Robert Alter

The literary guide to the Bible

General Introduction Robert Alter and Frank Kermode The Old Testament Introduction Robert Alter Genesis J. P. Fokkelman Exodus J. P. Fokkelman Leviticus David Damrosch Numbers James S. Ackerman Deuteronomy Robert Polzin Joshua and Judges David M. Gunn 1 and 2 Samuel Joel Rosenberg 1 and 2 Kings George Savran Isaiah Luis Alonso Schokel Jeremiah and Ezekiel Joel Rosenberg The Twelve Prophets Herbert Marks Jonah James S. Ackerman Psalms Robert Alter Proverbs and Ecclesiastes James G. Williams Job Moshe Greenberg The Song of Songs Francis Landy Ruth Jack M. Sasson Lamentations Francis Landy Esther Jack M. Sasson Daniel Shemaryahu Talmon Ezra and Nehemiah Shemaryahu Talmon 1 and 2 Chronicles Shemaryahu Talmon The New Testament Introduction Frank Kermode Matthew Frank Kermode Mark John Drury Luke John Drury John Frank Kermode Acts James M. Robinson The Pauline Epistles Michael Goulder The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles Gabriel Josipovici Revelation Bernard McGinn General Essays The Hebrew Bible and Canaanite Literature Jonas C. Greenfield The New Testament and Greco-Roman Writing Helen Elsom Fishing for Men on the Edge of the Wilderness Edmund Leach The Canon Frank Kermode The Characteristics of Ancient Hebrew Poetry Robert Alter Midrash and Allegory Gerald L. Bruns English Translations of the Bible Gerald Hammond Glossary Index

The art of biblical poetry

Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alter radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as not only a human creation but a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In The Art of Biblical Poetry, his companion to the seminal The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter takes his analysis beyond narrative craft to investigate the use of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. Updated with a new preface, myriad revisions, and passages from Alters own critically acclaimed biblical translations, The Art of Biblical Poetry is an indispensable tool for understanding the Bible and its poetry.

Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Convention

A coherent reading of any art work, whatever the medium, requires some detailed awareness of the grid of conventions upon which, and against which, the individual work operates. It is only in exceptional moments of cultural history that these conventions are explicitly codified, as in French neoclassicism or in Arabic and Hebrew poetry of the Andalusian Golden Age, but an elaborate set of tacit agreements between artist and audience about the ordering of the art work is at all times the enabling context in which the complex communication of art occurs. Through our awareness of convention we can recognize significant or simply pleasing patterns of repetition, symmetry, contrast; we can discriminate between the verisimilar and the fabulous, pick up directional clues in a narrative work, see what is innovative and what is deliberately traditional at each nexus of the artistic creation. One of the chief difficulties we encounter as modem readers in

Northrop Frye, entre archétype et typologie

Partant de la « definition provisoire » que N. Frye dans Le Grand Code (The Great Code. The Bible and Literature, 1981) donne du litteraire qui serait « une structure verbale qui existe pour elle-meme », Robert Alter pense que cette theorie, qui reste au centre de l’ouvrage, est vulnerable du point de vue de la theorie de la litterature et par rapport a la description de la nature de la Bible. Dans les deux parties de cet article, R. Alter entend montrer comment la conception imaginative de Frye est fondee sur toute une serie d’interpretations plus ou moins systematiquement erronees des textes bibliques. Il rappelle que malgre la presence de la metaphore dans sa poesie, la Bible laisse cette poesie dans un « genre minoritaire » par rapport a l’emploi de la prose, principal outil de narration typique du projet biblique.

In Our Beginnings

What do you do to start reading by our beginnings? Searching the book that you love to read first or find an interesting book that will make you want to read? Everybody has difference with their reason of reading a book. Actuary, reading habit must be from earlier. Many people may be love to read, but not a book. Its not fault. Someone will be bored to open the thick book with small words to read. In more, this is the real condition. So do happen probably with this by our beginnings.

Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem

Corresponding about Kafka on not knowing Hebrew the power of the text revelation and memory.

A Response To Critics

Let me begin by expressing my gratitude for the generosity of all three responses to my book. Coming to biblical studies as an incorrigibly literary outsider, I may have given vent at a few points in the book to an impatience with the field that did not do justice to its variety and its current openness. In any case, I am very pleased by the receptiveness my work has generally encountered among biblical scholars, both in these pages and elsewhere. There is one emphasis in my book that variously troubles all three critics. I am inclined to conclude that my own formulations in this respect may have been a little misleading, and I welcome the opportunity to make my position clearer. I repeatedly argued for a significant connection between the biblical world-view and the distinctive artistry of biblical narrative, but it was far from my intention to suggest a simple causal connection between the former and the latter. And, in keeping with David Jobling’s word of caution on this issue, I certainly did not mean to lapse into untenable polar generalizations about the ’Hebrew mind’ in contradistinction to the ’Greek mind’. Any culture’s underlying categories for thinking about the world are an untidy bundle (in this, I am, I suppose, an anti-