Ancient Israel - The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings

by Robert Alter

W. W. Norton & Co., 2013

That miracle of modern scholarship, Robert Alter's ongoing translation-with-commentary of the Bible, has a new addition this season, and that's cause for rejoicing among the roughly 400 readers in the world who'll be interested and who're prepared to do a little work for their rejoicement. Alter's lovely The Book of Psalms, his rigorously inquisitive edition of the so-called Wisdom Books, and his astonishing The Five Books of Moses are now joined by his edition of the rousing epic heart of the Old Testament, the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.

This new volume has the soporific title Ancient Israel, which readers can only hope was an imposition requested by W. W. Norton. The books involved here deal with the nevi'im ri'shonim, the former prophets, and The Former Prophets is the obvious choice for a title (even better - but far too daring for the timid 21st century publishing crowd - would have been Nevi'im Ri'shonim; Alter isn't exactly writing for the David Baldacci crowd - his readers would be happy to figure it out on their own). But even Alter seems a bit nervous about confusing prospective newcomers:

Some will wonder which prophets are involved, for the figures we usually think of as prophets like Jeremiah or Ezekiel are nowhere in evidence, and Isaiah has only a late walk-on appearance toward the end of 2 Kings. Then, the question poses itself: Former to what? Or even, what did they do after they stopped being prophets?

Fortunately, the whopping great material of the books he's translating this time around can survive even the dullest of presentations. These are the books that contain some of the Bible's best stories (that those stories also have by far the least direct divine intervention might not be entirely coincidental) - crazy, dangerous Saul, mighty, horny Samson, and most of all the utterly human figure of David, who goes from humble shepherd boy to famed warrior to rebel to king to tyrant before our eyes. Alter is a scrupulous scholar, and every page of Ancient Israel bristles with his enthusiastic learning - but there's an extra edge of excitement when he gets to the David bits:

The story of David is probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh ... nowhere is the Bible's astringent narrative economy, its ability to define characters and etch revelatory dialogue in a few telling strokes, more brilliantly deployed.

Violent anarchy is constantly erupting to the surface in these ancient stories, and there's rape,torture, mutilation, and warfare on virtually every page. Alter navigates all this larger-than-life material with the sure footing of a natural-born teacher intent on making it all interesting to the uninitiated at the same time that he makes it new for the experienced:

Judges represents, one might say, the Wild West era of the biblical story. Men are a law unto themselves - "Every man did what was right in his own eyes." There are warriors who can toss a stone from a slingshot at a hair and not miss; a bold left-handed assassin who deftly pulls out a short sword strapped to his right thigh to stab a Moabite king in the soft underbelly; another warrior-chieftain who panics the enemy camp in the middle of the night with the shock and awe of piercing ram's-horn blasts and smashed pitchers

Readers of The Five Books of Moses will no doubt vividly recall how alien Alter's translation made those so-familiar books. Nothing was done purely for shock value, but even so, a certain jolt to complacency was clearly intended. Ancient Israel has much the same effect, and like that earlier work, it's refreshingly sensitive to vast body of translations that came before it. Sometimes these sympathies can surprise; one would think the famous but antique phrasing of Samson striking the Philistines "a great blow, hip on thigh" wouldn't survive a reformer's zeal, but Alter not only keeps it, he eloquently defends it:

The implication is that he battered down a throng of Philistines, though the number in this case is not specified. The word "hip" actually means "leg" or "calf of the leg," but "hip on thigh" is a fine old locution coined by the King James translators that effectively conveys the intended sense of a murderous thrashing.

Similarly sharp insights fill the length of the book, as when we're told that David's death-bed advice to Solomon is not "the wisdom of the Torah of Moses but rather the wisdom of a Talleyrand," or when Saul's shortcomings as a leader are succinctly pointed out:

Saul, as the man head and shoulders taller than all the people, might be thought to be the one Israelite fighter who stands a chance against Goliath. Instead, he leads his own troops in fearfulness: the stage is set for his displacement by David.

The bottom half of every page is given over to notes on the text, and since those notes are printed in a font only slightly smaller than the text itself (no eye-strain), the curious effect of a double narrative is maintained throughout - one the one hand, the murderous rampaging of ancient epics, and on the other, the smart, sharply perceptive observations of one of the age's best Biblical scholars. This is surely twice the reward for readers who'll venture past the boring title and the poorly-chosen Rembrandt cover-illustration (it's The Blinding of Samson, and we mostly get the shadows)(a bright Tiepolo would have killed Norton?). A mighty work is here continued.