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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed

or you are the only animal

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today I'm very pleased

to have as my guest, Robert Alter, who has published a translation and commentary on the

Five Books of Moses, a translation and commentary on the five books of Moses, a translation and commentary

which has been responded to by writers as various as Seamus Heaney on the one hand and

Cynthia Ozick on the other, both of whom respect and rejoice in the way in which his translation returns to the rhythms and the meanings

of the biblical texts. Now he's done an even more difficult job. He's gone to biblical poetry

and translated and done a commentary on the book of Psalms.

Now, I'm going to treat this as if we are all needing to know everything.

So, first of all, who wrote the book of Psalms?

I wish we knew. Of course, Jewish and Christian tradition attributed the book of Psalms to David,

and there are many Psalms that begin a Psalm of David, or in my translation, a David's Psalm,

because the Hebrew particle that's represented as of is rather ambiguous. But this was a common practice

in the late biblical period to ascribe texts to important figures from early history. Most

scholars would agree that at best maybe there might be two or three or four Psalms that were

actually written by King David, but maybe none.

And the Psalms were composed probably over five, even six centuries, beginning around 1,000 BCE and coming down to the 400s of the

pre-Christian era. By anonymous poets, many of them probably were priests, since there is a clear

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