The David Story, Robert Alter

Acclaimed for its masterful new translation and insightful commentary, The David Story is a fresh, vivid rendition of one of the great works in Western literature. Robert Alter's brilliant translation gives us David, the beautiful, musical hero who slays Goliath and, through his struggles with Saul, advances to the kingship of Israel. But this David is also fully human: an ambitious, calculating man who navigates his life's course with a flawed moral vision. The consequences for him, his family, and his nation are tragic and bloody. Historical personage and full-blooded imagining, David is the creation of a literary artist comparable to the Shakespeare of the history plays.

This book is paperback and is recommended reading for Hillsdale's free online course, "The David Story: Shepherd, Father, King"

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“The most compelling version of [the David] story since the King James Bible.”—Robert Fagles, award-winning translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey

“A remarkable new translation... Anyone who cares about the Bible or the English language will want to read it... Alter's extraordinary work shows that Bible scholarship is healthy and getting healthier. Read it and rejoice."—David Gelernter, National Review

“For the contemporary reader in English, I would suggest that there is no better place to reassess the character of David than in Robert Alter's masterly new translation... It will, I hope and expect, prove as influential and popular as his version of Genesis, a groundbreaking work not only for its sophisticated literary scholarship but also because the cadences of biblical Hebrew were, for perhaps the first time, uncannily reactivated in English.”—Jonathan Wilson, New York Times Book Review