Quotes from Robert Alter

For much of art lies in the shifting aperture between the shadowy fore-image in the anticipating mind of the observer and the realized revelatory image in the work itself, and that is what we must learn to perceive more finely in the Bible.

What we have in this great story, as I have proposed elsewhere, is not merely a report of history but an imagining of history that is analogous to what Shakespeare did with historical figures and events in his history plays.

What this typographical distinction should make immediately apparent in the passage is the highly subsidiary role of narration in comparison to direct speech by the characters.