In this age of widespread education and flagging creativity, new translations abound. The old standbys who nurtured our youth—Constance Garnett rendering the Russians, C. K. Scott Moncrieff putting his spin on Proust, the Muirs translating Kafka, H. T. Lowe-Porter doing Thomas Mann—are all being retired, with condescending remarks about their slips and elisions, by successors whose more modern versions infallibly miss, it seems to this possibly crotchety scanner, the tone, the voice, the presence of the text that we first read. In general—if it’s generalizations you want—the closer the translator is in age to the translated, the more closely shared their vision and style will be. The Modern Library chose to reprint the 1700-03 translation of “Don Quixote” by Peter Motteux; after that peppery stew of italicized names and apostrophe-bedeck’d past tenses, every other “Quixote” feels watered down.

Of all translations into English, the one most read and universally admired is, of course, the King James Bible (1611), our language’s lone masterpiece produced by committee, at least until this year’s “9/11 Commission Report.” Nevertheless, new translations of the Bible—the world’s best-seller, long out of copyright—tumble forth, for the reasons, if any are offered, that contemporary scholarship presents a superior understanding of ancient Hebrew and that Renaissance English is increasingly, inconveniently archaic. The Hebrew scholar and literary critic Robert Alter, in introducing his thousand-page version, with copious commentary, of the first five books of the Bible—commonly called the Pentateuch or Torah—under the title “The Five Books of Moses” (Norton; $39.95), writes:

**{: .break one} ** Broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew. The present translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bible—and, above all, biblical narrative prose—in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary English. **

Professor Alter, whose earlier works include “Fielding and the Nature of the Novel” (1968) and “A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal” (1979), has been tilling the Biblical fields ever since “The Art of Biblical Narrative” (1981) and “The Art of Biblical Poetry” (1985). As his footnotes, which take up at least half of all but a few pages, make clear, Alter is profoundly steeped not just in the linguistic details of Hebrew but in the nigh-overwhelming amount of previous commentary, including the Midrash of rabbinical interpreters going back to the early centuries of the Christian era. At the same time, he has, as his oeuvre shows, an appetite for literary theory—“Motives for Fiction” (1984), “Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre” (1975)—and, as the passage quoted above indicates, a resolute sense of the Biblical style to be achieved.

He sees Biblical Hebrew as a “conventionally delimited language, roughly analogous in this respect to the French of the neoclassical theatre” and significantly though indeterminately distinct from the vanished vernacular of three thousand years ago. (The vernacular vocabulary, according to the Spanish Hebrew scholar Angel Sáenz-Badillos, must have exceeded the Bible’s—a lexicon “so restricted that it is hard to believe it could have served all the purposes of quotidian existence in a highly developed society.”) Alter has set himself to create a corresponding English—“stylized, decorous, dignified, and readily identified by its audiences as a language of literature,” with a “slight strangeness,” “beautiful rhythms,” and other qualities (suppleness, precision, concreteness) that “by and large have been given short shrift by translators with their eyes on other goals.” Why should not Alter’s version, its program so richly contemplated and persuasively outlined, become the definitive one, replacing not only the King James but the plethora of its revised, uninspired, and “accessible” versions on the shelf?

Several reasons why not, in the course of my reading through this massive tome (sold sturdily boxed, as if to support its weight), emerged. The sheer amount of accompanying commentary and philological footnotes is one of them. The fifty-four churchmen and scholars empowered at a conference at Hampton Court in January of 1604 to provide an authoritative English Bible had a clear charge: to supply English readers with a self-explanatory text. When they encountered a crux, they took their best guess and worked on; many of the guesses can be improved upon now, but no suggestion of an unclear and imperfect original was allowed to trouble the Word of God. Alter’s more academic and literary commission allows him to luxuriate in the forked possibilities of the Hebrew text, in its oldest forms written entirely in consonants, and without punctuation. Sample footnotes, taken at random from Deuteronomy:

*{: .break one} ** Some recent scholars have accepted Jacob Milgrom’s proposal that here the verb q-r-b (“approach”) is used in a political extension of its cultic meaning, “to encroach upon,” though there is no compelling necessity to see that sense of the word in this verse. **

*** ** The second of the two Hebrew words here, we’oyveinu pelilim, is a notorious crux, evidently already a source of puzzlement to the ancient Greek translators… . If one notes that pelilim rhymes richly with ’elilim, “idols,” and if one recalls this poet’s verbal inventiveness in coining designations for the nonentity of the pagan gods, “would-be gods” is a distinct possibility. **

It is difficult for the reader, given the overload of elucidation imposed upon the basic text, to maintain much momentum, and, indeed, one finds welcome refuge from the tedium and harshness of some Biblical passages in the companionable contemporary voice of the learned commentator. However, in his very zeal to communicate the nuances of the underlying Hebrew, Alter falls into the error of Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of “Eugene Onegin”: in the effort to achieve absolute fidelity, he settles on rather odd English.

Take Alter’s version, for starters, of the opening verses of Genesis:

**{: .break one} ** When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. **

The King James has it thus:

**{: .break one} ** In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. **

Alter is the more concise, and is not above duplicating certain phrases of the King James, much as the royal committee drew upon the translation of Tyndale. But Alter’s syntax goes off the rails when “God’s breath hovering over the waters” is tacked onto a series of non-parallel nouns; by comparison, “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” is clearer narrative and great poetry. It may stray minutely from the Hebrew but it is theologically intelligible.

Both translations can be usefully compared with that of Everett Fox, also titled “The Five Books of Moses” and published in 1995. Alter cites Fox as the outstanding exception to the general trend of a blandly readable English Bible—an extremist after Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, whose German Bible “flaunts Hebrew etymologies, preserves nearly all repetitions of Hebrew terms, and invents German words.” Fox’s version, set in lines like poetry, reads: