Spotlight on Roland Meynet

Roland Meynet is a professor of New Testament Exegesis in the Theology Department of the Gregorian University, Rome, Italy. He has written extensively on the gospel of Luke, the book of Amos (with Pietro Bovati), a number of psalms, and a variety of other texts.

    Meynet has founded a school of biblical interpretation that seeks to uncover structure and figures of composition in delimitable textual units. Not all of the texts treated by Meynet are examples of verse, but many are. For an overview, go here. The method of analysis involves the search for parallelisms across macro and micro units and their classification in terms of structures

(1) chiastic (a¹b¹:b²a²); 
     (2) concentric (a¹b¹c¹d¹e¹:x:e²d²c²b²a²) and
     (3) simplex parallel (a¹b¹c¹d¹e¹:a²b²c²d²e²). 

The tradition of analysis Meynet develops has roots, as he shows, in the work of Christian Schoettgen, Johann Albrecht Bengel, Robert Lowth, John Jebb, Thomas Boys, John Forbes, and Nils Wilhelm Lund. Before them, unbeknownst to Meynet, came John Smith, The mystery of rhetorick unveil'd: Wherein above 130 of the tropes and figures are severally derived from the Greek into English; together with lively definitions, and a variety of Latin, English, scriptural examples, pertinent to each of them apart. Eminently delightful and profitable for young scholars, and other of all sorts, enabling them to discern and imitate the elegancy in any author they read (London: George Eversden, 1683; repr. with the title Mystery of Rhetoric Unveiled (1657) (English linguistics 1500-1800: a collection of facsimile reprints 205; Menston: Scolar Press, 1969). 

For an introduction to Meynet’s method in English, see Rhetorical Analysis. An Introduction to Biblical Rhetoric (1998). The formatting of the volume does not follow standard editorial procedure. It is sometimes difficult to know when the author is speaking as opposed to quoting another. For a more adequate introduction, see Traité de rhétorique biblique (2007). 

For a bibliography of Meynet’s contributions to the study of examples of ancient Hebrew poetry, go  here. In Bernard Witek’s Bibliography of Rhetorical Analysis, the figures of composition identified by Meynet are listed along with the contributions in which they are discussed. For this bibliography and a complete Meynet bibliography, go here.