Diving into the Hebrew Bible—Feat. Dr. Robert Alter

[Music] welcome to the living room disciple podcast look I can't wait to share my interview guest today but quick story you see this past Christmas my wife gave me this amazing box set this is a translation and commentary of the Hebrew Bible and it has been a huge blessing to me and my learning and the author is Dr Robert alter he has been a professor at Berkeley since 1967 and he's both a hebraist he he he he translates the Hebrew language into English as well as studying and helping other people understand Hebrew narrative and poetic structure and it's that that crossover that has really helped me or drawn me to his work and I am incredibly excited to introduce you all to him today as he is our guest so let's get right into the conversation on the living room disciple podcast where discipleship finds a home [Music] Dr Alter thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today and I was just about to tell you before we hit record that the one of the reasons I'm so excited to talk to you is because your academic background which is extensive kind of has a very in my opinion very interesting overlap uh and correct me if I'm wrong here um between understanding narrative and understanding transl ation for uh what many Believers call the Old Testament text or the Tanakh the Hebrew Bible would would you say that's an accurate kind of overlap yeah um my formal training although I've read Biblical Hebrew since my late teens my formal training is all in comparative literature in modern literatures um English French and modern Hebrew and um uh the story is that that um I was always fascinated by biblical narrative and these seemed to me astonishing stories but I couldn't really figure out because they were they were so spare uh why they were so great and then about 15 years into my career uh I thought well you know maybe I have a couple of ideas so uh I I wrote One article which I thought was going to be a oneoff on the need for a literary perspective on the Bible and it got quite a response so I thought okay I have a another couple of ideas I'll write a second article and one thing led to the the the next and after um I don't know half a year so I found that I was on my way to writing the art of biblical narrative and actually I thought I which is your first major landmark work isn't it correct yeah right so I thought I'd stop with that but um that got was very well received so I thought well why not a book on the art of biblical poetry and by that time I was going down the slippery slope into biblical studies uh and really combining my literary interests with my biblical interests and I think that's why your work inspires me or gets me so excited because I my own background is in English literature and understanding literature and I I came to Faith you know kind of around that time um and so I I kind of it actually wasn't until recently um you know I've been a Christian for uh 15 years now but it wasn't until recently until I I really became convicted I like man like the Bible is a story and even though I feel like that's common language it's not common practice to read the Bible as story yeah and to begin to see narrative through lines through specifically the Old Testament text and I think for me one of the difficulties and this is this is where I'd love to to kind of begin diving deeper into our conversation so uh I've been leveraging resources from the Bible project for some time now and in fact it was in a class from the Bible project one of the students asked the teacher Dr Tim Macky where could we get a translation that helps us understand and see some of these through lines that we're learning about and he recommended your translation which is how I got got on to it so huge shout out to you there but it wasn't until you know later in my walk when I'm I'm really learning and and understanding that there's imagery for example in the Garden of Eden that because of like the Hebrew words or phrases is repeated imagery that is drawn upon consistently throughout the Hebrew uh Bible would you say it's accurate yeah I think that's accurate and um well here's the thing about um picking up how the biblical narrative is shaped as literature it of course has a religious purpose I don't deny that for a moment um but for reasons that we can't really fathom this rather we you know we talk about the glories of ancient Israel but in the big picture of the ancient near East um ancient Israel was The Boondocks it was this of land sandwiched in between these Mighty Empires Assyria and then Babylon to the East and um Egypt to the South uh Empires that that had magnificent art and architecture and sculpture as anyone who's walked through the the ancient uh near Easter um division of a great museum the best one to go to is the British museum in London um you NOA whereas in terms of the material culture of ancient Israel it was kind of rudimentary you know the the um there was nothing astounding about the architecture uh the uh the visual representations we have of human figures are pretty much stick figures yet this small and in some ways backward culture produced writers of Genius whose work far Eclipse everything in the surrounding cultures I I mean gilg is you know a really interesting narrative poem but it doesn't begin to compare with with um the David story or or with with the the patriarchal tales in Genesis and we will never know why it is that these writers decided to convey their vision of monotheism in highly sophisticated subtle literary form but they did now let me say just one more thing I don't want to okay hold forth too