Today, I’m reviewing two texts that provide very different entry points into Scripture: Robert Alter’s The Book of Psalms and Blaine Eldredge’s The Paradise King. To be clear, these books could not be more different from each other, but they provide a novel approach to Scripture that I have found both invigorating and inspiring. Perhaps you will, too.
The Paradise King
The first thing to know about The Paradise King is the book itself is comprised of fictionalized (if well-researched) retellings of Biblical stories. These stories are not meant to look entirely like what is in your Bible. They are imaginative retellings and are framed as such.
Why do this? As Eldredge points out, these sorts of fictionalized retellings of Scripture have a long history in the early church (and especially for the pre-literate church – although the popular book Joshua when I was growing up is also a good example!). To dramatize these stories is to help us experience the real awe and wonder of them, to shake us from our complacency and see them in a new context.
So, tracing the tales of Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Josiah, and Christ, the book is Eldredge’s attempt to “recover the unhusked story of God in the Bible and convey that story without obscuring its visceral power.” He introduces these figures in a new way: as “the king of the garden. The wandering Aramean. The kingdom builder who discovered the giant’s sword. The reformer who descended the stairs into a vale of fire.”
To do this, Eldredge relies on a combination of historical study, Biblical scholarship, and linguistics. His storytelling is conversational but powerful, and reading the book feels like sitting down with a brilliant friend who wants to let you in on the way he visualizes God’s word.
What he accomplishes is to recontextualize Scriptural stories in a way that helps us understand anew how incredible God is and what it means that Christ came. You remember, reading The Paradise King, what it is for this kind of a God to make Himself known in a world beset by paganism and idol worship: what precisely was broken in the Garden, and the love by which it was restored. You see Abram, for example, as a real historical person in a real historical place who wildly, bewilderingly, encountered El-Elyon, and who is one in a line of loved people with whom and through whom God dealt up until He sent His Son.
And speaking of the Son, Eldredge’s writing trembles with joy envisioning His eventual return:
“Here at last is the earth shaker. Here is the cloud rider. He is the guardian of widows and orphans and the servant king who withheld nothing. His face is young. Young, and yet old, old beyond the reckoning of this age, for He hails, in fact, from eternity past. It is a beautiful face, ready to laugh, full of humility and adoration and power. And He is crowned. Yes, He is crowned.
… Who would oppose him? Who even could? The devil is not there. That creature will have to be fished out of the last corner of the universe and burned.”
This text is, of course, not the place to get your Biblical interpretation, theology, or your scholarship (although Eldredge offers plenty of footnotes and scholarship to show how he came to his choices, and they make a wonderful place to begin your own investigations). It is, rather, a place to meet God again—to be inspired, to shake ourselves free of stale complacency and familiarity, to marvel at who God is and what He has done. In that regard, The Paradise King stands as a work for me alongside Stephen Lawhead’s Albion trilogy or J.R.R. Tolkien’s works: they beckon us to something deep and true and beautiful.
Read it; reread it; enjoy it; let your heart soar.
The Book of Psalms
If Eldredge’s The Paradise King serves as a fictional reimagining of God’s grand design, The Book of Psalms is almost the complete opposite. This is—and I cannot stress this enough—a literary text. It is written by renowned Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, and the text focuses on the language and the Psalms themselves.
This means this is not, despite being about the Psalms, a deeply religious text. Alter is not interested in interpreting the songs religiously; he is not viewing them through a Christological lens; he is not necessarily interested in Biblical prophecy or what the Psalms might have to say about God or about the soul or about salvation.
What he is interested in is recovering our sense of the psalms as deeply Hebrew. To this end, Alter invests a significant amount of effort in both making the translated Psalms sound in English more like they do in the original Hebrew, keeping their deeply embodied and visceral language and adjusting their sound to give us a truer sense of what it might have been like to hear them originally.
He also strives to remain faithful to the original language of the Psalms. This means the visceral approach I mention above, but also a lot of honesty where translations have grown crabbed or confusing over time. At points, Alter acknowledges, the Psalms as they have been handed down were copied and re-copied and re-copied: errors slipped in, or some meanings faded away, and he acknowledges as best he can where this has happened or where something is for all intents and purposes bewildering.
Alter’s attention and care—for it is a wonderful thing to watch a careful scholar at work—results in translations of the Psalms that provide a whole new layer of depth, meaning, and understanding. Take one of my favorites, Psalm 126, for an example: the Psalm closes with the image of the weeping sower. Alter renders it thus:
They who sow in tears
in glad song will reap.
He walks along and weeps,
the bearer of the seed-bag.
He will surely come in with glad song
bearing his sheaves.
Alter writes in a footnote that although it is tempting to English-language speakers to translate the psalm as “explanatory subordinate syntax” (although he walks along and weeps, he will surely come in) this risks the beauty of the Hebrew, which asks us to “envisage two coordinate images, separated in time and precisely antithetical in meaning.”
Or consider Psalm 17, in which Alter explains that the line “You have tried me, and found no wrong in me./I barred my mouth to let nothing pass” uses a Hebrew verb for muzzle: the idea being that the speaker has subjugated his speech in order to remain faithful. And he renders exquisitely the resonate, sensual language of the Psalm’s final line:
“As for me, in justice I behold Your face, / I take my fill, wide awake, of Your image.”
I have always been a fan of supplementary texts that help me to understand Scripture better. Alter’s text serves this purpose by helping me to understand on a much deeper level the deeply embodied language of the Psalms. They are feeling poems, focused on mouths and lips and bellies and eyes. The Psalmist isn’t just “struck down” in a metaphorical sense by grief or sorrow: he sinks on his belly to the earth.
For me, this is a perfect text to read alongside Scripture: to tease out gems of meaning about the Psalms I am reading, to understand better their language and focus. That Alter takes a literary-historical view, rather than a religious or explicitly Christian one, does not particularly concern me. There are, frankly, a thousand books I can read that interpret, meditate on, or explicate the Psalms spiritually or theologically; this is the only book in my possession that translates their beauty as poems, that seeks to help me understand not just a truer sense of what the language means but what it means for them to have a specific worldview and to have been written in a particular place and time.
If you hate footnotes, if you are looking for spiritual revelation, or if you are offended by the notion that some of the Psalm’s verse structure and composition might have been influenced or adapted from earlier Canaanite traditions, this is not your book! But if you are looking for a scholarly addition to your study of the Psalms that focuses on language and translation, and if you take great joy in reading across translation and finding linguistic gems that reveal deeper meaning, this text is absolutely worth your time and energy—and you will find yourself reading and rereading it for some time to come.
Samaritan's Song 