Alter's translation puts into practice his belief that the rules of biblical style require it to reiterate, artfully, within scenes and from scene to scene, a set of "key words," a term Alter derives from Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who in an epic labor that took nearly 40 years to complete, rendered the Hebrew Bible into a beautifully Hebraicized German. Key words, as Alter has explained elsewhere, clue the reader in to what's at stake in a particular story, serving either as "the chief means of thematic exposition" within episodes or as connective tissue between them.

Several biblical translations into other languages in the 20th and 21st centuries have followed some kind of version of these translation norms, albeit with different goals and within different contexts. The German translation by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, whose first volume appeared in 1925, for instance, aimed to reflect the linguistic features of the original Hebrew. The central precept of Henri Meschonnic’s French translation, which came out in 1970, is “more than what a text says, it is what a text does that must be translated.” Haroldo de Campos’s translation of individual biblical books into Brazilian Portuguese in the 1990s were meant to “Hebraicize the Portuguese.”