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Quote by Robert Alter

“The monotheistic revolution of biblical Israel was a continuing and disquieting one. It left little margin for neat and confident views about God, the created world, history, and man as political animal or moral agent, for it repeatedly had to make sense of the intersection of incompatibles—the relative and the absolute, human imperfection and divine perfection, the brawling chaos of historical experience and God’s promise to fulfill a design in history. The biblical outlook is informed, I think, by a sense of stubborn contradiction, of a profound and ineradicable untidiness in the nature of things, and it is toward the compression of such a sense of moral and historical reality that the composite artistry of the Bible is directed.”

Quote by Robert Alter

Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
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The Art of Biblical Narrative

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Robert Alter

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“For as soon as the idea of one flesh has been put forth ... the narration proceeds as follows: “And the two of them were naked, the human and his woman, and they were not ashamed.” After being invoked as the timeless model of conjugal oneness, they are immediately seen as two, a condition stressed by the deliberately awkward and uncharacteristic doubling back of the syntax in the appositional phrase, “the man and his woman” – a small illustration of how the flexibility of the prose medium enables the writer to introduce psychological distinctions, dialectical reversals of thematic direction, that would not have been feasible in the verse narratives of the ancient Near East.”

BibleGenesisRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
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“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.”

BibleUlyssesRobert AlterJames JoyceFaulknerThe Sound And The Fury
Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
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“If we could actually hear God talking, making His will manifest in words of the Hebrew language, what would He sound like? Since poetry is our best human model of intricately rich communication, not only solemn, weighty, and forceful but also densely woven with complex internal connections, meanings, and implications, it makes sense that divine speech should be represented as poetry. Such speech is directed to the concrete situation of a historical audience, but the form of the speech exhibits the historical indeterminacy of the language of poetry, which helps explain why these discourses have touched the lives of millions of readers far removed in time, space, and political predicament from the small groups of ancient Hebrews against whom Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and their confreres originally inveighed.”

PoetryBibleRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Poetry
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“The logic of the language of poetry brings Amos to glimpse for a moment a new order of reality. Strictly speaking, this is not yet eschatology as it would be developed seven or eight centuries after Amos, but the imagination in prophetic poetry of restored national existence without want or pain or danger is an important way station to explicit doctrines of a radically new era that will replace earthly life as we know it.”

PoetryBibleRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Poetry
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“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 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.”

BibleProverbsRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Poetry
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