Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005
A New Story of Stories
By Frank Kermode
The Five Books of Moses
translated and with commentary by Robert Alter
Norton, 1,064 pp., $39.95
The first five books of the Bible, traditionally the work of Moses, and the core of Jewish law, retained authority in the Christian tradition and have probably been translated into more languages than any other book. English versions date back to the first stirrings of the Reformation in the fourteenth century. The invention of printing made it possible for Protestants to produce, against official Catholic opposition, the great series of sixteenth-century vernacular Bibles that culminated in the King James or Authorized Version of 1611 (hereinafter referred to simply as 1611).
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