long uh so why hasn't it been seen over the ages well Christians and Jews of course regarded the Bible as a source of wisdom of theological truth of moral instru ruction and they began to look past the literary dimension of it and then a kind of cultural Amnesia set in that that is for examp in the narrative and I could give you some examples if you want to explore that the um uh there are very sophisticated narrative conventions and techniques that the Hebrew writers developed and yeah give us give us like one common one or like one easier to grasp for somebody who maybe isn't like a a Hebrew scholar okay well there's a lot of repetition in uh the Hebrew narratives which at first blush is surprising because it's such an economical kind of of narrative and very often you have a setup where um character X says something and then character y re reports what x said to Z and which for modern readers is so boring why would they do that well here's the thing it really isn't boring if you learn to look at it because what happens is that in what looks like uh absolute repetition there's almost always a swerve away from the verbatim and that swerve opens up a window of meaning I I'll give you a very simple example when um uh when puar's wife accuses Joseph of attempted rape she says of her husband not even referring to him by name or by by husband but just he look um he brought us a Hebrew man to um dally with us or to mock us it has a sexual meaning but also just means the Mark um and she's talking to the household staff MH when her husband comes home she gives him the same report in verbatim repetition except instead of saying a Hebrew man she says a Hebrew slave so what's going on the writer is keenly aware of whom is being addressed when she's talking to to the household workers they are almost certainly slaves so she doesn't want to remind them of the the solidarity as slaves between them and Joseph so she says a Hebrew man implying uh maybe as a a recent political candidate who I will not name said that all Mexicans are rapist you know all those crazy Hebrews from kind emphasizing the ethnicity issue right ISS you know uh now when um she turns to her husband she substitutes just one word substitute she substitutes slave for man because to her husband she wants to remind him that your slave a creature is your property had the audacity to try to assault me you see it it what looks like boring repetition is alert with meaning and that happens again and again and I think the fact that it happens again and again for me like so I'm I'm I can hold up here so this is um the the first this is the the law of Moses this is a part of your amazing translation of the Hebrew Bible which I can't recommend to our listeners enough this is my most exciting Christmas gift and this is just one part of it and so I'm working slowly through the Book of Genesis using your translation and one of the things that's sticking out in fact I'll even jump over to it you're referring to um this moment where you know Yahweh looks at those who are building the Tower of Babel and there's this little line that says you know come let us and as a part of that you talk about um the word language in this section occurs five times in this brief text as does the phrase all the Earth and the land of Shar is the same Hebrew word as that of Earth the pros and you say this the pros turns language itself into a game of mirrors is this what you're talking about when you talk about repetition yeah this is a a somewhat different kind of repetition well back a century ago in Germany Martin Boer of course became famous as a religious thinker and FR Rosen um set out to do a new German translation of the Bible and uh one of the things that they discovered I think it was a a real Discovery is that the biblical narrative you this is another technique it uses what they called light ver which means leading words that that is that term that they invented was coined on the model of light Motif in vagian um um music in in vag vag's um operas okay H and what they proposed this turns out to be completely convincing is that as stories unfold there Ser maybe the easiest way to call it in English it's key words there are certain key words that recur and they Define the theme of the story sometimes they occur and they uh their meaning switch or it's a play on two different meanings of the word uh so in the the Tower of babyage was a very compact uh narrative it's just half of one chapter uh uh in early Genesis um the what constitutes language and how language according to this story split apart is um is the the main theme and so language words keeps recurring in that story I want to ask you I think a really important question for our listeners because I guess I don't have a good answer for it and I need help yeah Dr Alter are take a a normal American modern day you know reader of the Bible religious or not they they come in and they pick up just the normal translation that was offered to them NIV NLT ESV um and they read through they just they open the Bible to Genesis 1:1 and they just start reading you know what are they likely going to miss from The Narrative structure of the text because they're not reading in the original language or because of common translation choices um what are some of the difficulties and challenges they may have and what are some of the things that you expect them to miss well the main thing is this the um the various modern translations of the Bible uh which are most of them were done in the second half of the 20th century by um committees composed of um ecclesiastical authorities and Scholars um and these people had