Robert Alter

Think of Robert Alter as the slingshot-wielding David of biblical scholars, said

in The New York Times. During his five decades as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, he has fearlessly challenged conventional wisdom about the most studied book in history. First, there was a 1981 book in which Alter argued that the Bible’s text is not, as most academics presumed, a hodgepodge, but instead a collage-like anthology in which multiple texts have been woven together with extraordinary artistry. Then, 24 years ago, he embarked on an even more ambitious project: creating the first single-author English translation of the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the

Old Testament. He believed he could improve on even the celebrated 17th-century King James version; as for the most widely used modern translation, he says, it “simply didn’t do justice to the literary beauty of the Hebrew.”

Alter’s changes can go deeper than matters of beauty, said

in NPR.org.

The word “soul,” for example, comes from “nefesh,” a Hebrew word that Alter says “often means something like life-breath,” though it can also mean “throat.” In either case, it refers to something more physical than “soul,” with its implied split, in Christian theology, from the body. “So I got rid of the soul,” Alter says. However painstaking his own 3,000-page translation, though, he knows it won’t be the final word. He foresees a future scholar coming across one of his carefully translated lines and thinking, “I can do better.” He adds, “Let’s hope this translator is many, many decades down the road.”