Years ago, Alter started with annotating the Book of Psalms, well before beginning this larger project of translating the entire Hebrew Bible. In this introduction, he first gives the historical context behind the psalms. “The psalm was conceived in the ancient period as a fairly flexible poetic form. Sung and played in the Temple service, it could be a liturgical text in the strict sense. It could also accompany individual ritual acts of thanksgiving, confession, and supplication, or perhaps express these various themes outside a ritual context…. The psalm could serve as a poetic vehicle for philosophic reflection or didactic instruction or the commemoration of national history or for the celebration of the monarch and the seat of the monarchy.” Alter continues by explaining the specific poetic nature of the psalms. “Biblical poetry is based on a parallelism of meaning between the two halves of the line (or, in the minority of lines that are triadic, among the three parts of the line). There is no requirement of rhyme (very occasionally one encounters an ad hoc rhyme) and no regular meter…. Between the two halves of the line there may be some equivalence of meaning (“semantic”), and equivalent number of stressed syllables (“accentual”), and a parallelism of syntax…. Much of the force of ancient Hebrew poetry derives from its rhythmic compactness…. A typical line of biblical poetry has three beats in each verset.” Finally, Alter defends his translation choices, “What I have aimed at in this translation—inevitably, with imperfect success—is to represent Psalms in a kind of English verse that is readable as poetry yet sounds something like the Hebrew—emulating its rhythms wherever feasible, reproducing many of the effects of its expressive poetic syntax, seeking equivalents for the combination of homespun directness and archaizing in the original, hewing to the lexical concreteness of the Hebrew, and making more palpable the force of parallelism that is at the heart of biblical poetry. The translation is also on the whole quite literal.”
In Psalm 8:10, Alter alerts the reader to a familiar biblical structure, the envelope form, but then also how this case is unique, “Lord, our Master,/how majestic Your name in all the earth. Although biblical literature, in poetry or prose, exhibits considerable fondness for envelope structures, in which the end somehow echoes the beginning, this verbatim repetition of the first line as the last, common in other poetic traditions, is unusual.”
Alter’s annotations often point out poetic technique. In Psalm 14:2, he notes, “The LORD from the heavens looked down/ on the sons of humankind/ to see. These three versets are remarkable for involving enjambments from verset to verset (a rare maneuver) and avoiding semantic parallelism, which appears only at the end (“discerning,/ … seeking out”). Thus, the eye is drawn downward in a miniature narrative sequence, following the divine gaze, from the heavens to the human sphere.”
Psalm 22:2 is famous in Christian theology. Alter notes, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? These famous words are the ones pronounced by Jesus in his last agony—though in Aramaic, not in the original Hebrew. That moment in Mathew is a kind of pesher, or fulfillment interpretation, of this psalm.”
Alter also is quick to note when his translation differs from more standard versions and gives an explanation for his choices that reveal them far from arbitrary. In Psalm 23:4, he states, “in the vale of death’s shadow. The intent of the translation here is not to avoid the virtually proverbial “in the shadow of the valley of dearth” but rather to cut through the proliferation of syllables in the King James Version, however eloquent, and better approximate the compactness of the Hebrew—begey tsalmawet.”
In Psalm 27:10, Alter points out a poignant verse, “Though my father and mother forsook me,/ the LORD would gather me in. The extravagance of this declaration of trust in God, perhaps the most extreme in the whole Bible, is breathtaking and perhaps even disturbing.”
Often, Alter alerts the reader to unique stylistic moments in the psalms. However, the transition from paganism to monotheism is also a recurring motif throughout the Bible. In Psalm 82:1, he notes, “God takes His stand in the divine assembly. Like the psalms of supplication, this poem is concerned with the infuriating preponderance of injustice in the world. It differs from them, however, not only because God is the principal speaker (from verse 2 through verse 7) but also because the psalm is frankly mythological in character. Alternatively, one could describe it as a poem about the transition from mythology to a monotheistic frame of reference because in the end the gods are rudely demoted from their divine status.”
In Psalm 86:8, the shadow of paganism’s influence in the Bible is again described, “There is none like You among the gods, O Master. This line quotes the Song of the Sea, Exodus 15:11. The move from this quotation to verse 9 and 10 traces the trajectory from henotheism to proper monotheism. In the old poem in Exodus, other gods are imagined as existing but are feeble in power compared to YHWH, God of Israel; here the poet goes on to affirm that “You alone are God” verse 10.”
Alter notes that psalms were often song chorally. In Psalm 98:7, he states, “Let the sea and its fullness thunder. There is a concordance between the human orchestra—in all likelihood, an actual orchestra accompanying the singing of this psalm—with its lutes and rams’ horns, and the orchestra of nature, both groups providing a grand fanfare for God the king. The thundering of the sea in a percussion section, joined by the clapping hands of the rivers, then the chorus of the mountains…. The Israelites chanting the poem’s words of exaltation, to the accompaniment of musical instruments, are invited to imagine their musical rite as part of a cosmic performance.”
Finally, Psalm 114:1 is an example of the layers of meaning often alluded to in biblical literature. Alter reveals, “When Israel came out of Egypt…. This psalm is used to illustrate the fourfold levels of interpreting a sacred text (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical or mystic)…. The original intention of the psalmist, however, seems clearly literal—which is to say, historical—a celebration of God’s spectacular intervention in history on behalf of the people of Israel.”
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