BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Translator Takes the Word at Its Word
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: December 29, 2004
'The Five Books of Moses'
'A Translation With Commentary'
By Robert Alter
1,064 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $39.95.
In the beginning, God did not create the heavens and the earth. The King James Bible puts it too neatly: ''In the beginning'' could mean that the creation was God's first act, or that the creation was itself the beginning, but wasn't something there before? The sentence also reads like a topic sentence, bluntly introducing that account that follows.
Things are actually far more mysterious and inchoate, as Robert Alter keeps reminding us in his astonishing translation of the original Hebrew text of the first five books of the Bible. There are so many accretions of meaning and assumption layered over the Biblical text, so many commentaries, so many doctrines; even the English language has been influenced by the glories (and errors) of the 17th-century King James translation.
Return, then, to the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch -- the Torah -- where pronouns are often ambiguous, words are compacted with multiple meanings and clauses can begin to make sense not in the ordinary sequence of reading but only in the course of doubling back and rereading. Here is how Mr. Alter renders that first sentence of Genesis:
''When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, 'Let there be light.'''
That sentence unsettles. The creation is not a completed act, but part of a process. The act of speaking is the focus of attention, coming after an almost breathless catalog of elements in a world ''without form and void'' (as the King James version puts it), in which ''welter and waste and darkness over the deep'' and ''God's breath'' are components of a primordial earth.
It isn't likely that this rendering will soon replace the old. It doesn't easily scan. But it is so weirdly convincing, and so evocative of matters beyond conventional understanding, that it anticipates not just the story of Creation but the epic enterprise of translation and commentary into which Mr. Alter leads us.
That enterprise, as Mr. Alter explains in an invaluable introduction, means avoiding the ''heresy'' that translation can be used to explain the Bible, which in the worst cases becomes ''explaining away the Bible.'' He cultivates instead a scrupulous attention to the Hebrew text and its multifarious meanings. Another recent translation of the five books of Moses by Everett Fox (Schocken, 1995) is even more radical, so preoccupied with emphasizing the strangeness of the Hebrew that it creates a self-consciously strange English. But Mr. Alter seeks both English fluidity and Hebraic accuracy. That means paying attention to the large and the small: the way, for example, imagery of the hand, with all its deeds and misdeeds, works through the tale of Joseph and his brothers; or the way the Bible's use of the letter vav (meaning ''and'') creates accumulations of acts and events, reiterating the extraordinary. God really is in the details.
It also reflects a different approach from the one that has guided so much bland modern translation, which has tended to seek clarity and simplicity above all. For more than 20 years, Mr. Alter, who is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, has been arguing for a more literary approach to the Bible that would not blanch at its intricacies.
Religious belief has traditionally treated the Bible as a coherent, divinely inspired historical document. But in the 19th century, German philology began an archaeological excavation of the text, discerning in its varied styles, its different terms for God and its expressions of opposing interests, the hands of four authors who wrote their accounts over the course of centuries -- multiple sources out of which redactors created the pastiche we now read.
For a century, philological research laid bare the biblical text, illuminating its crevices, dating its shards, explicating its contradictions. After millennia of religious commentary by Jewish and Christian scholars, this was a form of secular compensation. Philology turned the Bible into a text about its own construction.
But Mr. Alter, beginning with ''The Art of Biblical Narrative'' (1981), undertook an extraordinarily powerful project of restoration. The redactors, he claimed, were not merely curators: they were creators. Their choice of words, their juxtaposition of passages, their respect for ambiguities -- nothing was arbitrary. But the Bible is not just a religious masterwork, Mr. Alter argued; it is also a literary one: pay close attention to the text and it will yield its secrets. Out of perceived patterns, analysis of word usage and attention to rhythm, insights into character and narrative and purpose will emerge.
In Mr. Alter's new versions of Genesis and much of Exodus, this literary approach proves its considerable power. But it seems much less effective or convincing in the compilations of law and ritual in Leviticus and Numbers. For there, literalness and precision are more the point than allusion and suggestion. The literary becomes secondary. The text may even demand sacrificing effulgence and grandeur -- a demand with its own dangers.