The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation With Commentary

Here in Robert Alter's bold new translation are some of the most magnificent works in world literature. All three of these biblical books test the ancient wisdom that the righteous thrive and the wicked suffer in a rational moral order. Job poses the most direct and radical subversion of the wisdom tradition. Its ancient poetry resounding in compact, percussive rhythms, Alter's Job is incendiary. The account of creation in the Voice from the Whirlwind is a soaring and unforgettable challenge to the place of man in God's universe. Proverbs by contrast is pragmatic and wry, its probes of the moral universe grounded in the everyday. Here the restoration of the ancient in Alter's translation draws a knotty, often amusing humanity to the surface. And finally there is the serene fatalism of Ecclesiastes, "Merest breath. All is mere breath." Its gentle dissent from the vision of a purposive universe suffuses Ecclesiastes with a quiet beauty.

This new volume in Alter's ongoing translation draws together three essential and compelling books of the ancient canon, enhanced throughout by his learned page-by-page commentary.

Robert Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Lifetime Achievement and the PEN Center Literary Award for Translation. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.