The Necessary Bad Faith in Reading the Bible as Literature

I thank Jon Levenson and Leonard Greenspoon for their kind responses to my essay on Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible. I’ll address their pieces in the reverse order of their appearance in Mosaic.

Leonard Greenspoon wonders why I didn’t mention Isaac Leeser in my list of solo Bible translators. The reason is that Leeser’s The Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures is not an original translation but a revision of the King James Version (KJV). Leeser took the KJV and made changes in it, sometimes more so and sometimes less so, while always retaining it as a baseline. Of the 90 words in the KJV’s rendition of the opening five verses of Genesis, for example, Leeser kept 85 exactly as they were.

As for Everett Fox, Richard Elliott Friedman, and Aryeh Kaplan, whom Greenspoon also mentions, they translated, as he himself observes, only parts of the Bible, mainly the Pentateuch, and their achievements, however great, aren’t comparable to Alter’s.