Tinkering With the Hebrew Bible

For years, the framed portrait of Franz Kafka, set alone atop an office bookshelf, was an unintended source of angst in the home of Everett Fox, the Bible translator. When Fox’s son, as a child, saw this black-and-white image of a handsome but unsmiling stranger, well dressed and tubercular, he had assumed that the man was a relative—a frightening one. “It really scared him,” Fox told me. “I think it was those eyes. That piercing gaze.”