Everett Fox — The Early Prophets

The Early Prophets is the second major volume in Everett Fox's distinctive attempt to reproduce Hebrew sound, repetition, and wordplay in English. Translated from Hebrew and following the Masoretic Hebrew base text, it covers the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings — the narrative sequence known in Jewish tradition as the Former Prophets, which recounts Israel's history from the entry into the land through the exile. Its guiding philosophy is form-sensitive, or Hebraizing literary, in the lineage of the German rendering by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, and it is classified as a fresh translation, taking Fox's Five Books of Moses (1995) as its predecessor and base translation. Among its distinctive features is a willingness to bend normal English intentionally in order to retain features of Hebrew rhetoric, so that the printed page preserves the cadences and echoes of the original for readers and hearers alike.