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• Parallelism in Hebrew Poetry

pō´et - ri :

I. IS THERE POETRY IN THE OLD TESTAMENT ?

Poetry Defined:

1. In Matter, Concrete and Imaginative

2. In Form, Emotional and Rhythmical

II. NEGLECT OF HEBREW POETRY : CAUSES

III. CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY , EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL

1. External or Formal Characteristics

(1) Vocabulary

(2) Grammar

(3) Rhythm

(4) Parallelism

(5) Other Literary Devices

(6) Units of Hebrew Poetry

(7) Classification of Stichs or Verses

2. Internal or Material Characteristics

(1) Themes of Hebrew Poetry

(2) Species of Hebrew Poetry

IV. POETICAL WRITINGS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

1. The Poetical Books in the Narrow Sense

2. Customary Division of the Poetical Books

3. Poetry in Non-poetical Books

LITERATURE

By Hebrew poetry in the present article is meant that of the Old Testament. There is practically no poetry in the New Testament, but, in the Old Testament Apocrypha, Sirach is largely poetical and Wisdom only less so. Post-Biblical Hebrew poetry could not be discussed here.

I. Is There Poetry in the Old Testament?

Poetry Defined:

The article, relative pronoun, accusative singular 'ēth and also the " waw -consecutive" are frequently omitted for the sake of the rhythm. There are several examples of the last in Psalm 112:1-10 :12 ff. The construct state which by rule immediately precedes nouns has often a preposition after it. The jussive sometimes takes the place of the indicative, and the plural of nouns occurs for the singular.

(3) Rhythm.

Rhythm (from ῥυθμός , rhuthmós ) in literary composition denotes that recurrence of accented and unaccented syllables in a regular order which we have in poetry and rhetorical prose. Man is a rhythmic animal; he breathes rhythmically, and his blood circulates - outward and inward - rhythmically. It may be due to these reflex rhythms that the more men are swayed by feeling and the less by reflection and reasoning, the greater is the tendency to do things rhythmically. Man walks and dances and sings and poetizes by the repetition of what corresponds to metrical feet: action is followed by reaction. We meet with a kind of rhythm in elevated and passionate prose, like that of John Ruskin and other writers. Preachers when mastered by their theme unconsciously express themselves in what may be called rhythmic sentences. Though, however, rhythm may be present in prose, it is only in poetry as in music that it recurs at intervals more or less the same. In iambic poetry we get a repetition of a short and long syllable, as in the following lines:

"With ravished ears

The monarch hears,

Assumes the gods,

Affects the nods."

- D ryden.

(4) Parallelism.

What is so called is a case of logical rhythm as distinguished from rhythm that is merely verbal. But as this forms so important a feature of Bible poetry, it must be somewhat fully discussed. What since Bishop Lowth's day has been called parallelism may be described as the recurring of symetrically constructed sentences, the several members of which usually correspond to one another. Lowth (died 1787), in his epochmaking work on Hebrew poetry ( De Sacra poesi Hebraeorum prelectiones , English translation by G. Gregory), deals with what he (following Jebb) calls Parallelismus membrorum (chapter X). And this was the first serious attempt to expound the subject, though Rabbi Asariah (Middle Ages), Ibn Ezra (died 1167 AD), D. Kimchi (died 1232) and A. de Rossi (1514-1578) called attention to it. Christian Schoettgen (died 1751) (see Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae ) anticipated much of what Lowth has written as to the nature, function and value of parallelism. The first to use the word itself in the technical sense was Jebb (Sacred Lit., 1820). For the same thing Ewald used the expression Sinnrhythmus , i.e. sense rhythm, a not unsuitable designation.

(a) Kinds of Parallelism:

In this the same thing is repeated in different words, e.g. Psalm 36:5 :

'Yahweh, (i.) Thy lovingkindness (reaches) to the heavens,

(ii.) Thy faithfulness (reaches) to the clouds.'

