His gorgeous large volume, The Five Books of Moses, leaves the reader agog that the Hebrew Bible wasn't written in King James English. Fox's rendering. Instead, it sticks close to the original tongue and has a rough-edged, field-research vividness where many of the characters come in unfamiliar names – Ish and Isha for Adam and Eve, for starters. Familiar quotations sometimes differ so sharply that they pass unrecognized.
The translation evokes the sounds of reading the text aloud and hews to puns, word play, word repetition, and alliteration – with detailed notes and footnotes, as needed – that give a sense of what's been stripped away in conventional translations that polish and soften the action.
It's my go-to version these days, augmented by others to context to my earlier readings. I wish we had more of the Bible rendered along the lines Fox pursues.
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