excellent credentials the schols had degrees in this country in biblical studies from Harvard and Yale and the University of Chicago and so forth and in England of course from Oxford and Cambridge so the they knew their scholarly PS and q's that they knew their philology but if you do a PhD in any of those August institutions in biblical studies you will never take a course in narrative technique in the Bible in Pros style in Hebrew narrative and so forth so they look quite pive they didn't see it and they proceeded uh under the um illusion that they were making the Bible more accessible to pretty much erase I would say at least 75% of of the literary finesse of the Bible Well I I'll I'll give you one example I'll go back to my bit about repetition and variation um in the book of Samuel there's a civil war between the house of Saul Saul is already dead and the House of David and uh after a lot of Bloodshed uh s the the house of souls General ER decides he's ready to make peace with David and he comes to David's provisional cap capital in heon and um uh they they have a mual together and then negotiate an agreement and the Hebrew works like this uh and he sent him off he being the first he being David the the second one being Abner he sent him off and he went in peace and then joab David's military commander who has a vendetta against uh Abner and also doesn't want to be replaced by Abner comes back from a a a a sort with it with uh some of his troops and they rep him Abner was here and David sent him off and he went in peace and I think that's repeated a third time the exact same words then uh um joab in in a rage uh confronts David and says uh why did you send uh Abner off and he went going off the peace evaporates and you have this ominous going off and in fact what what joab will proceed to do is Ambush uh Abner by the roadside and stab him to death so there a foreshadowing technique almost that's foreshadowing It's very effective and subtle foreshadowing as you can see now I've looked at several modern translations they all eras the repetition you know they think well you don't want to repeat things because they're boring yes they're not at all boring when you you have an eye to the swerve for from the btim so alas a a an innocent reader reading the new English Bible or the Jewish publication Society translation or a couple of others will never see this because it's been erased by the translation I can imagine somebody saying but Dr Alter does it really matter it doesn't affect the story right the events still unfold as the events the plot is still the plot so why does if it makes it easier for me to read or why does why does it matter oh that's a good question well first of all it does make it a less interest in story I do agree with that you don't have this ominous and heent him going off like that uh and there are hundreds of instances like this with repetition and variation in the Bible um but secondly it it often obscures how should I put it uh the social or um dramatic location of the speakers in the dialogue and I'll I'll stick again W with an the example that I gave to to start with Joseph and puar's wife now I if if you don't notice and if the translation in fact obscures the difference between a um an Egyptian man and an Egyptian slave then you're you're not picking up the social interaction first between Po's wife and the household workers second between Mrs potifar and Mr poar one of the things too and not that I want to dive into Theology and Doctrine uh but I but I have been noticing that you know when we're making translation choices oftentimes we vary words or or we adjust the meaning of a Hebrew word depending on the context around the word and I think that makes sense but I was doing a word study the other day and and I'd love for you to to fact check me here because I was looking in Genesis uh two and there's this word I'm I'm confident I cannot pronounce it correctly but it's um when Yahweh um creates Eve it's the word that is often translated helper oh yeah that's a hard one to translate is it azer is that how you say it how do you say AER AER okay so it's this term AER and I think the reason that it's stuck out to me because I was doing the word study this is really on like early on and me starting to try try to dabble in the original language and I am very far away from a scholar and I did a word study and everywhere else I believe that it appeared in the Old Testament text and in the Hebrew Bible that word was used in reference to Yahweh and yahweh's relationship to Israel um I and this is where I'm kind of getting at it's interesting because I think a lot of times the faith tradition that many of us come from would view the word used in the the original Genesis context as this submissive role that Eve is kind of brought into right be the helper of Adam but because we oftentimes do not translate these future words helper in the same context uh we might translate Ally or something to that that context it it's almost like based on what I'm beginning to learn about the authors they would have used that word intentionally so the word word that they would use to try to explain yahweh's relationship in the psalm or whatever it is to Israel was intentionally the same word that Yahweh used to describe what he was creating for Adam do you see where I'm going with this yeah uh that actually I hadn't really thought much about that but you know that that's that's quite possible um I'd have to check a Hebrew concordance to see I if it it's predominantly the the the kind of help that God extends to uh to Israel it it it comes a lot in the Psalms and in the