Genesis: Translation and Commentary

Alter’s Genesis is unsurpassed as a literary translation and narrative commentary. His rendering preserves repetitions, rhythms, concrete language and deliberate ambiguities that smoother English translations often obscure, while his notes illuminate dialogue, type-scenes, recurring key words, characterization and patterns of reversal. He is particularly adept at showing how seemingly small verbal details carry the emotional and literary weight of a story, repeatedly revealing dimensions of familiar narratives that even major technical commentaries can miss. Alter offers relatively little conventional biblical theology, historical discussion or Christian canonical interpretation, so this should not be a reader’s only commentary. Within its proper role, however, it transforms the reading of Genesis and is one of the most valuable literary companions available.

Literary scholar Robert Alter’s Genesis, Translation and Commentary (Norton, 1996) offers a translation that seeks to keep close to the original Hebrew and a commentary with literary sensibilities.