Acclaimed for its masterful new translation and insightful commentary, The David Story is a fresh, vivid rendition of one of the great works in Western literature. Robert Alter's brilliant translation gives us David, the beautiful, musical hero who slays Goliath and, through his struggles with Saul, advances to the kingship of Israel. But this David is also fully human: an ambitious, calculating man who navigates his life's course with a flawed moral vision. The consequences for him, his family, and his nation are tragic and bloody. Historical personage and full-blooded imagining, David is the creation of a literary artist comparable to the Shakespeare of the history plays.
There are countless good reasons to read The David Story, Robert Alter's new translation of the story of King David (beginning in I Samuel and ending in I Kings 2). In the book's introduction, Alter contends that the story of David is "probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh. It also provides the most unflinching insight into the cruel processes of history and into human behavior warped by the pursuit of power." Alter's translation is more literal than the King James version, which makes his rendering of Scripture newly immediate and jarring. (When Samuel anoints David in I Samuel 16, for instance, "the spirit of the LORD gripped David from that day onward.") This David Story is worth reading for the footnotes alone, which describe in vivid detail the mechanics of sheep-shearing festivals, sacrificial feasts, and other cultural phenomena that add depth and life to this familiar story. --Michael Joseph Gross
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
david hamelech is so cool!:
I really like how he looked at four different texts/translations and decided which one he thought fit best in each context while at the same time footnoting whatever the Masoretic text said, whether he chose it or not. I would have liked it better if there had been parallel Hebrew and English texts, but not everybody likes that (or can read it).
It's more than a translation and less than a commentary, as you might have guessed from the title. I kind of like commentaries more, but this is pretty cool.
Read this!:
Illuminating. Robert Alter is more than worth owning for those of us who enjoy clarity in translation.
A really incredible translation of a really great story:
It's really a shame that Robert Altar has "only" translated Samuel I and II and the Five Books of Moses because once you read one of his translations with all of their glorious commentary, using another commentary on another book of the Bible feels sort of empty. I am terribly sad about finishing this book. It's amazingly readable; the footnotes are ample and very satisfying. If you want to read the Books of Samuel and gain an understanding of them and an appreciation for them, I can't imagine there is a... more info
A Nabokovian translation:
The translations of Alter and Everett Fox, both excellent with slight variations between them, are the first in English that deserve to sit alongside the magisterial King James Version.
--Dr. Robert Zaslavsky, author of the recently published "The First Latin Course"