Psalms it's often someone in great plight uh asking God for help or um uh an affirmation that uh God is on my side in a military conflict whether that's relevant to the creation of Eve possibly but I'm not sure I feel like this is the closest I'm ever going to get to feeling really intelligent in a room it's the whole it's part of a two-word uh designation of the role that Eve is to fulfill um and um uh the other word is a preposition which means alongside him or opposite him maybe just with him but it doesn't appear anywhere else so I I found it a kind of ch alleng to come up with a happy English equivalent and I have to say this is a translator of the Bible although there are many delightful moments when you feel you've hit the nail on the head uh there are others where you can't think of anything in English that works the way the Hebrew does and so you come up with something that's a kind of compromise and it might be a compromise that makes you as a translator less than happy is that the biggest challenge that you face as a translator words that just have no real equivalent yeah that that's one I I'm going to suggest two challenges one is if if you look at the semantic map of Biblical Hebrew it doesn't map neatly onto the semantic map of Modern English so there explain a semantic map to me what do you mean by that the terms we use in in our native languages are the the way we map out reality the the way we um Define relationships role uh um um missions and so forth and uh some well okay let me take one of my my um my favorite challenges because it illustrates how the disparity between the two languages there is a Hebrew word that's used all over the place nephesh now now nephesh traditionally is translated as Soul s o um and I think that starts with with the Vulgate uh which translated as anima the sticky thing is that in the biblical world I know this will shock some of your listeners there was no equivalent concept of Soul because I've heard they didn't think of a a body soul split and in the Hebrew Bible this changes of course it changes for Jews not just Christians uh there was no notion of a soul surviving after death so the the word that's represented a soul uh actually means breath or life breath so um when Judah says of his father and Ben and Benjamin his nefes that is his father's nefes is bound up in Benjamin's nephesh his whole life is tied up with the kid's life yeah his very existence yeah yeah right so so so but then it gets more so often I translate it as life or even life breath um but then it gets complicated um when it's in the first person singular you know he biblical verbs are declined according to person and number so you say my nees and mind NE means something like me the essential me it's an intensive form of the first person pronoun we don't have anything like that in yeah then okay it gets still more complicated by um uh extension well by by what's called by by us literary types uh that is comparing two terms because they're in contact nees can also mean throat or neck because the throat is the passageway to the life breath so when when uh the uh King James version says water has come up uh even unto my soul which you wonder what kind of uh spiritual Plumbing that is uh actually what the psalmist is saying is water has come up to my neck throat drowning yeah so as much as I like to translate this this use the same English term with this for the same Hebrew term with NE I couldn't possibly do it I had to keep and there are other me meanings of neish but I think I've tormented that one enough I don't think I I wouldn't I definitely wouldn't call it tormenting but really what you're saying and I think this is important and this is one of the biggest Revelations I've had over the last two or three years you're not just translating words to words you're trying to bridge cultures because the language we use both shapes the culture we live in and is a reflection of the culture we live in so we have plenty of words Spirit soul that try to give us an understanding that the modern generally the modern spiritual understanding across various different religious viewpoints and even you know a religious viewpoints is that there's a Consciousness or spiritual element to a person and there is their physical body and these are separated and our language easily reflects that and that's the assumption that we make of other cultures and other peoples throughout time so when you're coming in as a translator you're now faced with words where they kind of did for throat what we kind of do for heart where we kind of indicate Heart Like a motion or you know it's both a bodily organ and it's like has this uh yeah spiritual kind of sense and they just did the same thing that they have that your whole Essence and being is represented in this word nephesh and well obviously this physical which actually makes more sense for the record than just some part of my chest but anyways yeah this thing we're like you know if I stop if this isn't working if this isn't attached if this is like yeah it's a very logical I think when you think about it from that perspective yeah you see these police procedures where there's a body on the floor and the detective comes in and the first thing he does is he feels the neck for post the nefes yeah and and so that does sound like a really iCal uh challenge that is uh being faced by translators so translating words to words and then translating uh cross-culturally right if I could yeah pick up what you're saying um certain thing well for example the the the Hebrew writer sense of spirituality was not quite it didn't quite working the same way that