Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Ancient Hebrew Poetry: Understanding Compositional Technique is Important

The objection will be raised: is it really possible to get students interested in the nuts and bolts of ancient Hebrew poetry? Who cares enough about the contours and craft of that poetry to want to come to a clear understanding of its ground rules? Poetry, yes, everyone likes how it sounds. Poetry theory, that’s for the birds.

A Research Database for the Study of Ancient Hebrew Poetry

The overview of recent research provided in the preceding posts illustrates the degree to which parallel structures characterize ancient Hebrew verse at every level of the textual hierarchy. A research database designed to facilitate the study of the phenomenon would ideally have the following features. Components of texts presumed to be poetry would be tagged at the macrostructural, prosodic, semantic, syntactic, morphological, and sonic levels. Each of the six levels, to be sure, is multidimensional.

Klaus Seybold’s Poetik der Psalmen: An Introduction

Klaus Seybold attends to aspects of ancient Hebrew poetry which escape the notice of many. His wide ranging scholarship concentrates on the literary and theological dimensions of the texts he examines. Below the fold I introduce a major work of his, and provide a bibliography of Seybold’s contributions to the field. Even if you care little about the field of poetics, you will enjoy reading about the rhyme-scheme Seybold employs in his monograph.

Philip Johannes Nel on the realization of the principle of recurrence in ancient Hebrew poetry

The phenomenon of parallelism in biblical Hebrew poetry continues to attract the attention of researchers with diverse points of departure. In my next posts, I will highlight recent contributions by the following scholars: Philip Nel, Beat Weber, Joel LeMon, Roland Meynet, and Klaus Seybold. In conclusion, I will describe the need for a research database designed to facilitate the study of parallelisms in ancient Hebrew verse. This post concerns a seminal article by P. J. Nel entitled:

“Parallelism and Recurrence in Biblical Hebrew Poetry: A Theoretical Proposal,” JNSL 18 (1992) 135-43

Why prosody is a topic that cannot be ignored in the study of parallelism in ancient Hebrew verse

In the wake of Robert Lowth’s pioneering investigation, some varieties of parallelism found in ancient Hebrew verse have been intensively researched while others have received little attention. For example, examples of apposition, syndetic coordination, and hypotaxis form series in parallelism, and reinforce other forms of parallelism. No one has looked at the phenomenon in depth.[1]

Does this post have the creepy feel of a scholarly treatise? Does the length of my sentences and the strange vocabulary make your eyes roll? It’s all on purpose! I’m going to give two papers at SBL in San Diego in a couple of weeks. It’s a well-known fact that papers presented at academic conferences are designed to be virtually unintelligible to the audience, so that no one dare criticize them in real time.

The ISV and Ancient Hebrew Poetry

An exciting aspect of ISV is its commitment to reproduce the poetry of the Old and New Testaments in its integrity. The ISV website states: “Poetic passages in both the Old and New Testaments are printed in poetic form.” But I continue to be frustrated by ISV’s formatting of ancient Hebrew poetry. Here is an example, ISV Lamentations 1:1-6:

Come, Let us Walk in the Light of the Lord: Isa 1:21–2:5

    "Come, let us walk in Yhwh's light" (Isa 2:5): these words echo those that introduce the concluding lines of a preceding pericope in the book of Isaiah (1:2-20): "Come, let us settle the case" (1:18). In my view, "Come, let us walk in Yhwh's light" is the concluding admonition of a speech that originally consisted of Isa 1:21-26 and 2:2-5.

An Annotated Bibliography of Research relevant to the Study of Ancient Hebrew Poetry

    Future advances in ancient Hebrew poetry studies will be based on the work of many who labored up till now in the field. The larger fields of metrics, prosody, and linguistic analysis of poetry also have much to offer.    

    Diachronic analysis of the Hebrew language will eventually force students of ancient Hebrew poetry to break with the received text, however tentatively, in the hopes of reconstructing ancient Hebrew verse as it might have been heard, read, and written in the period of its composition.

    This post contains an annotated bibliography of ancient Hebrew poetry studies, the larger fields of metrics, prosody, and linguistic analysis of poetry, and an introductory bibliography to the synchronic and diachronic study of ancient Hebrew. Go here.

A History of Modern Research on the Question of Meter in Ancient Hebrew Poetry

    An excellent definition of meter was given by John Lotz: “the numerical regulation of certain properties of the linguistic form.” Language in general possesses meter in this sense. Verse generally adheres to a more strictly defined set of regularities than do other forms of speech and literature in a given language. Specific stylizations of the more general metrical properties observable in speech and literature within a given language and time frame characterize verse.

    The history of research on the question of meter in ancient Hebrew poetry is uncharted territory for all but a handful of those who currently occupy themselves with ancient Hebrew literature.

    I herewith post a brief introduction to the history of research.

The Corpus of Ancient Hebrew Poetry

    What constitutes poetry among the examples of ancient Hebrew literature that have come down to us remains a controversial issue. The corpus of ancient Hebrew poetry I have made the basis of my research is the following  - a PDF version is available here):