Genesis translation and commentary by Robert Alter The Beginning of Desire by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

...It is hard to describe in the space of a short review the many felicities of this re-markable translation, but surely Alter's dual competence as biblical scholar and literary critic has uniquely positioned him to give us a translation that is both vigorous and contemporary...

...Not only is Zornberg's book leagues re-moved from popular trivializations, it does what all successful midrash is meant to do: open up new perspectives on ancient texts...

...He does not die and is not resurrected...

...Because of what struck me as, on the whole, the rather silly things some of the panelists said on Moyers's special on Genesis, I have grown rather leery of specifically modern embellishments on Genesis and so I approached this book with wariness...

...Edward T. Oakes For my money the best Old Testament scholar of the twentieth century was Ye-hezkel Kaufmann, a Rus-sian Jew who emigrated to Palestine in 1920 and became professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem...

...Avivah Zornberg's reflections on Gen-esis are as different from Alter's ap-proach as might be imagined: where he is sober, she is expansive...

...Because the midrashim Zornberg selects for her treatment are all traditional, they provide a refreshing alternative to mod-ern homiletic sentimentality...

...Alter's book is first and foremost a translation-and only secondarily a commentary...

...And correlatively, whatever conceptual borrowings Israel made from its Near Eastern environ-ment, these borrowings were fitted into a world view that from the outset was at fundamental odds with the mythologi-cal polytheism of its neighbors...

...And while the comments she makes on these midrashim ransack contemporary authors (Ricceur, Ker-mode, Kafka, etc...

...Indeed this is the usual prac-tice in many Jewish homes that have a weekly study group: the "Bible" they study is the Bible and the semicanonized tradition of stories that go with them...

...When I first read Kaufmann I asked myself why these perfectly obvious truths seemed to be slighted in other scholarship: Was it Kaufmann's native fluency in Hebrew, his Jewishness, or his innocence of schooling in the Ger-man/Hegelian tradition...

...he neither inherits nor be-queaths his authority...

...rather she takes only traditional semicanonical midrashim for her theme...

...Upon reflection, it is obvious that if the gods have a ge-nealogy, the world-womb out of which they were born is greater than them-selves, and so "in myth the gods appear not only as actors but as acted upon...

...How has God suddenly become so nice in all our preaching...

...I do not have answers to these questions, but they provide, I believe, the right context for understanding the vividness, clarity, and insight available in these two books under review...

...For the churches and synagogues desperately need a translation of all the books of the Bible of this quality...

...Sarah swoons and dies when she hears of her son being bound to the altar...

...He has no sexu-al qualities or desires and shows no need of or dependence upon powers out-side himself...

...these authors usual-ly have something disconcertingly, well, Kafka-esque to add-a dimension which is very much in line with the midrash tradition itself, where indeed Kafka got so much of his material and his sensi-bility...

...Al-though the Revised Standard Version is still the best overall translation of the whole Bible, Alter convincingly shows in his introduction, but more especial-ly in the success of the translation itself, that the time has come for a fresh ren-dering, one that is vivid, vigorous, bib-lical-and so completely contemporary that one does not notice the language but lives in the telling of the story itself...

...She does not weave her tales from whole-spun modern cloth, leaving the reader with a queasy feel-ing of just having watched a soap opera of negligent fathers and neurotically re-pressed mothers...

...But even that truncated husk of Kaufmann's original was enough to show the English-speaking world what Old Testa-ment scholarship can look like when freed of the Hegelian hammerlock that became so dominant in the German scholarship of the nineteenth century, a developmental outlook on historical cau-sation that then went on to influence al-most all the rest of later scholarship (much to its detriment, in my opinion...

...where he in-sists on the spare narrative, she builds on those later embellished narratives called midrashim...

...Reading Kaufmann makes clear how revolutionary the book of Genesis has been to the religious legacy of human-ity, how at a single stroke it altered the implicit metaphysical presuppositions of paganism, and how much contem-porary scholarship misses the point if it is solely bent on tracing influences and not radical differences...

...My fears were misplaced...

...He subsequently wrote a six-volume history, in Hebrew, of the religion of ancient Israel, only a much-abridged version of which was ever translated into English...

...And fascinating they are...

...Although she does not mention it, some of Zornberg's stories have interesting parallels with those in Greek mytholo-gy: Niobe's tears, Agamemnon's sacri-fice of Iphigenia, the wife who died of grief under the mistaken impression her husband had died in the Trojan War, etc...

...But as Kaufmann was for history of religions, Alter is to transla-tion: a man uniquely positioned to coun-teract the tendentious posturing of most other modern translations and the ex-tratextual spin-doctoring of, for exam-ple, so many panelists in the recent PBS talk-fest on Genesis hosted by Bill Moyers, too many of whom would in-dulge in embarrassing fatuities like ac-cusing Abraham of child abuse, etc...

...In another version, Abraham is living the high-life: he feasts and entertains but neglects to sacrifice to God, and when Satan points this re-mission out to the good Lord, God is pro-voked to ask Abraham to atone for this negligence by sacrificing his son...

...moreover, they eat and drink, fall sick and require healing, need and invent tools, etc...

...This book also casts a rather uncom-fortable glare on modern sensibilities...

...Crucially, in pagan religion the gods have a genealogy: they are born and, in most tellings, usually take over the pan-theon by usurping the earlier generation of divinities, as when Zeus rebelled against his father Chronos...

...This is also why the gods are not only sexually differentiated but are subject to sexual needs, desiring and mating with each other...

...Abraham, for example, is a "philosopher" who comes to monotheism through rational speculation and then smashes his father's idols in disgust...

...The Beginning of Desire Reflections on Genesis Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg Doubleday Image Books, S75.95,45b pp...

...Fate, says myth, apportions lots to the gods as well as to men...

...Here, under Alter's and Zornberg's ministrations, Genesis looks different, startlingly different...

...My only regret in reading this work is to realize how much the translation of the whole Bible nowadays transcends the capacities of any one individual, at least if the translator wants to take into consideration the vast expanse of recent research in biblical semantics and philol-ogy...

...in anoth-er story Isaac goes blind on the altar be-cause the tears of angels falling from heaven at his plight get into his eyes...

...This habit of expand-ing on the biblical material grew up in Jewish Bible-based cultures because of a feature everyone immediately notices about so many biblical narratives, es-pecially those in Genesis: their laconic telling...

...But the God of the Hebrews, in Kaufmann's lapidary words, "has no pedigree, fathers no gen-erations...

...If s going to be a long haul back up Milton's Mount Moriah again, whence alone we can sense the majesty of Genesis in all its radiant distinction and eerie difference from us...

...And that only highlights how far we have moved from the inner world of the Bible...

...So brief, so spare are the narra-tive interventions of most biblical tales that they positively invite later elabo-ration...

...In contrast to the vague evolutionism of the German school, Kaufmann was able to show-without ever straying from strict historical-critical principles-that Israel did not grow into its monotheism: its religion neither arose from a "dialec-tic" with its neighbors nor did it achieve its final (universal) monotheism because of the later influence of the more theo-logically elaborate and self-consciously literary prophets...