Proverbs ("Mishlei") 8:22, 30-31

Geneva (1560): "The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. Then I was by him, [as] one brought up [with him]: and I was daily [his] delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights [were] with the sons of men."

NJB (1985): "Yahweh created me, first-fruits of his fashioning, before the oldest of his works. I was beside the master craftsman, delighting in him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere on his earth, delighting to be with the children of men."

Alter's (2010): "The Lord created me at he outset of His way, the very first of His works of old. And I was by Him, an intimate, I was His delight day after day, playing before Him at all times, playing in the world, His earth, and my delight with Humankind."

"The cosmic or cosmogonic prominence of Wisdom may well have provided a generative clue for the prose-poem about the Logos ("In The beginning was the word...") in the first chapter of John's Gospel. In the rabbinic tradition, it was the trigger for the idea that God made the world by following the blueprint of the Torah, which pre-existed creation; and later the Kabbalah would elaborate this notion with a theosophic apparatus."

---Ecclesiastes ("Qohelet/ Kohelet") 1:2

King James (1611): "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all [is] vanity."

NIV (1984): "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless."

Alter's (2010): "Merest breath/vapor," said Qohelet, "merest breath/vapor. All is breath/vapor."

Perhaps this thought should be examined, as the key word translated seems to offer, in Alter's version, a substantially different meaning than those previously given. According to him, "The phrase and in particular the word, `vanity' would be more accurately rendered `vapor.' [It is] the closest word in English to the Hebrew word, `Hevel.' Rendering this phrase, as an abstraction is inadvisable, for the writer uses concrete metaphors to indicate general concepts. "Hevel", `breath' or `vapor,' is something utterly insubstantial and transient, and in this book suggests futility, ephemerality."

However, there also seems to be an esoteric meaning that belies this passage as well. In Judaism, the rabbis teach that there's a parallel world, where everyone and everything has dual representation: a physical representation here and an ethereal before the Creator. This verse, according to the late great Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, reflects this spiritual line of reason. "It is also the mystical reason," Kaplan once stated, "why the names of some saints are doubled in the Bible as `Abraham, Abraham' (Gen. 22:11), `Jacob, Jacob' (Gen. 46:2) and `Moses, `Moses' (Ex. 3:4). The first name corresponds to the Root that remains on High, attached to The Tree, while the second name is the branch that rests in the physical world."

*** This book is about 400 pages; cream-colored and relatively light to hold considering it's a hardcover. The only thing that is missing from the last publication of his Biblical translations is a bookmark. (I mentioned that when I reviewed his translation of The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary.) A bookmark would help as this is an annotated translation and often you find yourself referencing earlier comments or chapters, a placeholder really would have been a nice addition.

Perhaps one of these fine mornings I may get up on the wrong side of the bed wondering about this missing bookmark that W. W. Norton forgot to include and I just might have to give my good friend, Gloria Allred a call.

5 stars? Absolutely. Wish I could give more.

The Wisdom Books, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter.

Robert Alter is, with James Kugel, one of the two leading writer / translators of the Hebrew Bible who write to a general, lay audience who simply wish to read parts of the Old Testament as narrative literature. As with his translations of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), The Story of David (1 and 2 Samuel) and The Psalms, Adler has selected books with the widest general interest both across religions and across the spectrum of non-religious readers.

Aside from having that `family resemblance' which lumps these three books together as `Wisdom Books', they share the reputation for not being good fits in the Old Testament Canon. On the one hand, unlike `the law and the prophets', thinks like Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, you will find selections from these works very seldom read from the lectern on Sundays. And yet, these works, especially Job and Ecclesiastes, have a broad presence in our secular culture. Job has been dramatized often and the character himself has appeared in fiction from John Steinbeck to Ken Kesey. The standard-bearer for the wisdom literature is the 8 verse poem at Ecclesiastes 3:1 - 8, which Pete Seeger turned into the song `Turn, Turn, Turn'. It may be part of the genius of Hebrew poesy that when you compare Alter's translation of these verses with the oh so familiar translation Seeger uses from the King James Bible, the poetic power remains the same, even when individual words are changed. But as soon as we leave this poem, the clarity of Alter's translation makes itself felt, when he replaces the KJV verse 9: `What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?' with `what gain is there for him who does in what he toils?' The underlying Hebrew, it seems, is meant to puzzle, but at least the 17th century phrasing doesn't compound the mystery. Other modern translators simplify as well, but they seem to lose the sense of puzzle and introduce plurals where the original text seems to be singular.

My strongest curiosity with this translation was how Alter would translate that most famous of Biblical lines, Ecclesiastes 1:2, `Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' Every 1st semester seminary student knows that `vanity' is not a good translation for the Hebrew word, `hebel', but this translation started in the KJV, and one since has had the will to change it. It appears that way in the three top modern English translations of the Bible. Alter's solution is: `Merest breath, said Qohelet, merest breath. All is mere breath.' I like that. But Alter's translation of verse 3 is also a big improvement, where he starts `What gain is there for man in all his toil that he toils under the sun.' Compared to the standard NRSV translation, it places the `gain' in the front, as the most important part of the verse, in contrast to the previous verse which had declared all gain to be `mere breath'.

Alter's work is not comparable to a modern professional commentary. In fact, for most of his `analysis', he relies on the Anchor Bible commentaries of Michael Fox, who does his own translation of Ecclesiastes. But in the world of translation, Alter is superior to Fox, who turns `vanity of vanities' into `absurdity of absurdities', which runs counter to the concrete sense of the Hebrew.

The unsung hero of these wisdom books is Chapter 28 of the Book of Job, nominated to be one of the 16 greatest poems in the Old Testament (James Kugel). I compared Alter's translation with Kugel's translation and as poetry, Alter wins hands down. And, as witnessed by the perennial popularity of the KJV, there are times when you simply want a very good poetic rendering of ideas.

If Alter's translation does nothing else (and it certainly does more) its greatest service may be as a poetic alternative for Stephen Mitchell's translation of The Book of Job, which is less a translation than an adaptation, which has no chapter and verse references and leaves out many chapters. If, as I have now and again, wished to dramatize parts of Job, it is Alter's translation which will serve you best. One may even go so far as to see Alter's comments as `director's notes' blocking out the dramatic aspects of these works.

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