Quotes from Robert Alter

Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structural common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read: and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself.

Balaam in his wrath hardly seems to notice the miraculous gift of speech but responds as though he were accustomed to having daily domestic wrangles with his asses

Who watches his mouth guards his own life, 3 who cracks open his lips knows disaster.

10 The empty man in arrogance foments strife, but with those who take counsel is wisdom. 11 Wealth can be less than mere breath, but who gathers bit by bit makes it grow.

Subsequent religious tradition has by and large encouraged us to take the Bible seriously rather than enjoy it, but the paradoxical truth of the matter may well be that by learning to enjoy the biblical stories more fully as stories, we shall also come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history.

The notion of the Bible as literature, though particularly contaminated in English by its use as a rubric for superficial college courses and for dubious publishers' packages, is needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language. (It would at the very least be gratuitous to speak of Dante as literature, given the assured literary status of Dante's great poem, though the Divine Comedy is more explicitly theological, or religious, than most of the Bible.)

poetry is a special way of imagining the world or, to put this in more cognitive terms, a special mode of thinking with its own momentum and its own peculiar advantages.

The stories of Saul and David interlock antithetically on the theme of knowledge. Saul, from first to last, is a man deprived of the knowledge he desperately seeks.

in contrast to the second and third lines, would seem perfectly to confirm the synonymous conception of parallelism: "Ada and Zilla, O hearken my voice. / You wives of Lamech, give ear to my speech.

The human figures in the large biblical landscape act as free agents out of the impulses of a memorable and often fiercely assertive individuality, but the actions they perform all ultimately fall into the symmetries and recurrences of God's comprehensive design. Chapter 5 - The Techniques of Repetition

Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others; and a literary perspective on the operations of narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination.

For death holds no mention of You. In Sheol who can acclaim You? -Psalm 6:6

Later Jewish tradition made this the first in a sequence of psalms chanted as a prelude to the Friday-evening prayer for welcoming the Sabbath, evidently because the Sabbath was seen as a celebration of creation.

It may be easiest to see how this dynamics of repetition operates in our poem by working back from the last line to the first.

The Hebrew narrator does not openly meddle with the personages he presents, just as God creates in each human personality a fierce tangle of intentions, emotions, and calculations caught in a translucent net of language, which is left for the individual himself to sort out in evanescence of a single lifetime. -Chapter 4 Between Narration and Dialogue

For the lead player, a psalm; for David, a song. 1 To You silence is praise, God, in Zion, 2 and to You a vow will be paid. O, Listener to prayer, 3 unto You all flesh shall come. My deeds of mischief are too much for me. 4 Our crimes but You atone.

Finally, it is the inescapable tension between human freedom and divine historical plan that is brought forth so luminously through the pervasive repetitions of the Bible's narrative art.

But the underlying biblical conception of character is often unpredictable, in some ways impenetrable, constantly emerging from and slipping back into a penumbra of ambiguity, in fact has greater affinity with dominant modern notions than do the habits of conceiving character typical of the Greek epics.

The Hebrew imagination, we might note, was unabashedly anthropomorphic but by no means foolishly literalist.

As Jurij Lotman has provocatively put it, invoking contemporary notions of computer science, if we understood better how a poem achieved the astonishing degree of "information storage" that it does, our understanding of cybernetics in general might well be advanced.

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.

One thing do I ask of the Lord, it is this that I seek-- that I dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life -Psalm 27:4

Though my father and mother forsook me, the Lord would gather me in. -Psalm 27:10

Michal leaps out of the void as a name, a significant relation (Saul's daughter), and an emotion (her love for David). This love, twice stated here, is bound to have special salience because it is the only instance in all biblical literature in which we are explicitly told that a woman loves a man.