ours did it's different culture and basically they had a vision of spirituality that was anchored in the body in the human body and I'll I'll give you one example where I think I'm I'm the only person who translated this way but but um I'm almost POS it's right uh in one of the Psalms somewhere in the 60s maybe 63 I'm not sure um the speaker says um uh my okay the traditional translation my soul as nefes my soul thirsted for you oh God in a parched land without water now if you look at the parch land without water you can see that even though my soul thirst of for you God is beautiful MH I'm almost sure what the psalmist was saying was my throat thirsted for you in a parched land without water which maybe it's less elegant than soul but it has a a kind of powerful immediacy that that is a speaker so Longs for God that he imag imagine him himself um wandering through a desert under the blazing sun in the near East and um desperate for water and he's desperate for God in the same way and it's is wouldn't it be possible to say that he he meant and this is what we do with English language all the time it's a play on words and it means both things it's saying like my longing for you is like having a a parched throat like I am I am I just it's like dying of thirst but it's not just my throat it's my whole being is like that it's would that's possible sure you know and I think that's the sophistication of the literary form that your work and other work has kind of helped me begin to like open my eyes to that this is incredibly sophisticated literature and I just zoom by it or I have been Zoom buying it you know for like a decade honestly getting bored more often than I'd like to admit just like I don't know you know um and now I'm kind of Awakening to this excitement that there's so much going on here and I I mean for our listeners maybe this is a bit of a rabbit Trail I'd love to hear your thoughts on it there's almost this be it it it draws out to me the meditative qualities of liter of the biblical literature that um I think this this makes it too trite but but I do think this is true to some extent it's a puzzle at times that is only unlocked or solved and I don't think it's really solved but it's when your mind just P it it's almost like the benefit is less about the quick read and the more of the soaking it in um oh yeah and I I think that's that's true of modern day literature you have you know we have airport literature that's like read it quickly forget about it but then we have the classics right the great books that you come back to in time and time again because there's so much meat on the bone there as it were and I think that's one of the things that your work has kind of helped me unlock in um the Hebrew Bible specifically and I'm I'm really really grateful for that so thank you yeah I would say this my own experience in uh reading the Hebrew Bible that as I um got into it more deeply uh long before I I had any notion of translating the Bible but I was already working on biblical narrative the uh the more I looked at it the more I started seeing things that I had never noticed and things that were sometimes quite amazing and and even now in the last few years now I've recently finished the draft of a short book on the this topic I I began to notice how important dialogue is in Hebrew narrative and and and it began to dawn on me that this is a kind of dialogue that doesn't exist anywhere else in ancient literature I don't know maybe I don't know Chinese ancient literature or um or Indian so maybe there are Exceptions there although I kind of doubt it U and um what I started realizing was that the the virtually unique anticipation of novelist dialogue is in ancient Hebrew narrative what do you mean by that why do I say that yeah what do you mean by that what does that mean well uh I I mean the the um the language is shaped to reflect the speaker relationship to his or her interl as with Po's wife in that example that that I gave and um it often reflects the psychology or the um uh or the character of the speaker and in order to do this see well one important thing these are narratives written in Pros there are very few narratives in early culture that are in Pros the typical form poetry gilgames is poetry Homer's poetry uh hiad is poetry and so forth if you're writing in poetry let's say if you're Homer and everything is um uh dilic hexameter that particular meter that Hees and the the Lang this even though there were eloquent speeches for sure in in Homer in both the odsy and The Iliad they're speeches they're they're not really dialogue it's not that kind of give and take of of dialogue it's not what you would find in in a novel by Faulkner or Hemingway or Virginia wol or whomever and but the Hebrew writers did this and they they didn't hesitate at times to bend the language in order to remain true to the character and to the narrative situation I give you an extreme example okay in absol's Rebellion against David David despite the fact that his son absam has usurped the throne and wants to kill him he doesn't want any harm to come to to Absalom the son say in I think the quite beautiful translation of the King James version which I followed here deal gently with the lad Absalom so uh the the battle takes place David is enjoined by his troops to stay back in this fortified city of Mim and the um uh the forces of David Prevail and joab who realizes that despite David's instructions it would be dangerous to keep Absalon around J is he has a tendency to do this yeah he's a ruthless practitioner of real politi so he sees to it that absam is killed and then um uh somebody