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Robert Alter made his way into Biblical Studies in the 1970s, when still in his first decade of teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where for forty years now he has been a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature. That involved him in teaching and writing about modern literature, including modern Hebrew literature; one of his recent works compares Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. But he made the logical if unconventional move to looking also at the ancient Hebrew literature that Christians call the Old Testament. In a series of ground-breaking articles in the journal Commentary that led to his books The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), he asked the kind of questions one might ask of other literature: How does the Bible's narrative work? How is its characterization effected? What are the techniques of Hebrew poetry? How does it use metaphor?
These studies came out at a propitious moment for Alter to be taken seriously in Old Testament study, a time when scholars in the field were becoming aware of the limitations of the dominant contemporary approach and were looking in new directions. Hans Frei had chronicled how 18th-century biblical scholarship became newly aware of the gap between the story the Bible tells and the events that actually happened, and had to make up its mind which it was interested in. There was no contest. History was God in those days, and narrative was abandoned for the quest to locate the actual events. (The only difference in conservative scholarship was continuing to insist that the story and the history were the same, or nearly so.) If you had a copy of John Bright's History of Israel on your shelves, so the assumption went, you had what you needed for understanding the Old Testament.
By the 1970s and 1980s, the downside to that choice of focus had become apparent. If Alter had published his innovative studies a decade or two earlier, in the world of Old Testament scholarship he would have looked quaint. In this new context, he looked really interesting. He has subsequently moved on to translation and commentary, covering the Pentateuch, the David story, and now the Psalms in this latest volume (published in 2007 and scheduled to appear in paperback in the fall of 2009).
Do we need another translation? One aspect of Alter's dissatisfaction with existing versions is that they are anemic. They aim at being reasonably easy to understand, which the Bible does not. To a certain extent he makes an exception for the King James Bible, but he notes that its rhythm, too, conveys no sense of that of the Hebrew, and it is sometimes simply wrong. As he put it in connection with the Pentateuch, the problem with modern translations is their shaky sense of English, with the kjv its shaky sense of Hebrew.
The brief introduction to his translation of the Psalms is itself a masterpiece, mostly of common sense. He begins with their historical background, which means first of all their background in Middle Eastern psalmody (he could give the impression that we have examples of Canaanite psalms; we do not). He notes the ambiguity in the recurrent expression mizmor ledawid, from which readers infer Davidic authorship, but which is actually of rather indistinct meaning. He brilliantly translates it simply "David psalm" and comments, "One cannot categorically exclude the possibility that a couple of these psalms were actually written by David," which nicely makes the point about authorship. He treats with deserved skepticism attempts to identify the precise liturgical background of the Psalms and with almost as deserved skepticism the form-critical approach. He summarizes the possible development of the Psalter without buying into the overly fashionable canonical reading of individual psalms. He considers the Psalms' textual problems, and turns out to be freer about emending the text than I might have expected (or than I would be). And he summarizes his understanding of the nature of Hebrew poetry as it appears in the Psalms.
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