Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Style in Composition

Writing is great fun. It is also fun to read the writing of someone you know well who is struggling to find a voice of their own. When the writing you are reading was penned by your own son, the proprieties and improprieties of the language used are a little bit haunting.

Below the fold is a brief essay by my oldest. His teacher, who passed it on to his mother during a parent-teacher conference, did not correct a single error. It’s pretty good writing for a 16 year old, but there are about a dozen instances in which a rewrite would be appropriate. If you can find those instances, you have a future as a copy-editor.

Getting People to Read What You Write

I don’t think this post by Seth Godin nails it, but he touches on an aspect that is important in the “real” ( = non-academic) world. The secret to being read: keep it short and simple, as in blowing a K.I.S.S. to your readers.  Shorter sentence length rather than an avoidance of technical vocabulary turns out to be the chief hallmark of readable prose. 

Other posters put it this way: write less, impact more. Simple. Words. Sell. Check out Steven Johnson’s research.

Now Seth is right as far as he goes, but the real secret to being read is another. As they say in another business, it’s all about location. If you want the kind of people who surf the net – generally speaking, a well- educated, independent-minded bunch - to read what you write, you blog. If you want the kind of people who buy books in a Christian bookstore to read your stuff, you publish with an outfit that targets that market. If you want scholars to read what you write, you publish articles and book reviews in a variety of important peer-reviewed journals and you write books for a well-known academic publisher.

It’s that simple.

Why do people blog about the Bible?

A songwriter once said, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” But that isn’t the reason most people blog. Most Bible bloggers are not lonely at all. Their lives are of full of people.

People blog because they enjoy interacting with people from around the world. They dig the informal atmosphere of blogdom. They like to write. They are interested in the intersection of the personal and the professional.

Rico thinks in economic terms about blogging. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people blog. Most people blog because they have something to say.

Isaiah 50:4-6 A Wounded Healer

When ancient Hebrew verse is formatted such that structures of parallelism are evident, the wallop the language packs is also more evident. A translation that seeks to reproduce the structures of parallelism may be formatted in the same way. Here is an example:

Memories

1977: Between spring and fall semesters at the University of Toronto, I spent the summer in Madison WI where I was raised, and had my first taste of romance – and rejection. She went on to become a writer of children’s novels. At the time, I may have been the only one to see she had it in her. She passed on to me her love of Italian art and literature, which led to my decision, a few years later, to study in Rome.

1987: As a student pastor of the Waldensian church in a three-point charge - Udine, Gorizia, and Tramonti di Sopra - I put a lot of miles on my Fiat millecento and was plied with grappa and Picolit on pastoral visits. On the side, I wrote a paper for the Rivista biblica italiana on attestations of “Habakkuk” in Akkadian sources.

1997: While part of the pastoral team at the Sun Prairie WI United Methodist Church, I learned by being there for many people in death something of the meaning of life. At the Midwest meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Wheaton IL that year, I gave a paper on 2 Baruch – a Jewish apocalypse with notable affinities to 4 Ezra and the Apocalypse of John. It was later published in the Jewish Quarterly Review.

This meme arrived via Bob MacDonald. I tag Angela Roskop Erisman, Wayne Leman, and Kevin Edgecomb.

Job 28:3 Text, Translation, and Notes

28:3 is a strophe unto itself. The notes I offer are technical, and go into more detail on some matters than is done in otherwise available commentary. If this puts you off, you may choose instead to ask whatever questions you might have regarding the verse. I’ll do my best to answer them.

In Praise of Wikipedia

The quality of Wikipedia is uneven. But it sometimes provides better information than is found most everywhere else. Here is an example.

Job 28:1-2 Text, Translation, and Notes

I promised earlier I would talk about gender-accurate translation and the place of Job 28 within the narrative flow of Job 1-42. Before I do, it seems best to plow through Job 28 strophe by strophe. In accordance with a theory about how ancient Hebrew poetry works, a “strophe” is a unit of 2 to 3 “lines” each of which consists of 2 to 3 “versets” of 2 to 3 beats or “prosodic words.”

Here is the text of 28:1-2, a translation, and notes:

The Macrostructure of Job 28

Lingamish and I are having a contest to see who can write the most difficult prose. How many times can we send our readers to a dictionary or search engine in the course of reading a post? With this post, as originally written, I probably won hands down. I’ve now rewritten it in a less daunting style and have added links that explain technical language.

Almost all translations of the Hebrew Bible subdivide the text into verses according to the tradition preserved in masoretic texts, and into chapters according to a refinement of earlier efforts at macrodivision of the Vulgate by Stephen Langton.[1] The division of the text of the Bible into chapters and verses is not ancient - the hybrid system is first attested in a manuscript dated to 1519 of Isaac Nathan's concordance of the Hebrew Bible, the first ever, compiled in 1437-45 - but is still deserving of respect. I may discuss the origins of the system in greater detail at a future time. Much of what one reads in the manuals regarding these topics is misleading or outright false.

Job 28: A Poem about Two Kinds of Wisdom

The book of Job poses great challenges to a modern interpreter. Its structure and plot require a powerful imagination to make sense of them. Those who think the book is rhetorically persuasive in its present form, and that Job 28 is appropriate on Job’s lips at the juncture in which it is found in the unfolding drama the book lays out, are rare birds. I happen to belong to that number.