Robert Alter is best known for his magisterial translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. I tell my Old Testament students that when they study a passage of scripture, one of their first steps should be to read Alter’s translation notes. They’re that good. The Art of Bible Translation pulls back the curtain on the translation process, revealing the decisions and compromises translators makes when handling an ancient text.

What makes Alter’s work so great is not just his fidelity to the lexical meaning of words, but his attentiveness to syntax, word play, and rhythm. These features of the Hebrew text are essential to the meaning of a passage and an attempt should be made to convey these in translation.

From the beginning my translation was impelled by a deep conviction that the literary style of the Bible in both the prose narratives and poetry is not some sort of aesthetic embellishment of the “message” of Scripture but the vital medium through which the biblical vision of God, human nature, history, politics, society, and moral value is conveyed. (Alter, Art of Bible Translation, xii)

Alter is very opinionated about the deficiencies of modern translations (all of them) that try to explain rather than represent (re-present) the text. He resists “dynamic equivalence” (23) as a betrayal of the text since it “inevitably entails a palpable degree of misrepresentation of the Bible’s literary vehicle” (23). Alter doesn’t go this far, but it seems to me that the choices of many modern-day translations committees transform the Bible into a kind of evangelical midrash.

The only area where I disagree with Alter is on the primacy of the King James Version. Alter writes: “I would propose that for an English translation to make literary sense it somehow has to register the stylistic authority of the 1611 version, or, one might say, it needs to create a modern transmutation of how the King James translators imagined the Bible should be rendered in English” (10). While recognizing the debt that all English literature has on the King James Version, I don’t view it as a prerequisite for a literary approach to scripture. That said, Alter is clear-eyed, sometimes praising and sometimes shaking his head at the decisions made by the seventeenth-century translators.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that this is a book for language nerds. Not so! Alter’s explanation of his translation philosophy is riveting, filled with many detailed examples from scripture. I would recommend this as a must-read for anyone who’s read his Hebrew Bible translation. For students, this book provides a helpful overview of the details of the biblical text: syntax, word choice, sound play and word play, rhythm, and dialogue. For pastors, each point Alter makes is illustrated in detail with examples from scripture. These examples alone could be the spark that ignites future sermons.

Alter, Robert. The Art of Bible Translation. Princeton UP, 2019.