The Five Books of Moses
By Robert Alter
2004
First Published
4.57
Average Rating
Through a distinguished career of critical scholarship and translation, Robert Alter has equipped us to read the Hebrew Bible as a powerful, cohesive work of literature. The culmination of this work, Alter's masterly new translation and probing commentary combine to give contemporary readers the definitive edition of The Five Books. Alter's majestic translation recovers the mesmerizing effect of these ancient stories—the profound and haunting enigmas, the ambiguities of motive and image, and the distinctive cadences and lovely precision of the Hebrew text. Other modern translations either recast these features for contemporary clarity, thereby losing the character of the original, or fail to give readers a suitably fluid English as a point of contact. Alter's translation conveys the music and the meaning of the Hebrew text in a lyrical, lucid English. His accompanying commentary illuminates the text with learned insight and reflection on its literary and historical dimensions.
Avg Rating
4.57
Number of Ratings
711
5 STARS
69%
4 STARS
22%
3 STARS
7%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
1%
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Author
Robert Alter
Author · 22 books
Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967, and has published many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature.
