By David M. Howard, Jr.

This review appeared in the
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 39.4 (Dec 1996): 642-43.

The World of Biblical Literature. By Robert Alter. New York: Basic, 1992, xiii + 225 pp., $12.00 paper.

Robert Alter is justifiably renowned as one of the prime movers in the recent emphasis on literary study of the Bible. His The Art of Biblical Narrative, published in 1981, has become a classic. In 1985, he published a similar volume on Hebrew poetry, and he co-edited The Literary Guide to the Bible in 1987. The present work is a collection of nine loosely connected essays, five of which have previously appeared. It continues Alter's brief for a literary reading of the Bible -- the "world" in his title does not mean the ancient Near Eastern world, as I thought when I first read it, but rather the literary and social "world," both ancient and modern, that the Bible inhabits -- but it is the most disjointed of his trilogy of works (excluding his edited volume).

This volume engages current scholarship much more than his first two did. In many respects, it is a running dialogue with -- and sometimes a diatribe against -- scholars who have built upon his ground-breaking work or disagreed with it. Thus, for example, chapter seven ("The Quest for the Author") is not a theoretical exploration of the place of an author in a text (as one might expect), but rather a scathing review of Harold Bloom's The Book of J, and chapter one ("A Peculiar Literature") reviews and evaluates literary approaches since 1981, when his first book appeared.

Chapters three ("The Literary Character of the Bible") and eight ("The Medium of Poetry") are reprinted from The Literary Guide to the Bible, and are general restatements of his positions in his 1981 and 1985 works.

Chapters two ("Biblical Imperatives and Literary Play"), four ("Narrative Specification and the Power of the Literal") and five ("Allusion and Literary Expression") are vintage Alter. In chapter two, Alter argues that biblical authors were driven by more than their serious messages (their "imperatives"), but also by the modes (literary genres, literary devices, literary "play") by which they communicated these messages. In chapter four, Alter perceptively shows how the Bible's narratives, which are normally sparing in their details, many times use the smallest bits of information to make important, although often subtle, points. Chapter five deals with how these narratives draw upon each other, directly and indirectly, frequently in texts widely separated from each other in textual context and in time.

Chapter six is a fascinating look at how commentaries are written, and how they deal with literary criticism. Choosing the first three volumes of the Jewish Publication Society's new commentary on the Torah as examples, Alter analyzes the methods of the three authors, and shows how they do and do not measure up to what he considers a proper feel for the literary qualities of the texts. I recommend this chapter highly to all commentary writers.

Alter's final chapter ("Scripture and Culture") attempts to deal with the problem of the Bible's authority. Since the Bible has been dethroned by post-Enlightenment movements, it retains little authority for most moderns, and Alter certainly does not want a return to pious "fundamentalism." Yet, he is uncomfortable with the biblical illiteracy abroad today, from a literary standpoint, if nothing else (otherwise, how can one read many secular classics, whose allusions are so heavily rooted in the Bible?). The uncomfortable perch occupied by many who approach the Bible from a secular stance (including Alter) is revealed well in this chapter.

Nevertheless, this is another fine work from Alter, filled with examples of his vaunted close readings to illustrate his points. In one sense, it is a work that needed to be written, given how much biblical studies have changed since 1981, when he published The Art of Biblical Narrative -- changed in no small degree by his own work. However, this work cannot be read on its own; the reader must at least have read Alter's 1981 work, which, in my mind, is still his finest. If readers have not read that one, they should do so forthwith. Then they may come to this present volume if they like.