UC Berkeley professor Robert Alter has a new annotated English translation of the Hebrew Bible (Pentateuch). In the New Yorker, novelist John Updike gives Alter’s work a mixed review, and concludes with this:
The miracle of the Pentateuch is that, unlike the numerous other tribes and gods that vitally figure in it, the Jews and their God have survived three millennia. The Israelites’ effort to claim and maintain their Promised Land fuels a contemporary crisis and occupies today’s painful headlines. It is still cruelly true that, as we read in the Alter version of Numbers:
If you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land from before you, it will come about that those of them you leave will become stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they will be foes to you on the land in which you dwell.
Jewish tradition ‘fuels’ this crisis? Seems abundantly clear that Palestinian terrorism is actually responsible for that.
But the modern applicability of the quoted biblical passage is certainly striking, as Updike notes.
(If you’re interested, here’s another, glowing review of Alter’s work in the New York Times.)
