Meter in Ancient Hebrew Poetry

My paper proposals were accepted for the international SBL meeting in Rome this summer. Just as I was hoping might not happen. I actually have more fun at meetings when I do not have to present. It is now incumbent on me to take my mass of papers and notes on the corpora I will concentrate on, Proverbs 1-9 and Lamentations 1-5, and whittle the material down to two 20-minute presentations.

In my view, Proverbs 1-9 contains wisdom poems written in “mashal” meter with lines consisting of two (occasionally, three) half-lines of approximately equal length. The halves of a given line vary slightly, never drastically, in phonological length, with either the first or the second half slightly longer than the other. The poems have global counts of 12, 18, 22, 28, and 36 lines, or combinations thereof.

Lamentations 1-5, on the other hand, contains poems written in “qinah” meter with lines consisting of two half-lines in which the second half is shorter, phonologically speaking, than the first half, and in any case never longer than the first half. The poems have global counts of (combinations of) 12, 18, and 22 lines.

Mashal and qinah meters differ from the more free-form “common” meter of the bulk of ancient Hebrew poetry, in which verset, half-line, and line length are subject to specifiable but less rigid constraints. All three species of ancient Hebrew poetry, common, mashal, and qinah, adhere to the “general” and “length” rules stipulated here.

In terms of the history of research, my text model for ancient Hebrew poetry incorporates and tweaks the prosodic word counting method associated with Ley, Sievers, and Budde, and upheld more recently by Harshav and Alter, as well as the syllable counting method of Cross, Freedman, Culley, and Fokkelman – however, the definition of “syllable” I work with differs somewhat from that of both Freedman and Fokkelman, and I draw different conclusions than they do from the data. For an outline of the history of research, go here.

Here are the abstracts of my papers.

Regularities in Ancient Hebrew Verse: The Wisdom Poems of Proverbs 1-9

The prosodic parse reflected in the Masoretic text of Proverbs 1-9 is a linguistic artifact of the first order. Nonetheless, if the attempt is made to identify the organizing principles of the prosody of the underlying text, a revision of the traditional parse in specific instances seems in order. For example, the division into pesuqim (masoretic verses) often but not always subdivides the whole into prosodically equivalent domains. In this paper the prosodic regularities of Proverbs 1-9 are stipulated in terms of a formula that embraces prosodic word count and a phonological length parameter. As one would expect given the analogy of strong-stress meters in poetries cross-culturally, the meter in question is not strict but nevertheless subject to specifiable constraints. The result is a working hypothesis whose impact on questions at the level of Einzelexegese is not insignificant. A handout in which the prosodic subdivisions of Proverbs 1-9 are laid out in their entirety will be provided.

The Qinah Meter of Lamentations 1-5 Re-examined

The prosodic parse reflected in the Masoretic text of Lamentations 1-5 is a linguistic artifact of the first order. Nevertheless, since the pioneering analysis of Karl Budde, the attempt has been made to identify the organizing principles of the prosody of the underlying verse. This has led to a revision of the traditional parse in specific instances. In this paper the prosodic regularities of Lamentations 1-5 are stipulated in terms of a formula that embraces prosodic word count and a phonological length parameter. As one would expect given the analogy of strong-stress meters in poetries cross-culturally, the meter in question is not strict but nevertheless subject to specifiable constraints. The result is a working hypothesis whose impact on questions at the level of Einzelexegese is not insignificant. A handout in which the prosodic subdivisions of Lamentations 1-5 are laid out in their entirety will be provided.

Comments

[Andrew]

Grrrr - if only I could make it out to Rome this summer. You know full well that your paper topics are of great interest to me! Perhaps I can entice you to send me a copy! Congrats and I'm sure the papers will go very well.

[JohnFH]

Hi Andrew,

I will be trying out pieces of my papers on-blog, and everything will eventually get posted. So stay tuned.

[danielandtonya]

John,

They sound great. Wish we could hear them live. Unfortunately, during July we're in the middle of class.

D&T

[Hope]

Hi,

I like reading your blog and at first I was marvelled to see such a blog. You have a gift of writing, keep up the good work. I'll be back soon to read more.

Regards,
Hope

[JohnFH]

Daniel and Tonya,

I trust all is well in your new venue. Thanks for your fine blog.

[Christopher Heard]

I'm sure that your presentations will be stellar, but I've never really found quantitative analysis of Hebrew poetry to be that helpful. I'm sure you could probably convince me otherwise.