Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Ancient Hebrew Dancing

You put your right regel in, you put your right regel out. You put your right regel in and you shake it all about. You do the Hokey Pokey and you sovev yourself around. That's what it's all about!

James Kugel vs. Robert Alter on Psalm 51:9-12

For earlier posts in this series, go here, here, and here. The analysis below is verse-by-verse.

Bialik’s “On the Slaughter” and the Tradition of Biblical Lament: Stanza Two

Go here, here, and here for earlier posts in this series.

The second stanza of Bialik’s “On the Slaughter” cannot be fully understood without knowing the details of the Kishinev pogrom to which it reacts. The horror of the pogrom included a Jewish man and his dog, both beheaded, lying in a street to rot. The perpetrator: a Gentile, who probably thought he was doing a Christian good deed.

The title of the poem is activated in this stanza. The slaughter is understood through ritual categories. This takes us deep into the world view of the Hebrew Bible, a world view we might wish to understand before recoiling in uncomprehending disbelief.

Here is the second stanza:

Jeremiah 31:22: A Text to Consider when Planning a Jewish or Christian Wedding

In this post, I describe how a subtext of the traditional Jewish wedding rite may be actualized in terms of the larger Jewish or Christian tradition. If you don’t know Hebrew, don’t worry. Translation is provided.

Why Unitarianism is on a Roll

The prophet Isaiah was rather tart about the human tendency to fulfill religious requirements in the absence of inner conviction and in the studied disregard of the one who commanded the requirements in the first place:

Bialik’s “On the Slaughter” and the Tradition of Biblical Lament: Stanza One

Go here and here for introductions to this post.

Bialik’s “On the Slaughter” is informed by the categories of biblical lament. To the extent that we do not understand biblical lament, we will not understand his prayer. It also works the other way. To the extent that we understand his prayer, we will understand biblical lament, including psalm 137.

Bialik’s Prayer and Psalm 137

Nahman Hayyim Bialik (1873-1934) was born into a large, impoverished, and pious family. His father died in 1880. Without the means to raise him herself, his mother parted with him and entrusted him to the care of his well-to-do paternal grandfather. Nahman was 7 years old. He remembered the first six years of his life as the happiest he knew.

“Everybody won't be treated all the same”

The title for this post is taken from a song written by the man in black, Johnny Cash. It’s a powerful song. The blood of scripture courses through its veins. For all the lyrics to “When the Man Comes Around,” go here. The music, which is fabulous, is a click or two away in more than one place.

This post is the first in a two-part introduction to a forthcoming post on Psalm 137. My goal is to prepare the reader to hear the psalm in a new way. My other goal, as always, is to teach the Hebrew of the Bible. Poetry is an excellent means to that end.

Psalm 137 is incomprehensible to the extent that we are not cognizant of the trauma out of which it was born. The disaster and the effect it had on its victims is expressed in words of great bitterness in Lamentations. For a taste thereof, go here.

Another, more bracing path into the viscera of Psalm 137 is by way of the poetry of Hayyim Nahman Bialik. As a young man, Bialik wrote two poems in reaction to the pogrom of 1903 that took the lives of 47 Jews in Kishinev, Moldovia, and displaced over two thousand Jewish families.

A Review of Chapter Five of Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies

“Literary Criticism: Aesthetics as Apologetics.” Chapter Five of Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007) 219-247.

 Avalos covers a lot of ground in this chapter. The texts he touches on include Isaiah 40, the Hebrew and Greek versions of the book of Jeremiah, Jonah, Psalm 68:21, Psalms 9-10; Psalm 35, and Psalm 137. The scholars whose work he passes in review include Robert Alter, Sakae Kubo and Walter Specht, Robert Lowth, David Noel Freedman and Frank Moore Cross, James Kugel, Jack Sasson, Stanley Gevirtz, Carroll Stuhlmueller, Hermann Gunkel, James Ackerman, Alan Cooper, Susan Niditch, Mitchell Dahood, and Phyllis Trible.

The Haftarah for Yom Kippur Afternoon: Micah 7:18-20

“May you cast to the sea-depths all our sins!”

These words are well-known to observant Jews because they form the basis of the Tashlikh ceremony of the afternoon of the first day of Rosh HaShanah in which this text is symbolically re-enacted. It is of course an excellent practice to inflect a text not only on a verbal level, but on a physical level. Kinetic learning is a trait of all full-bodied religion (pun intended).

Sephardic Jews recite Micah 7:18-20 together with Hosea 14:2-10 on Shabbat Shuvah (the Sabbath before Yom Kippur). All Jews recite it, together with the entire book of Jonah, as a Haftarah on Yom Kippur Afternoon.

The Masoretic text reads ‘their sins,’ not ‘our sins’ in 7:19. ‘Their sins’ seems to fit the context poorly, and might be accounted for in terms of scribal error (נו corrupted to מ). The Old Greek translates as if its source text read ‘our sins.’ The reading was independently reproposed in gaonic times.[1] I have adopted the proposal here.