Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Nabokov and the Real World, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, and Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem, among other books. Award-winning translator of the complete Hebrew Bible, Alter has received the National Jewish Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, the PEN Center Literary Award for Translation, and the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters. Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British literary critic and the author or editor of more than fifty books, including The Sense of an Ending, a defining work of fiction theory. A regular contributor to London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, Kermode was knighted in 1991. He was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at University of Cambridge.

Professor Alter is one of our foremost lay readers and expositors of the poetic and narrative genius of the Bible. He brings to his commentaries a knowledge of Hebrew and of Judaism together with an exceptionally wide literary awareness and authority of judgment. Professor Kermode has long been eminent among teachers and critics of English and European literatures from the Renaissance to Romanticism and the moderns… [The volume] contains much that is enlightening, convincing and finely argued.

• General Introduction Robert Alter and Frank Kermode The Old Testament Introduction Robert Alter Genesis J. P. Fokkelman Exodus J. P. Fokkelman Leviticus David Damrosch Numbers James S. Ackerman Deuteronomy Robert Polzin Joshua and Judges David M. Gunn 1 and 2 Samuel Joel Rosenberg 1 and 2 Kings George Savran Isaiah Luis Alonso Schokel Jeremiah and Ezekiel Joel Rosenberg The Twelve Prophets Herbert Marks Jonah James S. Ackerman Psalms Robert Alter Proverbs and Ecclesiastes James G. Williams Job Moshe Greenberg The Song of Songs Francis Landy Ruth Jack M. Sasson Lamentations Francis Landy Esther Jack M. Sasson Daniel Shemaryahu Talmon Ezra and Nehemiah Shemaryahu Talmon 1 and 2 Chronicles Shemaryahu Talmon The New Testament Introduction Frank Kermode Matthew Frank Kermode Mark John Drury Luke John Drury John Frank Kermode Acts James M. Robinson The Pauline Epistles Michael Goulder The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles Gabriel Josipovici Revelation Bernard McGinn General Essays The Hebrew Bible and Canaanite Literature Jonas C. Greenfield The New Testament and Greco-Roman Writing Helen Elsom Fishing for Men on the Edge of the Wilderness Edmund Leach The Canon Frank Kermode The Characteristics of Ancient Hebrew Poetry Robert Alter Midrash and Allegory Gerald L. Bruns English Translations of the Bible Gerald Hammond Glossary Index