ABSTRACT
ALTER’s twin studies (1981 and 1990) are the work of a distinguished critic of fiction who is also a Jew; for him the Bible is the Hebrew Old Testament. A major strength of his work is the combination of alertness to the language of biblical Hebrew with a sense of the usefulness and limitations of literary categories and procedures. For example, in a chapter on “Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction” he is able to identify a “theologically intent” shaping of narrative, which nonetheless exhibits an element of imaginative play. He identifies the complexities of a narrative technique that is more obviously “an art of reticence” in terms of characterisation and realistic detail. The excitement of the first book comes from a sense of discovery, of new insights and new methods. The Art of Biblical Poetry is a more focused formal study, starting from a reworking of parallelism as a prosodic feature, and moving outwards towards ever more complex “structures of intensification” in the Psalms, Job, and the Song of Songs.
