THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES
A Translation With Commentary.
By Robert Alter.
1,064 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.

'The Five Books of Moses': From God's Mouth to English
By JUDITH SHULEVITZ

DON'T be deterred by the unfamiliar name. If you've never heard of the Five Books of Moses (not actually composed by Moses; people who believe in divine revelation see him as more secretary than author), you've heard of the Torah and the Pentateuch, the Hebrew and Greek names, respectively, for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The story starts with the creation of the world, and ends with Moses dying on the wrong side of the Jordan and being buried in an unmarked grave. In between these extremes of possible experience, between the magnificent birth of the universe and the anonymous death of the human being, lies a tale that still has the power to astonish: "The encounter between a group of people and the Lord of the world in the course of history," in Martin Buber's phrase.

But this encounter has such enormous implications, and the story in which we read of it is so frank about what it means to enter into a relationship with the Lord, that for two millenniums readers have preferred to veil its details in allegory. Who wouldn't rather construe Abraham's knife as a metaphor for all the things that test our faith or a foreshadowing of the Cross than as a big sharp blade held by a father over his son's throat? Raw images like these must be what made theology necessary. Only by universalizing or typologizing the life stories of the biblical protagonists could most people stand to think about them.

Robert Alter, who has come up with this remarkable translation of the Five Books after decades of writing some of the most convincing analyses ever produced of the Hebrew Bible, is a critic with the strength of mind to resist the urge to uplift. Luckily for us, he is equally skeptical of what usually replaces homily in modern commentary, namely history. Scholars who study the Bible, of course, don't try to determine what "really" happened, as passionate amateurs do. Instead they attempt to reconstruct how the books must have been assembled. But Alter, along with critics like Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, David Damrosch and Gabriel Josipovici, has spent the past quarter-century rejecting both the preacherly and the historicist approaches to the Bible and devising one that would allow us to grapple with it as literature.

Not that Alter overlooks the Bible's moral and spiritual dimensions; he could hardly do so, given that roughly half the Five Books is made up of laws, and the other half -- the narrative half -- is concerned with working out the covenants made by God with his chosen people. Nor does he ignore the work of scholars who valiantly attempt to isolate historical voices in this blended text. As a matter of principle, though, he declines to chop stories into pieces, reassigning parts to "J" or parts to "P" for the purpose of resolving apparent contradictions. What Alter does with the Bible instead is read it, with erudition and rigor and respect for the intelligence of the editor or editors who stitched it together, and -- most thrillingly -- with the keenest receptivity to its darker undertones.

In the case of the binding of Isaac, for instance, Alter not only accepts a previous translator's substitution of "cleaver" for the ""knife" of the King James version but also changes "slay" (as in, "Abraham took the knife to slay his son") to "slaughter." Moreover, in his notes, he points out that although this particular Hebrew verb for "bound" (as in, "Abraham bound Isaac his son") occurs only this once in biblical Hebrew, making its meaning uncertain, we can nonetheless take a hint from the fact that when the word reappears in rabbinic Hebrew it refers specifically to the trussing up of animals. Alter's translation thus suggests a dimension of this eerie tale we would probably have overlooked: that of editorial comment. The biblical author, by using words more suited to butchery than ritual sacrifice, lets us know that he is as horrified as we are at the brutality of the act that God has asked Abraham to commit.

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In a fiction book I read the most remarkable speculation on the meaning of Cain's murder of Abel that is way too plausible. It suggested that when Abel's sacrifice of a sheep topped Cain's sacrifice of fruits and vegetables, Cain didn't murder Abel, he sacrificed him. Human sacrifice was all the rage in the days under discussion.