Over the past 24 years, a literary scholar named Robert Alter has been working, by hand, on a 3,000 page translation of the Hebrew bible. “I’m very particular, he said. “I write on narrow-lined paper and I have a Cross mechanical pencil.” His steadfast work has resulted in a translation that spans three volumes.
As you can imagine, it was no easy feat. “If you keep going verse by verse, looking at the commentary and wrestling with difficult words and so forth, you can get a little batty,” said Alter in an interview with NPR. For the scholar, it was the “very high level of artistry” found in the Hebrew bible which inspired him to take on such an enormous task. “The existing English versions simply didn’t do justice to the literary beauty of the Hebrew,” he said.
Alter was careful to remove “Christological references” in existing translations in order to be more faithful to the original text. “In trying to be faithful to the literary art of the Hebrew Bible I certainly edged it away from being merely a precursor to the New Testament — which is a different kind of writing all together,” he says. For example, you won’t find the word ‘soul’ in Alter’s translation. “That’s because the Hebrew word translated very often as ‘soul’ means something like ‘life breath,’ ” Alter explained. “It’s a very physical thing and there is no concept among the biblical writers in a split between body and soul. So I got rid of the soul.”
Other changes included altering the wording in Psalm 23. The King James bible reads: “thou anointest my head with oil,” “But the Hebrew verb does not mean ‘to anoint,’ ” said Alter. “The word that’s actually used by the psalmist means ‘to make luxuriant’ — something like that. It’s a very physical word. So after wrestling with other alternatives … I ended up saying ‘you moisten my head with oil.’ ”
Alter’s translation also attempts to replicate the rhythm of the original, which proved difficult as Hebrew is a much more compact language than English. “Words squeeze together,” he said. In English you need three words to say “he saw him.” But Hebrew only requires one. “You know it’s ‘he’ in the way the verb is conjugated, and then there’s a little suffix at the end of the verb that tells you it’s ‘him.'”
Alter also avoided words with lots of syllables as they’re not commonly found in biblical Hebrew. For instance, the King James version of Psalm 30 reads: “What profit is there in my blood?” Which Alter changed to “What profit in my blood?” Which is much closer to the rhythm of the original Hebrew.
As painstaking as his work has been, Alter is well aware that future translators may try to improve and change his work. “A translator of a great work is delusional if he or she thinks that there aren’t places where the translation falls down,” Alter said, He imagined a future translator may say: “That’s awkward. I can see he’s trying to get the literal sense of the Hebrew, but it sounds goofy in English and I can do better than that.”
After 24 years of work, we certainly hope Alter takes a well earned rest. His translation of the Hebrew bible is available to order now.
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