The English settlers were Christians, of course, but it was the Old Testament, much more than the New, that spoke to them and their experience. In the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and conquest of the Promised Land, the Puritans found an obvious parallel to their own journey across the Atlantic and their struggle in the New World. (As Alter notes, Israelite place names are everywhere in the American landscape, from Salem to Shiloh.) The King James Bible, then, was not just the matrix of the American language, but the means of transmitting Jewish history, and the morality of the Hebrew Bible, to the American people.

As a leading scholar and translator of the Bible, who is also deeply knowledgeable about American literature, Robert Alter is ideally suited to study this complicated inheritance. Alter’s own translations of scripture—most recently, the Book of Psalms—have inevitably been measured against the familiar cadences of the King James Bible, and they can be seen in part as attempts to criticize or displace that standard text. But in literary terms, Alter recognizes, the King James version—though it may be “often inaccurate”—is canonical and irreplaceable. In a sense, the English Bible has ceased to be a translation and become a second original. If you were more mystically inclined than Alter, you could consider it an example of Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation, which holds that every true translation completes the meaning of a text as it appears in the mind of God.

The locutions of the King James Bible echo through our literature so pervasively that we often take them for granted. The Gettysburg Address offers a small but telling example. Why, Alter asks, did Lincoln begin by saying “Four score and seven years ago,” rather than just “eighty-seven years ago”? The answer is that he was drawing, perhaps unconsciously, on the phrase “three score and ten,” which appears 111 times in the King James Bible. By measuring time in this formal, archaic fashion, Lincoln raises American history to the same level as sacred history. At the end of the Address, Lincoln again turns to the Bible: When he promises that American democracy “shall not perish from the earth,” he is echoing a phrase from Job and Jeremiah.

At the core of Pen of Iron—the title, of course, is itself a Biblical allusion (“the sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond”—Jeremiah 17:1)—is Alter’s analysis of the Bible’s influence on three great American novels: Moby-Dick; Absalom, Absalom; and Seize the Day. In discussing these books, Alter shows that that influence cannot be measured strictly in allusions or verbal echoes. Melville, Faulkner, and Bellow do not simply use biblical language, they think in biblical categories—especially, Alter argues, when they are challenging the faith and morality that the Bible teaches.

Moby-Dick is a perfect case in point. Melville’s novel is a riot of language, whose lavish rhetoric owes a great deal to Shakespeare, Milton, and other 17th-century writers. But the elemental power and metaphysical scope of the novel are rooted in its complex response to the Bible. When the Pequod sets sail, for instance, Melville writes: “ever and anon, as the old craft dived deep in the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang.” This simple form of narration, where events are connected only by “and,” is known as parataxis, and it is the Bible’s favorite technique: “Then Jacob gave Esau bread and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.” (As Alter points out, the parataxis is still more pronounced in the Hebrew: The King James’s “then” and “thus” actually translate the Hebrew “and.”) Biblical parallelism, too, is used to heighten Melville’s style. When he writes that the sea is “worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing now the creatures which itself hath spawned,” Alter observes that “the two long clauses … could almost be read as two lines of Biblical poetry.”

The irony is that Melville uses these biblical tropes in constructing a book that is a kind of anti-Bible—a long refutation of the existence of God and the goodness of Creation. In one of the best sections of Pen of Iron, Alter focuses on Melville’s use of Leviathan, the biblical sea-monster, as a way of turning scripture against itself. Leviathan, who is of course a prototype of Moby Dick, seems to Melville to puncture the Bible’s own chronology:

Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed blood older than Pharaoh’s. Methusaleh seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable horrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.

Leviathan, as the principle of brute violence and evil, is older than the biblical dispensation (“antemosaic”) and will survive it. As Alter writes, the whale “drops the bottom out of history, leaving man as an inconsequential and transient mote in a play of cosmic energies that vastly antedates him and that will no doubt outlast him.” In this way, Melville uses the Bible to herald a new, post-biblical worldview—which is one reason why his echoes of the King James text are so starkly powerful.

Alter’s other subjects, Faulkner and Bellow, are also powerful prose stylists, but they are less directly indebted to the English Bible. The style of Absalom, Absalom, with its nonce words, Latinisms, involved syntax, and general fanciness, is as unlike the plainness of the Authorized Version as English can well be. Yet as Faulkner’s title announces, the novel’s plot is based on events from the life of King David—the rape of Tamar, the murder of Amnon, and the rebellion of Absalom. More, Alter writes, Faulkner builds the book around certain primal words that come straight from the King James Bible: “birthright, curse, land or earth, name and lineage … seed, birthplace, inheritance, house, flesh and blood … dust and clay.”

Pen of Iron makes a convincing case that it is impossible to fully appreciate American literature without knowing the King James Bible—indeed, without knowing it almost instinctively, the way generations of Americans used to know it. The problem is that, over the course of the last century, biblical literacy has plummeted, even as translations and editions of the Bible have proliferated. (Several free apps can put the whole King James Bible, along with many other versions, on your iPhone.) It would be interesting to try to read more recent American fiction through Alter’s lens: Can you hear the Bible in David Foster Wallace’s prose, or Lydia Davis’? “The essential point for the history of our literature,” Alter writes at the end of Pen of Iron, “is that the resonant language and the arresting vision of the canonical text, however oldentime they may be, continue to ring in cultural memory.” I wonder how faint the ring can grow before we stop hearing it completely.