a um one of the priests that's in David's um on David's side wants to rush to bring the news from the battlefield to David and joab tries to talk him out of it but he no I got to do this so he go sprinting across the plane uh arrives at M tells David that his forces have prevailed over the rebels forces and then David says is basically is the kid all right he says actually the Hebrew is quite beautiful he say shalom [Music] shalom is all well with the L absam but you have that play on shalom Shalom uh and at that point uh the um uh the messenger starts to babble he speaks these incoherent sentences like maybe two sentences and then he breaks off in the middle now all the translation before mine fig well it's the Bible it has to make sense so they they clean up what he says and make it coherent but this is true dialogue the the messenger is scared to tell David that his son has been killed he might be remembering the messenger who told him about Saul so so this is as far as you know perhaps one of the first texts and and which is really interesting because you have multiple authors spread over you know how how many years would you say the Hebrew Bible was written over well if you look at everything in the Hebrew it's really an anthology yes it spends um eight or nine centuries so eight or nine00 years and um this is really some of the first texts that we see from a civilization that is is using dialogue that's a close approximation of the type of dialogue that we'd be writing in our modern Texas today which you made this point earlier and I think it's really good to come back to because some people might be like okay but why does that matter paper is not cheap and writing is not uh a common uh in the you being being able to translate like this is every decision to repeat means that there is a not just a decision B based on one author but a collective decision by a bunch of people to invest time money and energy into that repetition into this types of dialogue and and it meant that they they felt there was real value to every single word because it wasn't somebody just typing and hitting send on an email you know like and and I think we take that for granted like that was really important which is might be why Gilgamesh uh the aliad these things are written in poetry it's more economical it's easier to remember it's easier to carry on it uh orally versus writing it down and this Backwater uh you know what you say boondocks earlier like you know that in many other ways in forms of art and architecture is not sophisticated chooses this type of literat to dive head first it really is remarkable yeah it is and there's some things in the history of cultures that are are just Mysteries like um why is it that in um England toward the end of the the 16th century and into the first two decades of the 17th century you had th this astonishing cluster of literary Geniuses you know not not only Shakespeare but Spencer and and Ben Johnson and John D and so forth and people say well it's because of the success of British imperialism but that you know doesn't seem to be a very convincing explanation it just happened miraculously yeah I do agree with you even if certain things like British imperialism you know contributed to them the widespread cons consummation of their work the Brilliance of their work and and I think you see that too in Europe in Germany specifically with composers musical composers um right you know again like just absolute Geniuses um but I don't know I think we're still talking those are often still the hubs of civilization at the time and Israel was not it was not that's right and I think that's where it stands out and again I'm you know I'm not an expert on world history and I don't want to pretend to be but I think that's where it stands out is even more remarkable to me and yes I agree entirely yeah I I really do want to bug you for much more of your time and so maybe we'll come have you come back at some point to talk specifically about narrative because I haven't read your book on biblical narrative yet but it's on my list and okay I can't wait to dive into it so uh but Dr Alter thank you so much for your time this evening thank you so much for joining me and Dr Alter on our conversation today for me his work has really helped me understand the Hebrew Bible narrative that that Old Testament narrative and for me that's created both a deeper understanding of who God is and therefore a deeper understanding of the New Testament texts and what the gospels are teaching me and what the kingdom is like and what the Epistles are instructing me to do what I'm trying to say is as I understand biblical narrative in the language and the audience it was intended for I better understand the person of Jesus and how to follow him better and that's why I think conversations like this are really important and why academic work like this is so important so if this interests you I would absolutely recommend checking out Dr alter's work specifically his translation of the Hebrew Bible which is our Old Testament so thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today thank you to Ana live for all the production work to church for getting this episode out there and to Daniel Ramirez for his amazing composition of our music and thank you to you for sticking around to the end and also for listening and supporting our podcast it means the world this is a living room disciple podcast where discipleship finds a [Music] [Music] home

Channel: The Living Room Disciple

Views: 82

Keywords:

Id: dalI3uDE7qs

Length: 52min 0sec (3120 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2024