The Alter Psalter: a review

For many years now I have followed the Book of Common Prayer's thirty-day schedule for praying through the Psalms, and during November I used Robert Alter's translation in The Book of Psalms for morning and evening prayers. During this time I read his commentaries for each Psalm as well, and I learned quite a lot in the process. As promised, here is my review of the collection.

To begin, I must admit that I have little grasp of the Hebrew language other than the ability to recite the alphabet. This, of course, would put me at a disadvantage with respect to a substantive review, which I shall not attempt here. Thus I limit myself to describing what Alter does in his translation and commentary and to alerting my readers to some interesting peculiarities unique to his work. What I can tell you is that Alter's scholarship is highly respected, with some exceptions, by his colleagues, and his translation of the entire Hebrew Bible, of which this is a part, represents a significant milestone in disseminating knowledge of the Scriptures and could well be seen as the culmination of his life's work.

The prospective reader may ask why we should read Alter when there are so many other translations of the Bible available in English. Yet there are peculiarities to Alter's translation that make it distinctive and worth exploring. The introduction explains his methodology and his translation choices for certain Hebrew words. Somewhat surprisingly, Alter retains the King James and other versions' use of LORD for the ineffable tretragrammaton, YHWH. But then again, perhaps this should not be unexpected, given that devout Jews have for more than two millennia substituted Adonai whenever they come across the Name in the text. More jarringly, when the text actually reads Adonai, Alter renders it as Master, a name often employed elsewhere as a translation of Baal, the chief god of the Canaanites. This is especially obvious in Psalm 86 where Adonai is used repeatedly throughout.

Like most scholars, Alter doubts that very many of the Psalms were written by David himself and generally renders the appropriate superscription as "A David Psalm," to avoid using less ambiguous prepositions such as for or of. But neither does he think that many Psalms date from as late as the Hasmonean era which he calls an "extravagant scholarly hypothesis" (xvi).

As for the translation of certain Hebrew words, he prefers, for example, to use the more concrete meanings of nephesh, often rendered as soul. These include life, life breath, and even neck or throat, through which the breath passes. For 'awen he uses crime rather than the latinate term iniquity, and for het' he uses offence. Psalm 44:26 he translates as follows: "For our neck is bowed to the dust, / our belly clings to the ground," rather than "For our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly cleaveth unto the earth" (KJV). Anatomical references abound in this version, and he reminds us in footnotes that the word often rendered conscience in English actually means kidneys, thought by the ancient Hebrews to be the seat of the conscience (19, footnote 10, Psalm 7:10; 255, footnote 21, Psalm 73:21). The word usually rendered as salvation Alter renders as rescue, possibly due to the former's use in Christian theology. "God of my salvation" thus becomes "God of my rescue." As Alter puts it, "Biblical Hebrew uses few abstractions" (xxxi).

The earthiness of the early Hebrews is similarly illustrated by their apparent lack of belief in an afterlife apart from a shadowy realm of silence known as Sheol. For those who attempt to find hints of a final resurrection in the Psalms Alter has no patience, stressing instead that God's rescue is for this life. This is in stark contrast to other Near Eastern peoples, such as the Egyptians, who prepared elaborate monuments to their deceased rulers and stocked them with various supplies to aid them in the afterlife. This is why the psalmist is constantly pleading for God to rescue him: because the deceased have been silenced and thus cannot praise him (e.g., Psalm 30:10).

In his translations of the Psalms, Alter attempts where possible to retain something of the poetic rhythm of the Hebrew, which entails, not rhyming and strict metre as in English, but repeated stresses or beats in a line. Here's Alter:

A typical line of biblical poetry has three beats in each verset (I borrow this term for the half lines from [Benjamin] Hrushovski [Harshav], who uses it instead of "hemistich" or "colon" to avoid confusion with other systems of prosody). Some lines exhibit a three-beat four-beat pattern; sometimes a verset may have only two beats. Typically, given the compact structure of biblical words, there are usually only one or two unaccented syllables between the accented ones (xxi).

In this respect, Alter's Psalms are similar in rhythm, if not consistently so, to those of the Grail Psalter sung to Fr. Joseph Gelineau's chant tones, although he makes no mention of this. Here is my attempt to point some of the lines of Alter's translation of Psalm 27 according to the pattern of three beats followed by two beats:

The LÓRD is my líght and my réscue.
     Whóm should I feár?
The LÓRD is my lífe's strónghold.
     Of whóm should I be afraíd?

One thíng do I ásk of the LÓRD,
     it is thís that I seék—
that I dwéll in the hoúse of the LÓRD
     all the dáys of my lífe . . . .

Alter emphasizes that the well-known parallelism of Hebrew poetry is not content simply to repeat a thought in other words from the first to the second verset. There is often a forward development—even a narrative development—pushing it ahead. For example: "Who shall go up on the mount of the LORD, / and who shall stand in His holy place?" (Psalm 24:3) In the first verset, the pilgrim is ascending Mount Zion, and in the second verset he or she is now in the Temple courts. Sometimes the parallelism is triadic, as in Psalm 90: 

For a thousand years in Your eyes
     are like yesterday gone,
          like a watch in the night.

Such triads Alter displays in the text by the use of increasingly indented lines as shown above.

Although I generally appreciate Alter's work, I question one element of his interpretive framework, with relevance especially to Psalm 82, but to others as well. Throughout the Psalms he sees vestiges of Canaanite polytheistic religion, with many of the traditional attributes ascribed to Baal being reassigned to YHWH, including the often-used metaphors of riding on the clouds and defeating the waters of chaos. Of course, there is little doubt that the early Hebrews were influenced by the surrounding peoples' religions, as the Bible itself testifies. But I think it's possible to exaggerate these mythological remnants in such a way as to miss something more concrete and obvious, which Alter is otherwise at pains to emphasize. Here are the two initial versets in Alter's translation:

God takes His stand in the divine assembly,
     in the midst of the gods He renders judgment.

Alter comments: "The efforts of traditional commentators to understand 'elohim here as 'judges' are unconvincing. God speaks out in the assembly of lesser gods and rebukes them for doing a wretched job in the administration of justice on earth." Perhaps. But remember that in the ancient world it was scarcely unusual for rulers to claim divine status for themselves. The Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors are worthy of note in this respect. In light of this historical reality, look again at the words of God's judgements:

How long will you judge dishonestly,
     and show favor to the wicked?
Do justice to the poor and the orphan.
     Vindicate the lowly and the wretched.
Free the poor and needy,
     from the hand of the wicked save them.

Now it is possible that Psalm 82 is a general protest against idolatry posed in mythological terms. But given the Hebrews' penchant for the concrete over the abstract, for the earthy over the ethereal, it seems to me that God's judgement here is directed at earthly rulers who esteem themselves divine and are miscarrying justice in quite ordinary and particular ways.

Is the Alter Psalter appropriate for liturgical use? Some of it probably could be sung or recited in worship using the Gelineau tones, but as the work of a single scholar with his own idiosyncrasies, it may not lend itself well to corporate worship. Nevertheless, his scholarship has prompted me to make a very few alterations to my recently-completed Genevan Psalter project. Sound biblical scholarship can and does contribute to our liturgical practices. With this in mind, I would affirm that exploring the Alter Psalter is definitely worth our time.