In the context of teaching the poetic texts
of the Hebrew Bible, it helps to work with transparent definitions of poetry
and features thereof. Furthermore, it is worth expounding and illustrating a
working hypothesis relative to regularities in ancient Hebrew verse, even when
scholars endlessly argue, as biblical scholars do, about the exact conventions the
corpus of poetry under study conforms to. The endless arguments should not be
allowed to obscure a firm datum: Hebraists are in general agreement about the basic
conventions that regulate ancient Hebrew poetry, an evident fact once it is
observed that the identification of and scansion of biblical
Hebrew poetry offered in recent translations such as NJPSV, NRSV, REB, NAB, NJB,
and ESV overlap to a very large degree.
Concepts like meter, rhythm, and the
distinction between the two as clarified by Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky are
not difficult to teach if examples are given first from native language verse
and then from Hebrew, the ultimate goal. When it comes to parallelism, the
chief trope of ancient Hebrew poetry, it helps to introduce the phenomenon of
“recurrence” according to the adaptation of the model of Roman Jakobson by biblical
scholar P. J. Nel. The notion of semantic transfers via metaphorical frames of
reference is also of great utility. The theory of metaphor advanced by Benjamin
Harshav is a cogent point of departure for the purpose of identifying
metaphorical planes in Hebrew poetry.
To start things off, here are some straightforward definitions of key terms.
Poetry is a genre of verbal art in which highly patterned and highly figured language predominates. The patterns which qualify as “poetic” in a given language and time are established by convention. As far as ancient Hebrew poetry is concerned, the dominant patterns consist of co-occurring structures of parallelisms woven into the fabric of the text at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, prosodic, and semantic levels.
A poem is a sustained example of verbal art of the genre defined above.
“Verse is language in lines,” as Charles Hartman stated.[1] More precisely, as Albert Willem de Groot put it, “Continuous correspondence of successive segments, called ‘lines,’ is the only constant feature which distinguishes verse from prose.”[2] As far as verse in ancient Hebrew is concerned, the units of measurement which most clearly correspond to each other on a continuous basis are the prosodic word, the verset, the line, and the strophe. These terms are defined in relationship to one another in the general rule, which I introduce below.
Prose may be defined as a genre of verbal art in which the patterned and figured language conventional in poetry does not predominate.
As far as ancient Hebrew prose genres are concerned, legal, rhetorical, and narrative prose often possesses a cadence that approximates the division of ancient Hebrew poetry into clusters of two to three prosodic words. But consistency is not observable. Clusters of four prosodic words 1+3, 3+1, and 1+2+1 in configuration occur with some frequency. Furthermore, the high density of semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological parallelisms across units of verset, line, and strophe length characteristic of ancient Hebrew poetry is not the norm in ancient Hebrew prose. Further study is required, but, if my working hypothesis is on the right track, the distinction between prose and poetry in ancient Hebrew literature is, generally speaking, very clear-cut.
What is that hypothesis? It has two parts.
There is a general rule. In
ancient Hebrew, a prosodic hierarchy of “twos and threes” structures a poem.
Two to three prosodic words or stress units form a verset,
two to three versets a line, two to three lines a strophe,
two to three strophes a stanza, and two to three stanzas a poem
or section thereof.
There is also a length rule: a poem, if it contains more than 10 lines, typically consists of 12, 18, 22, 28, or 36 lines, or combinations thereof. Among the Psalms, 14 lines is also a common length.
The terms meter and rhythm are often conflated. An excellent definition of meter was given by John Lotz: “the numerical regulation of certain properties of the linguistic form.”[3]
The problem is that language in general possesses meter
in this sense. At the highest level of abstraction, all one can say is that
verse generally adheres to a more strictly defined set of regularities than do
other forms of speech and literature in a given language. As a practical
matter, however, the problem rarely obtains. Verse is characterized by specific
and describable stylizations of the more general metrical properties observable
in speech and literature within a given language and time frame. The
stylizations which qualify as “verse” are established by convention. We
normally reserve the term “meter” for the metrical properties of verse.
In the view of many, ancient Hebrew poetry is describable in terms of counts of strong stresses across the components of its units. The research carried out in connect with this project supports this view. The distinctions of Viktor Zhirmunsky are worth keeping in mind:
Pure
tonic verse is based on a count of the stressed syllables; the number of
unstressed syllables is a variable quantity . . . When attention is focused on
the stressed syllables, groups of unstressed syllables – even though they
contain varying numbers of syllables – may be perceived as equivalent to each
other.
