Robert Alter - The Hebrew Bible, A Translation with Commentary, W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 2018 ( Copyrighted material)
Parshat HaShavua: Series of Sefaria sheets in progress (November 2022)
EXCERPTS from Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses, Introduction to Genesis (copyrighted material). [MS Emphasis and formatting added]
[MS: Revised Feb 2023: For similar material see also Reading Genesis as a Book, from My Jewish Learning or:
GENESIS - INTRODUCTION (pp 9-16)
"[T]he narrative presupposes that Genesis is a coherent book, what
we moderns would think of as a work of literature…
But, …. two centuries of biblical scholarship have generally assumed that Genesis and indeed each of the Five Books of
Moses as well as most other biblical texts--is not strictly speaking a
book but rather an accretion of sundry traditions, … accumulated in an uneven editorial process … I do think that the historical and textual criticism of the Bible is not so damaging to a literary reading of the text as is often assumed.
The biblical conception of a book was clearly far more open-ended
than any notion current in our own culture, …
The biblical term that comes closest to "book" is sefer. …
A book in the biblical sphere was assumed to be
a product of anonymous tradition. …
The informing assumption of my translation and commentary is that
the edited version of Genesis--the so-called redacted text-which has
come down to us, though not without certain limited contradictions and disparate elements, has powerful coherence as a literary work, and that this coherence is above all what we need to address as readers. …
What seems quite clear, however, is that the redactors had a strong and
often subtle sense of thematic and narrative purposefulness in the way they wove together the inherited literary strands, and the notion of
some scholars that they were actuated by a mechanical compulsion to
incorporate old traditions at all costs is not sustained by a scrutiny of
the text …
It is quite apparent that a concept of composite artistry, of literary
composition through a collage of textual materials, was generally
assumed to be normal procedure in ancient Israelite culture….
I am deeply convinced that conventional biblical scholarship has been …tuning in to the static of transmission, not to the complex music of the redacted story.
The reader will consequently discover that this commentary refers
only occasionally … to the source analysis of Genesis… it seems to me a good deal less interesting than the subtle workings of the literary whole represented by the redacted text….
I have constantly sought, in both the translation and the commentary, to make this biblical text accessible as a book to be read, which is surely what was intended by its authors and redactors. To that end, I discovered that some of the medieval Hebrew
commentators were often more helpful than nearly all the modern ones,
with their predominantly text-critical and historical concerns. Rashi
(acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Itshagi, 1040-1105, France) and Abraham
ibn Ezra (1092-1167…) are the most often cited here; they are two of the great readers of the Middle Ages, and there is still much we can learn from them."
p.12 A few brief remarks about the structure of Genesis as a book are in order. Genesis comprises two large literary units—the Primeval History ( chapters 1–11 ) and the Patriarchal Tales (chapters 12–50). The two differ not only in subject but to some extent in style and perspective.
p.14 The Primeval History, in contrast to what follows in Genesis, cultivates a kind of narrative that is fablelike or legendary, and sometimes residually mythic. The human actors in these stories are kept at a certain distance, and seem more generalized types than individual characters with distinctive personal histories. ... As everywhere in biblical narrative, dialogue is an important vehicle, but in the Primeval History it does not have the central role it will play later, and one finds few of the touches of vivid mimesis that make dialogue in the Patriarchal Tales so brilliant an instrument for the representation of human—and human and divine—interactions. ...
p.14 God’s very first words to Abraham at the beginning of chapter 12 enjoin him to abandon land, birthplace, and father’s house. These very terms, or at least this very sphere, will become the arena of the narrative to the end of Genesis. The human creature is now to be represented not against the background of the heavens and the earth and civilization as such but rather within the tense and constricted theater of the paternal domain, in tent and wheat field and sheepfold, in the minute rhythms of quotidian existence, working out all hopes of grand destiny in the coil of familial relationships, the internecine, sometimes deadly, warring of brothers and fathers and sons and wives. In keeping with this major shift in focus from the Primeval History to the Patriarchal Tales, style and narrative mode shift as well. ...
p.15 Such vivid immediacy in the representation of the densely problematic nature of individual lives in everyday settings is an innovation not only in comparison with the Primeval History but also in comparison with virtually all of ancient literature. What nevertheless strongly binds the two large units of the Book of Genesis is both outlook and theme. The unfolding history of the family that is to become the people of Israel is seen, as I have suggested, as the crucial focus of a larger, universal history.
National existence, moreover, is emphatically imagined as a strenuous effort to renew the act of creation. The Creation story repeatedly highlights the injunction to be fruitful and multiply, while the Patriarchal Tales, in the very process of frequently echoing this language of fertility from the opening chapters, make clear that procreation, far from being an automatic biological process, is fraught with dangers,... But implicit in the end is a promise of more life to come, of irrepressible procreation, and that renewal of creation will be manifested, even under the weight of oppression, at the beginning of Exodus.
p.16 Genesis then, works with disparate materials, puts together its story with two large and very different building blocks, but nevertheless achieves the cohesiveness, the continuity of theme and motif, and the sense of completion of an architectonically conceived book. Although it looks forward to its sequel, it stands as a book, inviting our attention as an audience that follows the tale from beginning to end.
Excerpts from : Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary: Three-Volume Set (p. 143). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. (Copyrighted Material)