Robert Alter on the Psalms

April 30, 2008

My small dose of pure enjoyment for the term has come from a reading of the new translation of the Psalms by Robert Alter. Following his translation of The Five Books of Moses and The David Story, Alter turned his attention to the poetry of the Psalms, providing a commentary to accompany the text.

There is something salutary about taking a book out of the Bible and presenting it on its own. Being wrapped in the same cover as all those other biblical books leads the mind to an easy conclusion: these books must be saying the same thing. Alter's translation of the Psalms is a testimony to how well one book can stand on its own and be understood according to its own values and assumptions. Can we finally say goodbye to that Reformation principle of letting scripture comment on scripture?

Alter's most impressive achievement may well be his ability to effortlessly dismiss deadbeat biblical scholarship. In numerous places he shows himself a skeptic when it comes to hard and fast conclusions about the setting or genre of a Psalm:

What should be resisted is the inclination of many scholars, beginning in the early twentieth century, to turn as many psalms as possible into the liturgy of conjectured temple rites—to recover what in biblical studies is called the "life-setting" of the psalms. [xvi]

Alter continues in a similar vein two pages later:

The case of [Psalm 137] should alert us to the limits of one of the most common scholarly modes of analysis of Psalms, the form-criticism that identifies distinct genres of Psalms (supplication, thanksgiving, Wisdom psalm, royal psalm, historical psalm, Zion psalm, psalm of praise. [xviii]

These are two examples from the introduction; similar notes are scattered throughout the commentary.

For the most part I find this skepticism directed at scholarly categories valuable. The imagination does not run down such narrow and prescribed lanes. Scholarship often has trouble imagining the fluidity of creation, from a subjective standpoint, and loses for that reason a sense of how literary types and physical applications can metamorphose into something different.

On the other hand there are places, such as the Psalms of Ascent, where a reasonable confidence that this is a mini- book of psalms used on pilgrimage could be quite enlightening. But Alter is quick to raise objections: "Most scholars assume that 'ascents' refers to pilgrimages to Jerusalem.... But among other meanings that have been proposed..." (435). Alter actively resists the non-bookish, ritual qualities of these works.

Alter is at his strongest when the Psalms conforms most closely to a book of poetry. A beautiful example of what I mean is in Alter's commentary on the heading for Psalm 56, which reads "For the lead player, on jonath elem rehokim, a David michtam, when the Philistines seized him in Gath," With respect to those odd Hebrew words Alter writes:

This is one of the most mysterious of the musical terms in Psalms. The literal sense of the three Hebrew words is haunting: the mute dove of distant places. The great medieval poet Judah Halevi responded to the evocativeness of the phrase in his poetry by turning it into a concrete image of Israel's exile. [195]

Reading through the commentary there are numerous traces of this community of sensitive Psalm readers.. and it is as a member of this invisible and partially forgotten group that Alter would clearly love to be remembered. A goal that we at Old Roads applaud.