Of course, the number of unstressed syllables between stresses is of essential importance in shaping the rhythm of individual lines or of the poem as a whole: since, however, such syllables form no part of the compositional structure, they belong to the area of rhythm, not meter.[4]
Put another way, feet in the sense of classical prosody exist in ancient Hebrew poetry but are not metrical. The patterns or lack of them in which they co-occur belong to the dimension of rhythm.
Another key term is prosody. As
I use the term, all language is subject to prosodic constraints at various
levels. Syllables, feet, words, phrases, and utterances in a given language
come in certain shapes and sizes, phonologically speaking, and not others. In
poetry, language-specific constraints are stylized according to convention.
In my view, the components of the line in
ancient Hebrew verse for which it is essential to have a working definition are
two.
In all languages and all poetries, below the
word level, syllables are isolable counting units. A syllable is
a sequence of segments grouped around an obligatory nucleus,
ordinarily a vowel. An initial margin, if any, is referred to as the onset;
the remainder of the syllable, as the rhyme, composed of the nucleus or peak
and optionally, a final margin, known as the coda. Ordinarily, margins
are consonants. But there is no evidence for the view that ancient Hebrew verse
was regulated in the sense of requiring a set number of syllable per line and
half-line. On the other hand, there is evidence for the view that particular
varieties of ancient Hebrew verse conformed to specific expectations in terms
of line length and half-line length. The expectations are expressible in terms
of a syllable recipe the exact details of which will not detain us here.
In accord with a venerable tradition of
analysis in Old Testament studies, it seems to me that the minimal counting
unit in ancient Hebrew poetry for general purposes is the prosodic word.
A prosodic word is the domain of word stress. In many languages, and in Hebrew,
an orthographic word is composed of a lexical word which may be preceded or
followed by a short function word the whole of which is dominated by a single
main stress. An orthographically distinct function word and the lexical word to
which it is attached taken together constitute a prosodic word. Words without
word stress are known as pro- and enclitics. Another term used for a prosodic
word is a stress unit.
If this kind of analysis is relevant to
ancient Hebrew verse, and I think it is, the regularities which show up on
further analysis can be elegantly expressed. As already proposed, two to three prosodic
words form a verset, two to three versets a line,
two to three lines a strophe, two to three strophes a stanza,
and two to three stanzas a poem or section thereof. The
application of this text model to the corpus of poetry in the Hebrew Bible
leads to results that vary to a limited but not insignificant extent from those
arrived at by the more intuitive, less formal text models that underlie the
lineation of the corpus to be found in the general run of scholarly commentaries
and recent translations.
To be clear, the first goal of the study of
ancient Hebrew verse is not that of reaching total agreement about the ground
rules of lineation in the corpus. The first goal is simply to move away from the
more intuitive approaches to lineation that continue to dominate the field, approaches
that consciously or unconsciously posit text models so loose that a distinction
between poetry and prose and between types of poetry become impossible. It is
time to put forward testable text models of ancient Hebrew poetry. Whether or
not the text model you adopt is identical to mine is not the point. The point
is, from the point of the data-based study of ancient Hebrew verse, a testable
working hypothesis is an essential heuristic tool if progress of any kind is to
be made.
For a full glossary and full introduction to
the text model of ancient Hebrew verse I propose, I direct the reader to the
post entitled How
Ancient Hebrew Poetry Works.
To be continued.
[1] Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980) 11; cited by Walter T. W. Cloete, Versification and Syntax in Jeremiah 2-25: Syntactical Constraints in Hebrew Colometry (SBLDS 117; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) 5.
[2] Albert Willem de Groot, “The Description of a Poem,” in Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Mass., August 27-31, 1962 (ed. Horace G. Lunt; The Hague: Mouton, 1964) 294-300, 299; cited by W. T. W. Cloete, Versification, 5.
[3]
John Lotz, “Elements of Versification,” in Versification: Major Language
Types (ed. William K. Wimsatt;
[4] Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky, Introduction to Metrics: The Theory of Verse (tr. and ed. C.E. Brown; introd. Edward Stankiewicz and Walter N. Vickery; The Hague: Mouton, 1966) 171; cited Cloete, Versification, 9.
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