Robert Alter > Quotes

“Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structural common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read: and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself.”
― Robert Alter

“Balaam in his wrath hardly seems to notice the miraculous gift of speech but responds as though he were accustomed to having daily domestic wrangles with his asses”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“Who watches his mouth guards his own life, 3 who cracks open his lips knows disaster.”
― Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary

“Judah and Jacob-Israel are not simple eponymous counters in an etiological tale (this is the flattening effect of some historical scholarship) but are individual characters surrounded by multiple ironies, artfully etched in their imperfections as well as in their strengths. A histrionic Jacob blinded by excessive love and perhaps loving the excess; an impetuous, sometimes callous Judah, who is yet capable of candor when confronted with hard facts; a fiercely resolved, steel-nerved Tamar—all such subtly indicated achievements of fictional characterization suggest the endlessly complicated ramifications and contradictions of a principle of divine election intervening in the accepted orders of society and nature.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“As Jurij Lotman has provocatively put it, invoking contemporary notions of computer science, if we understood better how a poem achieved the astonishing degree of “information storage” that it does, our understanding of cybernetics in general might well be advanced.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry

“The notion of "the Bible as literature," though particularly contaminated in English by its use as a rubric for superficial college courses and for dubious publishers' packages, is needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language. (It would at the very least be gratuitous to speak of "Dante as literature," given the assured literary status of Dante's great poem, though the Divine Comedy is more explicitly theological, or "religious," than most of the Bible.)”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“What is it like, the biblical writers seek to know through their art, to be a human being with a divided consciousness—intermittently loving your brother but hating him even more; resentful or perhaps contemptuous of your father but also capable of the deepest filial regard; stumbling between disastrous ignorance and imperfect knowledge; fiercely asserting your own independence but caught in a tissue of events divinely contrived; outwardly a definite character and inwardly an unstable vortex of greed, ambition, jealousy, lust, piety, courage, compassion, and much more?”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“There is no point, to be sure, in pretending that all the contradictions among different sources in biblical texts can be happily harmonized by the perception of some artful design. It seems reasonable enough, however, to suggest that we may still not fully understand what would have been perceived as a real contradiction by an intelligent Hebrew writer of the early Iron Age, so that apparently conflicting versions of the same event set side by side, far from troubling their original audience, may have sometimes been perfectly justified in a kind of logic we no longer apprehend.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“Subsequent religious tradition has by and large encouraged us to take the Bible seriously rather than enjoy it, but the paradoxical truth of the matter may well be that by learning to enjoy the biblical stories more fully as stories, we shall also come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“poetry is a special way of imagining the world or, to put this in more cognitive terms, a special mode of thinking with its own momentum and its own peculiar advantages.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry

“10 The empty man in arrogance foments strife, but with those who take counsel is wisdom. 11 Wealth can be less than mere breath, but who gathers bit by bit makes it grow.”
― Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary

“When Israel came out of Egypt, 1 the house of Jacob from a barbarous-tongued folk, Judah became His sanctuary, 2 Israel His dominion. 3 The sea saw and fled, Jordan turned back. 4 The mountains danced like rams, hills like lambs of the flock. 5 What is wrong with you, sea, that you flee, Jordan, that you turn back, 6 mountains, that you dance like rams, hills like lambs of the flock? 7 Before the Master, whirl, O earth, before the God of Jacob, Who turns the rock to a pond of water, 8 flint to a spring of water.”
― Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary

“[T]he early diary proves retrospectively to be not only a laboratory for self-exploration but a technical testing-ground for the future writer of fiction. Indeed, for someone with literary ambitions, the two impulses are hard to separate: fictional invention itself is another vehicle of self-knowledge, a way of recasting one's experience under the camouflage of fabulation; and, correspondingly, even so scrupulous an effort to observe what one had undergone as we find in Fogel's diary is also on some level a playing with the possibility of turning it into literature.”
― Robert Alter, Hebrew and Modernity

“in contrast to the second and third lines, would seem perfectly to confirm the synonymous conception of parallelism: “Ada and Zilla, O hearken my voice. / You wives of Lamech, give ear to my speech.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry

“72 1 For Solomon. God, grant Your judgments to the king and Your righteousness to the king’s son. 2 May he judge Your people righteously and Your lowly ones in justice. 3 May the mountains bear peace to the people, and the hills righteousness. 4 May he bring justice to the lowly of the people, may he rescue the sons of the needy and crush the oppressor. May they fear you as long as the sun 5 and as long as the moon, generations untold. May he come down like rain on new-mown grass, 6 like showers that moisten the earth. May the just man flourish in his days—7 and abundant peace till the moon is no more. And may he hold sway from sea to sea, 8 from the River to the ends of the earth. Before him may the desert-folk kneel, 9 and his enemies lick the dust. May kings of Tarshish and the islands 10 bring tribute, may kings of Sheba and Siba offer vassal-gifts. And may all kings bow to him, 11 all nations serve him. For he saves the needy man pleading, 12 and the lowly who has none to help him. 13 He pities the poor and the needy, and the lives of the needy he rescues, 14 from scheming and outrage redeems them, and their blood is dear in his sight. 15 Long may he live, and the gold of Sheba be given him. May he be prayed for always, all day long be blessed. 16 May there be abundance of grain in the land, on the mountaintops. May his fruit rustle like Lebanon, and may they sprout from the town like grass of the land. May his name be forever. 17 As long as the sun may his name bear seed. And may all nations be blessed through him, call him happy. Blessed is the LORD God, Israel’s God, performing wonders alone. 18 And blessed is His glory forever, and may His glory fill all the earth. 19 Amen and amen. The prayers of David son of Jesse are ended. 20”
― Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary

“Finally, it is the inescapable tension between human freedom and divine historical plan that is brought forth so luminously through the pervasive repetitions of the Bible’s narrative art.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“For the lead player, a psalm; for David, a song. 1 To You silence is praise, God, in Zion, 2 and to You a vow will be paid. O, Listener to prayer, 3 unto You all flesh shall come. My deeds of mischief are too much for me. 4 Our crimes but You atone.”
― Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary

“The human figures in the large biblical landscape act as free agents out of the impulses of a memorable and often fiercely assertive individuality, but the actions they perform all ultimately fall into the symmetries and recurrences of God's comprehensive design.