If Williams comes out of a David Lodge novel, however, Greenberg undoubtedly belongs in a book by Saul Bellow. “As I saw it, the real sacrifice was on the part of those who had to toe the line and forswear a free-style existence,” Greenberg writes of his adolescent self, cleverly alluding both to the title of his column and to that famous freelance, Augie March: “’First to knock, first admitted,’ in Saul Bellow’s words. ‘Sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.’” Following this creed, Greenberg never went to college, choosing instead to run away from home as a teenager, then prowl New York and the world in search of the writer’s elixir, experience. Yet in Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life—the terrific new collection of Greenberg’s “Freelance” columns, just published by Other Press—he is mainly concerned to show the downside of experience. The book is a chronicle, not of failure exactly, but of constant struggle—against the slipperiness of the writer’s vocation, against the psychological burdens of family and Jewishness, but most straightforwardly, as the title suggests, the struggle just to earn a living.

In other words, Greenberg is engaged with the very subjects that made the first generation of American Jewish writers so elementally vigorous. That is why this slender book makes such a strong impression: it is as though Bellow or Alfred Kazin were transported to post-millennial New York, bringing their toughness and romanticism to bear on our softer and more familiar world. Greenberg himself hints at this quality of his writing in a typically self-deprecatory piece about his early struggles to publish a novel. In the early 1980s, Greenberg writes, he sent his manuscript to the influential editor Ted Solotaroff, who returned it with a note: “This manuscript represents everything I hate in fiction.” Greenberg was devastated, of course; but years later, when he read Solotaroff’s memoir Truth Comes in Blows, he realized that his novel must have struck all too close to home. “With its complicated, immigrant-minded fathers and their sons,” Greenberg now sees, “my novel must have seemed old hat to him, a story of Jewish marginality that, in America at least, was passé.”

In a certain sense, the style of Jewish marginality that Greenberg writes about Beg, Borrow, Steal does seem passé, or at least to belong to the past, if only for socioeconomic reasons. We are accustomed to reading about Jewish peddlers on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, and their struggling intellectual sons in the 1930s. Follow that lineage down to the present, and the great-grandson who becomes a writer is likely to have an MFA from Iowa and a tenured teaching job; if he writes about Jewishness, it will be in a nostalgic, quasi-magical-realist style.

In Beg, Borrow, Steal, however, the familiar timeline of assimilation and upward mobility has been discarded. Instead of his grandfather, we find Greenberg himself working as a peddler (the time appears to be the early 1970s), selling knockoff cosmetics on Fordham Road in the Bronx. Greenberg befriends a Chilean food-vendor named Lucho, who teaches him the tricks of the trade—above all, which security guard to bribe to avoid being rousted. But this gesture of friendship, like most such gestures in Greenberg’s world, turns out to have been a con. The day before Easter, when Greenberg has done great business and is carrying a lot of cash, Lucho doesn’t show up to work; instead, three teenagers come and rob him, presumably on his friend’s instructions.

The moral is one Bellow would have approved: the life of the mind is okay for idealists, but real life is dog-eat-dog. This was also the creed of Greenberg’s own father: “To get by in my father’s world, you had to be tough, like he was. He didn’t have colleagues, only enemies. Every dollar, he taught us, had to be pried away from men who would just as soon see us starve.” No wonder Greenberg’s book is full of crooks and operators—from Henry, the young coffee-shop barista who expects Greenberg to look on approvingly as he robs the till, to Hugh, a junkie who feeds Greenberg’s curiosity with stories about thieving techniques before burglarizing his apartment. There is something of Rinaldo Cantabile, the gangster pal of Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift, in such figures, and in Greenberg’s suspicious-but-amused relationships with them.

The central irony of Greenberg’s memoir—for that is what Beg, Borrow, Steal amounts to—is that it was his literary idealism, in rebellion against his brutal father, that landed Greenberg in such brutal and unideal places. Greenberg’s war with his father begins, appropriately, in the book’s very first sentence: “My old man was like Zeus’s father Cronos: he couldn’t bear the idea that any of his children might surpass him.” The literary son fighting the businessman father is the oldest of modern Jewish tropes, going back to Kafka and Freud, but we seldom see it in such vigor in late 20th-century America. Greenberg’s fight was literal: he writes of the moment his father “took a wild swing at me. I dodged it easily, hearing the crush of bone as his fist hit the wall. I fled the apartment, and when I returned, three days later, his hand was in a cast.”

No wonder Greenberg is so conflicted about the burdens of family, and of Jewishness. In one of the book’s most charged sections, he writes about circumcision: “In ancient times, it fell to the father to do the job on his son himself, driving home the idea that masculinity belonged to God or to the priests who spoke for him. For Freud, this was proof of the violence of the father who crashes in on the paradise of mother and child.” Greenberg’s reluctance to inflict such “violence” on his son meant that he went uncircumcised, while ironically, “his Cuban and black crib mates were circumcised as a matter of course.” When, shortly afterward, the doctor informed Greenberg that the boy should be circumcised to treat a rare condition—“a one-in-a-million occurrence”—it is like a cosmic reminder that Jewishness cannot be ducked.

Greenberg’s refusal to join the family scrap-metal business was another kind of rebellion, and a more successful one, as we see from the fates of his brothers who fell in line: “For thirty years they tormented each other with accumulated rancor.” Yet Greenberg’s literary career has been anything but idyllic: he writes about his experiences ghost-writing for minor celebrities, writing narration for a golf documentary (though he doesn’t know how to play golf), and punching up Hollywood scripts. At a low moment, he compares himself to Wilky in Bellow’s Seize the Day, “who has persisted in his quest to be an actor just long enough to make himself unfit for the more lucrative professions.” But this book, with its intrepidity, humor, and dark insight, offers its own, irrefutable justification for the “writer’s life.”

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.