An American Jewish Bible? – Introducing Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses

Program: Hebrew College Tamid
Instructor: Dr. Avi Bernstein-Nahar (Read Bio)
Dates: 8 sessions

Time:  2 hours
Course fee: 

Location: Zoom
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Almost every new chapter in Jewish history seems to include a new take on the Hebrew Bible – a deep well of narrative, poetry, and law with which Jews have been in deep dialogue since antiquity. In America, however, for many the Jewish romance with the Bible has come to an end. With the great migration of Eastern European Jews to the new world, (1881 to 1945), distinctive Jewish languages, Yiddish, Ladino, and Hebrew – including biblical Hebrew – were lost, supplanted by English, a global lingua franca.

Does this mean that for many American-Jews, the centuries-old love affair with Torah is over? Not inevitably: American scholar Robert Alter, whose 2018  translation and commentary has been called a “landmark” in American literary history, has tried to produce an English version of the original Hebrew text loyal to its form, content, and the “music’ of the Hebrew language – the play of its sounds, its cadences, and sentence structures.  In other words, he reaches for the sky – to Hebraicize English! How much difference does it make to read the Bible in this way?  With Alter as our gadfly and our guide, and while reading some of the best stories the Bible has to offer, we have the opportunity to find out.

This course can be done in any of the four ways, depending on the preferences of the group:

• Iconic Stories of Genesis: The two creation stories, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel story, Abraham Venturing Forth, the Binding of Isaac, and the Joseph story are among the most iconic stories in all of world literature.  Robert Alter challenges us to see them not only as separate in their magnificence, but also as a unity in their message.  The Joseph story, without the Yehudah and Tamar story, is incomplete as is the Binding of Isaac without the Venturing Forth narrative.  As Alter insists, whether a reader is secular, agnostic or religious, the literary lens brings out more of what the Bible has always offered to its readers, and perhaps new contemporary meanings as well.

• The David Story: As Alter points out, the David story is probably the greatest single account of a human life we have from antiquity, a dramatic revelation of the social, political and family life of a tragically flawed and deeply impressive founding king of Israel.  Is this history or literature, fiction or fact? Alter, who does not hesitate to compare the one who produced this prose to the likes of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dickens, lifts the veil on a text which is all of these and more.  Lust, power, friendship, and desperate flight from the angel of death:  nothing human is omitted.

• Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Psalms: The Prophets, Isaiah and Ezekial, and the Book of Palms are among the most theologically charged books in the Bible. Scholars scrutinize their verses for evidence of Israelite history; philosophers dwell on their metaphysical statements. And, committed Jews and Christians offer the words of these texts in the course of prayer, as the words of these biblical.books are omnipresent in the liturgy. Thanks to the efforts of Robert Alter, these sacred texts are available to us as never before -- in an English translation with scholarly integrity, poetic virtuosity, and a Hebrew form and spirit.

• The Book of Deuteronomy:  Deuteronomy more than any other book of the Hebrew Bible centers the relationship between Israel and God.  Also unique is its status as oratory and interpretation, the beginning of Israel’s love-affair with exposition of its own history.  Finally, Deuteronomy represents Israel’s first dalliance with the reform of religious tradition.  Whoever wrote down Moses’ exhortations to the people – this person is often referred to as the Deuteronomist – was deeply committed to a covenantal theological perspective.  We will take great care in following Alter’s insightful, accessible commentaries and trying to discover both the character of the Deuteronomist as an author and of Moses as a leader.