The Alter Bible
Very interesting, and although I have little to no experience with reading the bible, I have to say that everything Alter is quoted as saying in this article makes obvious sense to me.<p>The difficulties translators have with any text should be a reminder of how painfully inadequate any language is as a mediator between two different brains. So much depends in context.<p>&gt; Perhaps the first person to openly suggest otherwise was Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher, who daringly wrote that the books of the Bible ought to be studied in just the same way we would study Greek and Italian poetry.<p>This, 100 times. I am not a religious person at all. However, it makes me extremely sad if self-proclaimed &quot;atheists&quot; make fun of the the Bible &#x2F; Torah &#x2F; Koran by pointing out how unrealistic almost all of the texts are. Of course they are unrealistic - but so are the works of Shakespeare, or Dante, or Goethe, or any great poet in the last 3000 years. Yet nobody would ridicule Dante for assuming that hell lies in some cave in Tuscany. If you just dismiss these religious texts as opium for the dull medieval masses, you might miss some deep poetical truths about mankind that just cannot be stated explicitly because of the shortcomings of any human language described above.