At the tent flap sin crouches
James Wood
- The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter
In the beginning was not the word, or the deed, but the face. ‘Darkness was upon the face of the deep,’ runs the King James Version in the second verse of the opening of Genesis. ‘And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Two uses of ‘face’ in one verse, and a third implied face, surely: God’s own, hovering over the face of his still uncreated world. The Almighty, looking into the face of his waters, might well be expected to see his face reflected: it is profoundly his world, still uncontaminated by rebellious man.
The committees of translators appointed by James I knew what they were doing. The face of God and the face of the world (or of mankind) will become a running entanglement throughout the five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). Man will fear to look upon God’s face, and God will frequently abhor the deeds of the people who live on the face of his world. Once Cain has killed Abel, and has been banished by God, he cries out: ‘Behold thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid.’ When the Almighty decides to flood his world, he pledges to destroy every living thing ‘from off the face of the earth’. After wrestling with a divine stranger all night, Jacob ‘called the name of the place Peniel: For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.’ Jacob dies happy that he has seen his son Joseph’s face, and Moses, of course, spoke to God ‘face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend’. The Book of Numbers contains the little prayer so beloved of the Christian liturgy: ‘The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face shine upon thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.’ He casts his now kindly face upon ours. The Hebrew word for ‘face’ is the same in all these verses, so the 17th-century translators were being exact; but they were also perhaps telling us something about God’s circular ownership of his creation, his face above and his face below. Perhaps when they chose ‘the face of the waters’ they had in their ears John’s description of the Lord in Revelation: ‘and his voice as the sound of many waters’.
In his remarkable new translation of the Pentateuch, a monument of scholarship, Robert Alter eschews ‘face’ to describe the surface of the world at the start of Genesis, and I miss the cosmic implications, but his first two verses amply compensate with their own originality: ‘When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said: “Let there be light.” And there was light.’ The King James Version has ‘without form and void’ for Alter’s Anglo-Saxonish ‘welter and waste’, but Alter, as throughout this massive work, provides a diligent and alert footnote:
The Hebrew tohu wabohu occurs only here and in two later biblical texts that are clearly alluding to this one. The second word of the pair looks like a nonce term coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it, an effect I have tried to approximate in English by alliteration. Tohu by itself means ‘emptiness’ or ‘futility’, and in some contexts is associated with the trackless vacancy of the desert.
Alter brings this kind of sensitivity to bear on moment after moment of his translation, and the result greatly refreshes, sometimes productively estranges, words that may now be too familiar to those who grew up with the King James Bible. The Pentateuch, or Torah, contains the great narratives of our monotheistic infancy. It tells the stories of the creation; of Adam and Eve and their children, Cain and Abel; of the Flood and Noah’s escape and God’s promise never to destroy the earth again; of Abraham and God’s covenant with him and his people; of Isaac and his sons Esau and Jacob; of Jacob’s wrestle with God and God’s anointing of Jacob as Israel; the story of Joseph and his brothers; the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt and their exodus, led by Moses; the handing down of the law from the mountain at Sinai; the elaboration of the law or teaching (torah means ‘teaching’); and finally the death of Moses as his people are on the verge of the promised land.
Biblical style is famous for its stony reticence, for a mimesis that Erich Auerbach called ‘fraught with background’. This reticence is surely not as unique as Auerbach claimed – Herodotus is a great rationer of explanation, for example – but it achieves its best-known form in the family stories of Genesis. The paratactic verses with their repeated ‘and’ move like the hands of those large old railway station clocks that jolted visibly from minute to minute: time is beaten forward, not continuously pursued. Yet it is often the gaps between these verses, or sometimes between the clauses of a single verse, that constitute the text’s ‘realism’, a realism created as much by the needy reader as by the withholding writing itself. For example, after the Flood, Noah starts a new occupation: ‘And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard. And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.’ Noah is a lush. This is not without crooked humour of a kind, and the gap-filled rapidity of the narration is the reason for the smile it raises.
Likewise, though generating pathos rather than comedy, the laconic report of Joseph’s response to his brothers works by starving us of information. Joseph, installed by Pharaoh as his right-hand man in Egypt, receives in an official capacity his brothers, who have travelled from Canaan in search of food. He recognises them but disguises himself. Three times he weeps, twice turning away from them and a third time openly. The first time, ‘he turned himself about from them, and wept.’ The second time is more agitated: ‘And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his brother: and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and wept there.’ Finally, after various ruses, he can stand it no longer, and asks his servants to leave him alone while he ‘made himself known unto his brethren. And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard.’ The beauty is that the final episode, the apparent climax, is as terse as the first: secret weeping is no different in this account from public weeping, and revelation is as hidden as disguise. Joseph is no longer hidden from his brothers but he is still hidden from the reader: that surely is the thrust of the narration. And note, too, how our desire to witness this open crying, to bathe in authorial emotion, is reticently, and very movingly, transferred to another, less involved audience: ‘and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard.’
I quoted from the King James Version here, but Alter’s translation honours both the text’s grave simplicity and its almost novelistic attention to different literary registers. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, is for a long time barren, so she proposes that her maid Hagar sleep with Abraham to provide him with an heir. Hagar conceives, and when she sees that she is pregnant, ‘her mistress was despised in her eyes.’ It is one of those intensely human biblical moments: the servant, proud of her plump fertility, cannot but help look down on her withered mistress. But Alter improves on the King James Version’s ‘despised’: ‘And she saw that she had conceived and her mistress seemed slight in her eyes.’ That ‘slight’, for obvious reasons, is very subtle.
