5. The Bible as Literature | Dr. Robert Alter The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

In this episode J.J. and Dr. Alter explore the literary approach to the Bible, Dr. Alter's magnificent translation, and the impact of both of these works on the study of Bible in the university and the yeshiva. Also typescenes and how Dr. Alter met his wife at a modern-day well.


Robert Alter is Professor of the Graduate School and Emeritus
Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the
Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of
Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim
Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He has
written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to
the present, on American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature.
He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His
twenty-eight published books include two prize-winning volumes on
biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of
Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. He has devoted book-
length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, Nabokov, and the self-reflexive
tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into ten
different languages. Among his publications over the past thirty
years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka,
Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), Imagined Cities (2005), Pen of
Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010),The Art of
Bible Translation (2019), and Nabokov and the Real World 2021).
His completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with a commentary
was published in 2018 in a three-volume set. In September 2023 his
biography of Amos Oz will appear.
In 2009 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles
Times for lifetime contribution to American letters and in 2013 the
Charles Homer Haskins Prize for career achievement from the
American Council of Learned Societies. In 2019 the American
Academy of Arts and Letters conferred on him an award for literature.
He has been given honorary degrees by Yale, Northwestern, the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and three other institutions.