In what is both a radical approach to the Bible, and a fundamental return to its narrative prose, Robert Alter reads the Old Testament with new eyes--the eyes of a literary critic. Alter takes the old yet simple step of reading the Bible as a literary creation.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
Alter did it again:
Simply the best reading I have done in months. The first chapter is worth paying for the entire book. Robert Alter just did it again.
A Fascinating Way to Read the Bible:
Modern Biblical scholarship has tended toward a process of atomization: how many editors were involved in the creation of the Bible? How many different strands of tradition can we find in a given story? Robert Alter's "The Art of Biblical Narrative" at once provides a corrective to this tendency, and a striking alternative way of understanding the Good Book. Although recent scholarship has emphasized historical- and textual-critical methodologies, Alter chooses a literary-critical approach; that is, he... more info
A must read for Hebrew students or anyone wanting to better understand narrative portions of Scripture:
Alter's purpose in the book is made very clear, and that is to show readers of biblical narrative that there are authorial devices implanted in the narrative to heighten and signify parts of the narrative that the author feels is important or worth noting. He begins to show this purpose in chapter one by seeing the Bible as a literary piece of art. He illustrate mainly with the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 because it does not seem to fit with the rest of the Joseph narrative. However when one... more info
This book hits the mark!:
love this book. I am only on page 40 but am really enjoying every bit of it. Anyone interested in the Bible should read this book or any books by Robert Alter. He illuminates subtle literary devises in the text that you wont find anywhere else in Biblical scholarship, except maybe if you were a Torah Scholar and studied the Midrash Tanchuma (Hebrew commentary on the 5 Books of Moses) and understood it completely. But then Professor Alter translates all this into understanding the structure of well-written... more info