Or take the little adjustment Alter makes to the Jacob and Esau tale. Esau is so hungry for the lentils that his brother has that he sells his birthright for a mess of pottage: ‘And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage: for I am faint.’ Alter’s version is more literal, and more natural: ‘And Esau said to Jacob, “Let me gulp down some of this red red stuff, for I am famished.”’ In a footnote, he explains his choice:
Although the Hebrew of the dialogues in the Bible reflects the same level of normative literary language as the surrounding narration, here the writer comes close to assigning substandard Hebrew to the rude Esau. The famished brother cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for ‘stew’ (nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as (literally) ‘this red red’. The verb he uses for gulping down occurs nowhere else in the Bible, but in rabbinic Hebrew it is reserved for the feeding of animals.
There are many examples like this of choices deeply pondered and painstakingly explained; reading Alter’s scripture is a slow business only because one stops so often to put down into the well of one of his life-giving footnotes.
Though the King James Version is sometimes inaccurate, it is generally thought to be, of all English translations, the one that best captures the quiddity of the Hebrew. Early 17th-century English – and mid-16th-century English, since the KJV stands on the shoulders of Tyndale, Coverdale and Cranmer – was not afraid of anti-sentimental reticence (my favourite is perhaps Exodus 13.17, ‘And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword’); it followed the parataxis of the Hebrew narration, the ‘and’ that so often begins a new verse or clause; it understood, as a literary principle, that to repeat a word can be enrichment not exhaustion, and that repetition subtly changes the sense of the repeated word if not its sound (modern versions, like the flat Revised Standard Version, invariably flee from repetition); and it relished the pungent physicality of Hebrew, which often inheres in the verbs.
Alter’s translation brings delight because it follows the precepts of the committees of King James, but is founded on a greatly deeper conversance with Hebrew than the great 17th-century scholars could summon. (No Jew was involved in the King James committees.) And Alter, who has been at the forefront of the rise of what might be called literary biblical studies, and who has educated two or three generations of students and readers in the art of biblical appreciation, brings to his own English a scholarly comprehension of the capacities of literary usage. In his introduction he rightly says that among the great 20th-century English stylists like Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Faulkner – he might have added Lawrence, by far the most biblical writer of 20th-century English – ‘there is not one among them whose use of language, including the deployment of syntax, even vaguely resembles the workaday simplicity and patly consistent orderliness that recent translators of the Bible have posited as the norm of modern English.’ Thus Alter is happy to follow the precedent of the KJV when he feels that it cannot be bettered: his Adam also ‘knew’ Eve, and his Israelites also ‘murmured against’ Moses in the wilderness and lament that they have left behind ‘the fleshpots’ of Egypt. As ever, he usefully defends his reasons. About the ‘fleshpots’, he writes: ‘The Hebrew indicates something like a cauldron in which meat is cooked, but the King James Version’s rendering of “fleshpots” (“flesh” of course meaning “meat” in 17th-century English) has become proverbial in the language and deserves to be retained.’ Well, it became proverbial, but is it still? The word always makes me smile because when I was growing up, albeit in a highly scriptural household, my family used to talk of my grandparents’ house – where I was allowed unlimited sweets – as the ‘fleshpots of Egypt’.
Especially fine is the way Alter seems to dig into the earth of the Hebrew to recover, in English, its fearless tactility. When Pharaoh has his first dream, of seven good ears of corn and seven bad, ‘his heart pounded’, which, Alter informs us in a footnote, follows the Hebrew, whose literal meaning is ‘his spirit pounded.’ (The usually concrete KJV has the softer ‘his spirit was troubled.’) The dream comes to pass, and there are seven fat years and seven lean years. ‘During the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth abundantly,’ runs the Revised Standard Version, itself a wan starveling of the more robust and accurate KJV: ‘And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls.’ But Alter is more daring, and more literal: ‘And the land in the seven years of plenty made gatherings.’ A footnote girds the apparent oddity of ‘gatherings’:
The Hebrew qematsim elsewhere means ‘handfuls’, and there is scant evidence that it means ‘abundance’, as several modern versions have it. But qomets is a ‘handful’ because it is what the hand gathers in as it closes, and it is phonetically and semantically cognate with wayiqbots, ‘he collected’, the very next verb in the Hebrew text. The likely reference here, then, is not to small quantities (handfuls) but to the process of systematically gathering in the grain, as the next sentence spells out.
Or take the moment at the end of Chapter 2 of Exodus, where the Bible-writer tells us that God began to hear the groaning of the Israelites in their Egyptian bondage: ‘So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them,’ says the New International Version. The King James has: ‘And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God had respect unto them.’ Alter has: ‘And God saw the Israelites, and God knew.’ Notice that the New International Version shies away from repeating the word ‘God’, something that fazes neither the KJV nor Alter. But Alter’s reading is at once elegantly emphatic – ‘and God knew’ – and accurate. He informs us that the Hebrew verb has no object, and that Greek translators mistakenly tried to ‘correct’ it. How majestic and indeed divine that objectless ‘knew’ is. And Alter’s version allows one to make new connections with biblical-sounding texts. Saul Bellow, who grew up reading the Hebrew Bible, and whose English was profoundly influenced by both the Tanakh and the King James Version, was very fond of that objectless verb ‘knew’. Tommy Wilhelm, the hero of Seize the Day, is haplessly surrounded by people he fears are the kinds of people who ‘know’ (as opposed to the confused hero): ‘Rubin was the kind of man who knew, and knew and knew,’ Tommy thinks to himself. Mr Sammler’s Planet ends with the eponymous hero reflecting that he has met the terms of his life-contract, those terms ‘that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know’. This always sounded biblical to me, but Alter’s translation of the line in Exodus has given me chapter and verse.
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