From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FIVE BEST
Books on the Book of Books
Top tomes on the Bible.
1. "Mimesis" by Erich Auerbach (Princeton, 1953).
The formidable challenge that Erich Auerbach set himself with "Mimesis" is made clear by its subtitle: "The Representation of Reality in Western Literature." But the German scholar succeeded brilliantly, producing a masterwork of 20th-century criticism that also happens to have pioneered a modern literary understanding of the Bible. Though only the first chapter is strictly focused on the Bible--a comparison of a passage from "The Odyssey" with one from Genesis--a biblical grounding is essential to Auerbach's discussions of Dante and other important writers of the medieval and early modern periods. His enduring contribution: making us see that the Bible is not somehow apart from literature, sequestered in a special preserve of theology and spirituality, but is rather a manifestation of a high literary art.
2. "The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative" by Hans W. Frei (Yale, 1974).
The German-born Yale theologian Hans Frei identifies a turning point in the way the world understood the Bible: when 18th- and 19th-century English and German thinkers such as Locke and Kant broke the traditional link between the factual and the allegorical in the Bible. Though the realistic novel was flowering at the time, these interpreters declined to employ the lens of realism, which is to say, to read the Bible as "history-like." Frei's book deals with some difficult philosophical texts and is by no means a quick read, but it is a deeply instructive investigation of the history of ideas.
3. "The Book of God" by Gabriel Josipovici (Yale, 1988).
Gabriel Josipovici is a prominent British critic and novelist who at a midpoint in his career became interested in the Bible and acquired a competence in Hebrew (he already knew Greek) in order to engage with it seriously. "The Book of God" is an imaginative overview, sensitive to narrative detail and to stylistic nuance, of both Testaments. Josipovici sees how the Bible constitutes a unique kind of literature--a book, as he says, meant to change your sense of reality--which is nevertheless linked with certain later writers. He proposes surprising comparisons with Proust, Kafka and other modernists. Some biblical passages, he observes, "bring us face to face with characters who can be neither interpreted nor deconstructed. They are emblems of the limits of comprehension."
4. "Leviticus as Literature" by Mary Douglas (Oxford, 2000).
British anthropologist Mary Douglas takes us on an intellectual adventure with "Leviticus as Literature." No small feat, given that Leviticus is notoriously the driest of biblical books--it consists mainly of elaborate instructions for the sacrificial cult. But Douglas proposes that these cultic procedures reflect a sophisticated system of thought: In describing the ritual preparation of the sacrificial animal and the sanctuary's spatial divisions, the Leviticus writers may have also been explaining the structure of the cosmos as they understood it, a place where the vertical division of Mount Sinai (God and Moses at the top, the elders of Israel halfway up, the Israelites below) is mirrored horizontally in the sanctuary (the Holy of Holies within, the inner court for the Levites, the outer court for the Israelites). Douglas makes a persuasive case that more is going on in this book of the Bible than is generally supposed--and she shows that modern condescension toward biblical writing is misguided--but I am still tempted to say that Douglas is more interesting to read than Leviticus.
5. "The Biography of Ancient Israel" by Ilana Pardes (University of California, 2000).
Ilana Pardes, a scholar of comparative literature based in Jerusalem, traces an ancient nation's origins from Exodus through Deuteronomy. Combining anthropology, psychoanalysis, comparative religion and literary analysis, she shows us an epic tale that has as its subject not an individual hero but the Israelite people itself. The splitting of the Red Sea is Israel's birth, the Wilderness wanderings its rite of initiation--and so on, until finally, 40 years later, poised to enter the Promised Land, Israel is ready (precariously) to assume national adulthood. Pardes's lucid prose is a vehicle of interpretive élan.
Mr. Alter's two most recent books are "The Five Books of Moses: A Translation With Commentary" and "Imagined Cities."
