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What Hacker News says
- Yes! In that vein, The Five Books of Moses by Robert Alter[1] is great for folks who want to get a better sense of what the original Hebrew might feel like rendered in English.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Books-Moses-Translation-Commenta...
- Since the article is kind of shallow, here are a few atypical approaches to Biblical translation I’ve found interesting over the years:
• The Five Books of Moses, by Everett Fox, who attempts to retain in English the underlying poetry of the Hebrew like alliteration, meter, wordplay, and so on. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/55160/the-five-book...)
• The Books of the Bible: not a new translation (it’s just the NIV), but rather than a typical modern Bible which is laid out for easy referencing, instead cuts out chapters and verses completely, formatting it instead in the way the books were originally written, and eliminating a few historical artifacts of translation like the splitting of the Book of Chronicles, the order of books relative to each other, and so on. (https://www.christianbook.com/niv-books-of-the-bible-volumes...)
• Alpha: A Translation of Genesis 1. (https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht...)
- > often Exodus goes from narrative to descriptions of genealogy tree in modern translations
I think you were emphasizing something beside this, but if you want to know _why_ the five Books of Moses often jump suddenly into genealogy or minutiae of interest only to priests, you might be interested in the Documentary Hypothesis. Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible?" is an approachable introduction to it.
- I would love to talk about that more. It's been a long time since I have read the Old Testament. I meant to buy the "Five Books of Moses" translation a few years back.
