The ancient classics are back in new translations but they have lost the cachet they once had. Richmond Lattimore’s Homer, Ezra Pound’s Confucius, and the hugely successful book that launched the Anchor Bible, E.A. Speiser’s Genesis, became cultural icons in their day. Robert Alter’s “The Five Books of Moses” (W.W. Norton, 1,064 pages, $39.95) came shrink-wrapped for stardom but appears in another light to have been freeze-dried in its cellophane – to forestall thoughts about its authenticity.

Mr. Alter’s ambition is undeniable; it is also a problem. Fluent in Hebrew, his authority has gone largely unquestioned by American literary critics, few of whom are at home in that language. To this day only Harold Bloom among major critics has had enough Hebrew to critique Mr. Alter’s shortcomings as an interpreter of poetic narrative, historical origins, and authorship.

The list of literary translations of the Hebrew Bible into Western languages is long (James Moffatt’s in the 1920s in English and Andre Chouraqi’s in French in the 1970s became bestsellers). More than a century ago higher Biblical criticism had firmly established the literary historicity of the Hebrew Bible (described in the 19th century as the Documentary Hypothesis), whereupon clergy and laypersons attempted their own translations based upon “greater accuracy.” In 19th century America alone, these ranged from Isaac Leeser’s Jewish translation (1845) to Julia Smith’s woman’s translation (1876). Even Pearl Buck’s popular paraphrase, “The Story Bible,” was informed by a sense that the original authors were accessible as literary artists. Perhaps the most important translation by an individual American was made not into English but into Yiddish, by a poet and novelist in pre-war New York who took the nom de plume of Yehoash. His translation was soon being read in the worldwide Jewish community.

Prior to this burst of modern translation, knowledge about how the text was written was thought to be unimportant. Instead, all the attention was on the spiritual “why” of the text: the development of religious thought. Ancient Hebraic culture itself had largely been forgotten. This had changed by the 1960s, when Speiser rejected the German scholarly notion of impersonal “strands” and treated the J and E portions of the text as living authors with cultural imaginations. Speiser’s success, however, caused a backlash among academics newly weaned on structuralism. They were intent on taking the literary language apart and seeing what made it tick; the biblical text became a wondrous machine drained of awareness that creative individuals had written it.

Soon thereafter, Robert Alter began interpreting the structural artistry of the Bible as the work of a literary “redactor” – that is, an editor who came after the original authors and whose superior intelligence rendered them superfluous. “A Map of Misreading” (1975), an important book by Mr. Bloom, countered Mr. Alter by claiming that an author’s struggle for individuality was worth knowing. But Mr. Alter never budged from the conventional wisdom that the Bible was a sacred artifact “apart” and that its origin was in the Hebrew religion – rather than having a creative origin in ancient Hebraic culture.

Today, structuralism is growing obsolete, replaced by wider knowledge of interacting ancient cultures. It is Mr. Alter’s contention, on the other hand, that the Bible should continue to be studied as an isolated unit. Readers may be predisposed to accept his avoidance of comparative cultural influences and to approve of Mr. Alter’s narrow focus because they are still facing a Bible freighted with sacred religious uses.

The history Mr. Alter provides is focused upon the problematical history of words rather than the history of cultures. And the culture he most fails to present is the one in which Hebraic authors, like great writers in cultures before them, create a cosmic stage – this time in narrative – upon which man and God interact, often uncannily, depending on the greatness of the individual author. Instead, we experience according to Mr. Alter only the cosmic study rooms of the redactors (he is unclear if more than one was involved).

In his translation, which is based upon this same constricted interpretation, Mr. Alter’s authority over the Hebrew Bible suppresses awareness of the original authors yet again, as well as the influences upon them and their individual imaginations. Moreover, any apprehension on the reader’s part is assuaged by the translator’s assertion that the text undergoing translation is “miraculous.” The result is endless confusion of idioms and of the supernatural with the natural – as if it hardly matters.

When we look at the stories of Abraham’s calls – first to leave home and later to bring Isaac to a distant scene of sacrifice – we see how the cosmic stage is confounded in Mr. Alter’s translation and the cultural history made irrelevant. Abraham first hears: “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house. … I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you, and those who damn you I will curse.”