Chapter 5 - The Techniques of Repetition”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“At the very beginning of the poetic argument, we entered the world of Job’s inner torment through the great death wish poem that takes up all of Chapter 3. These first thirty seven lines of God’s response to Job constitute a brilliantly pointed reversal, in structure, image, and theme, of that initial poem of Job’s. Perhaps the best way to sense the special weight of disputation over theodicy is to observe that it is cast in the form of a clash between two modes of poetry, one kind spoken by man and, however memorable, appropriate to the limitations of his creaturely condition, the other kind of verse a poet of genius could persuasively imagine God speaking….

Perhaps the finest illustration of this nice match of meaning and imagery between the two poems is the beautiful counterbalance between the most haunting of Job’s lines wishing for darkness and the most exquisite of God’s lines affirming light. Job, one recalls, tried to conjure up an eternal starless night: “Let its twilight stars go dark, / let it hope for light in vain, / and let it not see the eyelids of the dawn” (3:9). God, near the beginning of His first discourse, evokes the moment when creation was completed in an image that has become justly famous in its own right but that is also, it should be observed, a counterimage to 3:9: “When the morning stars sang together, / and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (verse 7). That is, instead of a night with no twilight stars, with no glimmer of dawn, the morning stars of creation exult. The emphasis in this line on song and shouts of joy also takes us back to the poem of Chapter 3, which began with a triumphant cry on the night of conception—a cry Job wanted to wish away—and proceeded to a prayer that no joyous exclamation come into that night (3:7).”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry

“Later Jewish tradition made this the first in a sequence of psalms chanted as a prelude to the Friday-evening prayer for welcoming the Sabbath, evidently because the Sabbath was seen as a celebration of creation.”
― Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary

“The stories of Saul and David interlock antithetically on the theme of knowledge. Saul, from first to last, is a man deprived of the knowledge he desperately seeks.”
― Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel

“intensification because as the general term is transformed into a specific instance or a concrete image, the idea becomes more pointed, more forceful.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry

“One thing do I ask of the Lord,
it is this that I seek--
that I dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life
-Psalm 27:4”
― Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary

“It is only by imposing a naïve and unexamined aesthetic of their own, [Tzvetan] Todorov proposes, that modern scholars are able to declare so confidently that certain parts of the ancient text could not belong with others: the supposedly primitive narrative is subjected by scholars to tacit laws like the law of stylistic unity, of noncontradiction, of nondigression, of nonrepetition, and by these dim but purportedly universal lights is found to be composite, deficient, or incoherent. If just these four laws were applied respectively to Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Tristram Shandy, and Jealousy, each of these novels would have to be relegated to the dustbin of shoddily “redacted” literary scraps.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“Though my father and mother forsook me,
the Lord would gather me in.
-Psalm 27:10”
― Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary

“the writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters, to give their dialogues revelatory shape, to weave together episodes and characters with a fine mesh of recurrent motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of the events through allusion, metaphor, and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to understand it. In this elaborately wrought literary vehicle, David turns out to be one of the most unfathomable figures of ancient literature.”
― Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel

“The Hebrew narrator does not openly meddle with the personages he presents, just as God creates in each human personality a fierce tangle of intentions, emotions, and calculations caught in a translucent net of language, which is left for the individual himself to sort out in evanescence of a single lifetime.

-Chapter 4 Between Narration and Dialogue”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“Since art does not develop in a vacuum, these literary techniques must be associated with the conception of human nature implicit in biblical monotheism ....: every person is created by an all-seeing God but abandoned to his or her own unfathomable freedom, made in God’s likeness as a matter of cosmogonic principle but almost never as a matter of accomplished ethical fact; and each individual instance of this bundle of paradoxes, encompassing the zenith and the nadir of the created world, requires a special cunning attentiveness in literary representation.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“For death holds no mention of You.
In Sheol who can acclaim You?
-Psalm 6:6”
― Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary

“A good many proverbs prove to be narrative vignettes in which ... the moral calculus of reward for the good and retribution for the wicked is turned into a seesaw of miniature narrative: “The righteous is rescued from straits, / and the wicked man comes in his stead” (11:8).... The two sequenced images, then, that the line evokes are of the good man, first seemingly pinned down and then popped out of the tight squeeze into which he has fallen, and the wicked man slipped into his place. This is very neat, but, we may ask, is that the way the world is? Obviously not—obvious, I think, not only to us but also to the poet in Proverbs, who has chosen these emblematic images to represent an underlying principle of moral causation that he believes to be present in reality but that he knows would never be so perspicuous in the untidiness of experience outside literature. This for him is precisely the advantage of literary expression, the possibility of understanding made available through “proverb and adage.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry