The Literary Guide to the Bible

Rediscover the incomparable literary richness and strength of a book that all of us live with an many of us live by. An international team of renowned scholars, assembled by two leading literary critics, offers a book-by-book guide through the Old and New Testaments as well as general essays on the Bible as a whole, providing an enticing reintroduction to a work that has shaped our language and thought for thousands of years.

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.