The inky wretch never teased me about anything, but he did think it was funny when I decided to read the Bible straight through. "It's not Jane Austen," he told me.

He had the advantage of a proper Hebrew school education. Letter by letter, line by line, the children at his synagogue in Shreveport studied the Torah under the direction of their rabbi, cycling through the five books year after year, turning to more and more commentary, I suppose, as they grew older.

What a gift to bestow on a young person, the habit of reading line by line, and the habit of telling the story over and over again.

But true to my frontier Protestant ancestors, I took on the King James Bible. For a little over a year; I did not go as slow or as deep as I ought to have, did not read enough supporting commentary, did not always understand what was going on, but pressed on in hopes that the language--archaic even when it was written (or translated)--would form me with its rhythms and its concrete language and its delightful anachronisms.

(Wimples and unicorns are both in there. I suppose unicorns are not an anachronism if they never existed, but who's to say they didn't? I'm bringing my Zen mind to this. Child mind, beginner's mind.)

Robert Alter's translation of the five books of Moses provided support when I wanted to know what a passage really said. I think Alter is recognized as the great Hebrew scholar of our age. What I thought was my favorite quote from Alter is actually something he quoted from one John Barton in a book review: "The Old Testament is the literature of a nation, written over some centuries, and having a certain official character. The New Testament is the literature of a small sect, distributed over the eastern Mediterranean world, and in its origins unofficial, even experimental writing."

Alter's idea was to use all the scholarship available--textual, linguistic, and archeological--to translate the Hebrew into English as literally as possible without losing the music of the King James. He has now translated the entire Hebrew Bible.

Alter's parallel for the New Testament is David Bentley Hart. He sought to translate the Greek literally without reference to doctrine, without dropping details that seemed unnecessary to earlier translators.

An example that does not provoke theological controversy: In John 18:1, the KJV has Jesus and his disciples "go forth over the brook Cedron, where was a garden ..." The KJV omits that the Cedron (Kedron) flows in winter. Hart includes that detail. It's springtime, and Jesus is going into Jerusalem for Passover. So he is crossing a dry bed.

I do not have my copy of Hart's New Testament on hand and used a computer to find that example, which came from someone who commented on an article in Catholic Bible Talk. I'm willing to trust the person who commented. He goes by Bob.

I brought up Hart recently in a conversation with a computer. Its description of Allan Bloom's approach to "The Republic" reminded me of Hart's approach to the New Testament. If the Greek is weird, Bloom lets it be weird.

Bloom's essay "The Study of Texts" is what led me to turn to a computer to patch up another biblical-sized hole in my education. I've never read Plato. (Maybe part of The Apology in a philosophy class in college.) So the computer and I have started "The Republic." Line by line.

The computer serves up a passage from Bloom's translation, followed by the same passage in Greek. I'm learning some more Greek letters. (Till now I only knew the ones that are in the names of sororities at Fayetteville.) Every word serves up some delight.

Donald Harington offers up a wonderful rumination in "The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks" about the relationship between the words "architecture" and "bois d'arc," which he speculates might be related to "Ozark."

But until the computer called my attention to the name "Polemarchus," I didn't know that the Greek noun "arche" (pronounced "Arky?") means both "beginning, origin, first principle" and "rule, authority, sovereignty." It gives us monarchy, hierarchy, archaic, archaeology, and architect. Menarche and patriarchy. What beauty!

Every writer, says Bloom, has different intentions and a different rhetoric. "Each must be understood from within. He must be worn like a pair of glasses, through which we see the world." And, in a line that relieved decades of shame for all the gaps in my education: "It is unlikely that we shall be able to read many books in such a way, but the experience of one book profoundly read will teach more than many read lightly."

It might take me and the computer a year to get through "The Republic." Onward.

Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock. Email brooke@restorationmapping.com.

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