But Alter, along with critics like Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, David Damrosch and Gabriel Josipovici, has spent the past quarter-century rejecting both the preacherly and the historicist approaches to the Bible and devising one that would allow us to grapple with it as literature.

Alter’s approaches the Bible as great literature first and foremost — an approach almost inconceivable before the mid-20th century.