Invention of Dialogue in the Bible

The Invention of Dialogue in the Bible is an examination of the Bible's use of dialogue, a feature of literary writing often seen in prose, drama, and verse. Perhaps best known for its use in novels, it reflects characters' temperaments, social and educational backgrounds, their psychology, and their relationships with their interlocutors—and its use is rarely acknowledged within the narratives of the Bible.

Comparing a wide range of dialogue specimens in the Hebrew Bible with examples from the works of writers such as Henry Fielding, George Eliot, Henry James, and E. M. Forster, author Robert Alter demonstrates that all the features we attribute to the dialogue in novels are also present in that of the Bible. Alter speculates that the principal reason for this innovation is the fact that the Bible's narratives were composed not orally, nor in verse, but in prose. While verse's formal requirements do not allow the flexibility that is crucial for novelistic dialogue, prose allows a writer to manipulate language and reshape syntax to reflect the character of the speakers, their relationships, and the narrative moment.

An insightful look into one of Western culture's most important texts, The Invention of Dialogue in the Bible will be a useful resource for anyone studying the Bible, religion, literature, or narratology.

Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, on modern Hebrew literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty-four published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry. Among his publications over the past twenty-five years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (1999), Imagined Cites (2005), The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (2007), and Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010).