Роберт Альтер: Американский профессор и библеист

American professor
the hotelier

Robert Bernard Alter (born 1935) is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He published his translation of the Hebrew Bible in 2018.

Robert Alter earned his bachelor's degree in English (Columbia University, 1957) and his master's degree (1958) and doctorate (1962) from Harvard University in comparative literature. He started his career as a writer at Commentary, where he was for many years a contributing editor. He has written twenty three books, most recently his translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. He lectures on topics ranging from biblical episodes to Kafka's modernism and Hebrew literature.

One of Alter's contributions is the introduction of the type scene into contemporary scholarly Hebrew Bible studies. An example of a type scene is that of a man meeting a young woman at a well, whom he goes on to marry; this scene occurs twice in Genesis and once in Exodus, and, according to Alter, distortedly in 1 Samuel and the Book of Ruth.

Alter has served as an active member of the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress and as the president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1966 and 1978. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986. He was a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion fellow at Princeton University. He is a member of the editorial board of the Jewish Review of Books.