The young, often first-generation Jewish-American littérateurs of that period — Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, Irving Howe among them — took on a distinctly strident attitude: Literature, to them, was a form of citizenship. As Cynthia Ozick, one of the remaining grandees of that midcentury group, put it in a recent essay, these were “boys and girls drenched in ferocious bookishness and utopian politics, un-self-consciously asserting ownership of American culture at a time when it was most vigorously dominated by WASPs.”

Many Jewish writers of those years saw it as their mission to march onto center stage of American literature: not simply to master the English language but to remake it in their own voices. Of the novelist Saul Bellow, a hero to that generation, Ozick wrote with pride that he “capsizes American English.” Whether this is accurate, of course, is a matter of debate, but it does capture the ambition and the self-fashioning aspirations of that midcentury moment. As a young critic, Alter was active in this project. In a 1969 volume on contemporary Jewish literature, drawn from essays he published in magazines, Alter championed Bellow, among others, noting, “The WASP cultural hegemony in America is over.”

For a literary person of those generations, the King James Version loomed large. Along with Shakespeare, the King James was one of the wellsprings of English literature, especially in the United States. “It was in America,” Alter has written, “that the potential of the [King James] translation to determine the foundational language and symbolic imagery of a whole culture was most fully realized.” And unlike the work of Shakespeare, the Bible, or at least the first part of it — known in English as the Old Testament, a name that still carries a pejorative edge, positioning those books as the primitive precursors to the enlightened New Testament — happened to have been a kind of family inheritance to Jews. It is one of the few major texts that was foundational in both the Jewish and the Anglo-American traditions. And though Alter and his peers remained smitten by the language of the King James, there was an underlying sense that a key piece of their Jewish heritage had long been held captive in the churches and schools and texts of white Protestant English. With his intricate and artistically attuned translation, Alter has helped carve out a dignified place for the Hebrew Bible as the Hebrew Bible, squarely within the Anglo-American literary tradition, and rescued it from second-class status.

Alter regularly composes phrases that sound strange in English, in part because they carry hints of ancient Hebrew within them. The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, whom Alter has cited, describes translations that “foreignize,” or openly signal that a translated text was originally written in another language, and those that “domesticate,” or render invisible the original language. According to Venuti, a “foreignized” translation “seeks to register linguistic and cultural differences.” Alter maintains that his translation of the Bible borrows from the idea of “foreignizing,” and this approach generates unexpected and even radical urgency, particularly in passages that might seem familiar.

Here is Alter’s version of the well-known opening of Genesis 21, part of the story of Isaac, the miracle baby of 90-year-old Sarah, and her 99-year-old husband, Abraham: “And the Lord singled out Sarah.” The word Alter is translating as “singled out” is pakad. The King James, and most others after it, translate it as “visited.” The Jewish Publication Society has it as “remembered.” Others translate it as “kept his word,” “took note of,” “was gracious to,” “was attentive to” or “blessed.” A good literal version, provided by the canny contemporary translator Everett Fox, has it as “took account of” — and there is something numerical and even administrative about pakad. (Elsewhere in the Bible, in the context of describing a public census, pakad means “to number”; in modern Hebrew, it is related to the words for “officer,” “clerk” and “roll-call.”) Weaving together its numerical dimensions with a thread of bureaucratic banality, Alter yields the anxious verb “singled out” and with it, reveals new layers of tension in this story.

Sarah has just given birth to her first child, a son; in Hebrew, his name is Yitzhak, meaning he who laughs. Amid the celebrations of this miracle birth, the nonagenarian mother offers her own punning commentary on the child’s name. According to the King James Version, Sarah says, “God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me.” This is the direction that nearly every other English translation has taken since the early 1600s, and many others, too, in languages before English.

Alter, who gives Sarah’s statement its formal due as poetic speech, setting its line breaks apart on a page of prose, translates it like this: “Laughter has God made me,/Whoever hears will laugh at me.” This strange new Sarah, unlike the familiar Sarah of other translations, is not joining in the laughter nor is she offering a bawdy aside. Though it sounds odd in English, Alter has retained the Hebrew’s ambiguous verbal construction, “Laughter has ... made me.” More startling still, Alter has taken advantage of another ambiguity in the Hebrew’s prepositions and has Sarah directly say that her society is not laughing with but at her. After giving birth, she feels mocked, shamed and socially demoted. At the end of her life, when she should be reaping the rewards of seniority and respect, she fears that she has been turned into a punch line.