If you’d like to support the channel (gold bars, gemstones, rare earth rocks accepted) 👉 www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith/membership What does it take to translate the entire Hebrew Bible — and what happens when it happens almost by accident? In this long-form conversation, we speak with Robert Alter, legendary literary scholar and translator of the Hebrew Bible, about language, beauty, storytelling, and the strange path that led him to complete one of the greatest translation projects of our time. Alter reflects on how he began translating Genesis as an experiment — never intending to translate the whole Bible — and how one book quietly led to another until the entire project was complete. Along the way, we explore how biblical narrative works as literature, why repetition in the Bible often carries deep artistic meaning, and how char ...