These words and this rhetoric easily fit the partisan “advice” given by a Sumerian personal god, whose job it was to counsel the household. But the Sumerian household god was also portable: Abraham’s father’s ancestral god was brought from Ur, a cultural center of ancient Sumer, to Harran. It was this god who had originally counseled Abram’s father, Terah, to leave for Canaan in the preceding passage. Terah had done so, but he stopped in Harran, the furthest outpost where the authority of a Sumerian god was recognized.

Now comes an additional clause that suggests a merging with the creator-God, Yahweh: “and all the clans of the earth through you shall be blessed.” Mr. Alter brings to this undistinguished language the use of the word “clan” – a word that jars the ear because it is in conflict with “nation” in the previous sentence. The Hebrew plays with the idiom but here there is merely a clunky confusion, since “clan” is anachronistic in a way that the Hebrew is not. In the same way that the echo of god-speech in Mesopotamia is lost, we lose here the great sensibility of the original author, known as J in biblical scholarship. For J was consciously evoking for her Hebraic audience a merging of classical Sumerian rhetoric with Hebrew’s poetic universalism.

In the story of Abraham’s further call to sacrifice Isaac, the sensibility of this story’s author, E, is thoroughly muddled. “Offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall say to you.” The word for sacrifice, which comes from the archaic idiom of “going up,” becomes heavy-handed in “burnt offering.” This original metaphor for a sacrifice was already archaic when the biblical author used this term. Still, it is a relic whose nuance we have lost but which the original Hebraic audience still understood. The original authors played on this idiom, among others, in many ways: going up the mountain, for one. Or up the ziggurat-the root was very likely Sumerian in origin. Imagine if a translator in the future were to render “blueprint” as “blue plan” and you begin to sense the tone deafness that fails to consider the original author’s sensibility.

A more significant problem involves the trance-dream of Abraham and Isaac’s march to the mountain. The poetic idiom of dream communication with divinity, a familiar device used by prophet and historian alike at the time this was written, is ignored and set adrift in Mr. Alter’s translation. Abraham’s dream of being tested turns quickly into nightmare – but not in this translation. “Do not reach out your hand,” says the awkward-speaking God in Mr. Alter’s text, again translating an archaic figure of speech too literally.

Then comes: “And Abraham raised his eyes” to see the ram in the thicket. This is the most real thing that happens, turning this drama around and metaphorically wakening Abraham from his nightmare test: the natural appearance of a wild animal, startling just because it is not supernatural. Yet instead of naturalness, a ram becoming entangled in a thicket, the scene is botched when supernatural and natural dimensions are confused by unwieldy language.

Mr. Alter continues “Abraham went and took the ram.” No literary translation should have a “went and took” when such inelegance misrepresents the original authors. His translation is packed with comments and footnotes, reassuring the reader that the translator has thought long and hard about the meaning of words. Yet the words themselves are defined as if there were no author to use them and thus no historical resonance or irony in their usage.

Some scholars still proclaim “Anonymous” as the true author of these books because so little trace of Hebraic culture remained after the Israelite kingdom was first destroyed. But it is not all that surprising that it could have been lost within a shockingly short period. A unique literary culture of authors in the Yiddish language was wiped out in Europe only a little more than half a century ago. It will remain the work of Yiddish translators in the future – as it must now be the responsibility of Hebrew translators – to keep the authors individual sensibilities alive. In his biblical translation, Mr. Alter has obscured that responsibility.

Every new translation gives us the chance to realize again that great lives were lived in the past. The lives in the stories of history; the lives of the authors; and the lives of the audiences. In addition to the original audience for whom it was written there are the later audiences in time that we ourselves join – those of the misreaders. There is no alternative for us; the experience of our reading is personal.

This held just as true for one of the first misreaders, Mr. Alter’s redactor. By editing the text in a cut-and-paste mode that scholars have now been able to trace, mixing J and E and others, the redactor came up with a new text that has stood the test of time. It was adopted by religious tradition, whereas the original writers were dependent on a Hebraic culture that was eventually lost and replaced by Aramaic. But evidence of that lost Hebraic culture is slowly being pieced together now, however, in spite of the efforts of Mr. Alter to lovingly misread the Torah as the work of a redactor like himself.

Mr. Rosenberg, the former editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society, is the translator of “The Book of J,” to be reissued as a Grove Press paperback in January.