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Hi everyone.

Welcome back to the OnScript podcast.

This is Matt Lynch.

I'm a co-host of the podcast along with Matt Bates and Drew Johnson, Aaron Heim, Chris Tilling, and Amy Brown Hughes.

We're really glad that you've joined us today.

We have a very special guest.

Robert Alter is joining us. He's a professor of comparative literature and also is a biblical scholar. And to say the least, it's published widely in this field. Drew will introduce some of that later. But we're focusing on his massive Hebrew Bible with commentary project that he's been working on for 10 years.

And that's culminated in a big old 3,500 page three-volume set that I highly recommend.

It's got a very innovative and interesting translation of the Hebrew Bible

that reflects his careful literary sensitivities he's been cultivating for the past 40 years

at least with regard to the Hebrew Bible and and a rich commentary so you can kind of see the logic of the Hebrew

Bible from a literary point of view. And he's done more than perhaps anyone to really

open up the field of reading the Bible's literature, both on the poetry and the narrative

sides of the genre divide. And so it's a real gift to have this book now

available. And we're also looking at his book, The Art of Bible Translation, in which he reflects

on his commentary or his translation of the Hebrew Bible and the philosophy underlying it and that gives you a

kind of behind the scenes look at how he came to translate the Hebrew Bible the way he does.

So I hope you enjoy our conversation with him. Apologies for some of the audio quality because we had to work on them, ended up having to use a backup audio copy.

So his audio is at the best, but there you go.

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