Omitting "Yahweh," which belongs alike to both members, it will be seen that the rest of the two half-lines corresponds word for word: "thy lovingkindness" corresponding to "thy faithfulness," and "to the heavens" answering to "to the clouds" (compare Psalm 15:1; Psalm 24:1-3; Psalm 25:5; 1 Samuel 18:7; Isaiah 6:4; Isaiah 13:7 ).

(II) Antithetic Parallelism:

In which the second member of a line (or verse) gives the obverse side of the same thought, e.g. Proverbs 10:1 :

'A wise son gladdens his father,

But a foolish son grieves his mother'

(See Proverbs 11:3; Psalm 37:9; compare Proverbs 10:1 ff; Psalm 20:8; Psalm 30:6; Isaiah 54:7 ff). Sometimes there are more than two corresponding elements in the two members of the verse, as in Proverbs 29:27; compare Proverbs 10:5; Proverbs 16:9; Proverbs 27:2 .

(III) Synthetic Parallelism:

Called also constructive and epithetic. In this the second member adds something fresh to the first, or else explains it, e.g. Psalm 19:8 f:

'The precepts of Yahweh are right, rejoicing the heart:

The commandments of Yahweh are pure, enlightening the eyes.

The fear of Yahweh is clean, enduring forever: The judgments of Yahweh are true and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold;

Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb'

(See Proverbs 1:7; compare Proverbs 3:5 , Proverbs 3:7; Psalm 1:3; Psalm 15:4 ). In addition to the three principal species of parallelism noticed above, other forms have been traced and described.

(IV) Introverted Parallelism:

(Jebb, Sacred Lit ., 53): in which the hemistichs of the parallel members are chiastically arranged, as in the scheme ab ba . Thus, Proverbs 23:15 f:

( a ) 'My son, if thy heart be wise

( b ) My heart shall be glad, even mine:

( b ) Yea, my reins shall rejoice

( a ) When thy lips speak right things'

(Compare Proverbs 10:4 , Proverbs 10:12; Proverbs 13:24; Proverbs 21:17; Psalm 51:3 ).

(V) Palilogical Parallelism:

In which one or more words of the first member are repeated as an echo, or as the canon in music, in the second. Thus, Nahum 1:2 :

'Yahweh is a jealous God and avenges:

Yahweh avenges and is full of wrath;

Yahweh takes vengeance upon His adversaries,

And He reserves wrath for his enemies'

(Compare Judges 5:3 , Judges 5:6 f, 11 f, 15 f, 23, 27; Psalm 72:2 , Psalm 72:12 , Psalm 72:17; Psalm 121:1-8; Psalm 124:1-8; Psalm 126:1-6; Isaiah 2:7; Isaiah 24:5; Hosea 6:4 ).

(VI) Climactic or Comprehensive Parallelism:

In this the second line completes the first. Thus, Psalm 29:1 :

"Give unto Yahweh, O ye mighty ones,

Give unto Yahweh glory and strength"

(see Exodus 15:6; Psalm 29:8 ).

(VII) Rhythmical Parallelism:

(De Wette, Franz Delitzsch): thus, Psalm 138:4 :

"All the kings of the earth shall give thee thanks...

For they have heard the words of thy mouth."

See Proverbs 15:3; compare Proverbs 16:7 , Proverbs 16:10; Proverbs 17:13 , Proverbs 17:15; Proverbs 19:20; Proverbs 21:23 , Proverbs 21:25 .

Perfect parallelism is that in which the number of words in each line is equal. When unequal, the parallelism is called imperfect. Ewald (see Die poetischen Bucher des alten Bundes , I, 57-92; Die Dichter des alten Bundes , I, 91 ff, 2d edition of the former) aimed at giving a complete list of the relations which can be expressed by parallelism, and he thought he had succeeded. But in fact every kind of relation which can be indicated in words may be expressed in two or more lines more or less parallel. On the alleged parallelism of strophes see below.

(b) Parallelism as an Aid to Exegesis and Textual Criticism:

If in Lowth's words parallelism implies that "in two lines or members of the same period things for the most part shall answer to things, and words to words," we should expect obscure or unknown words to derive some light from words corresponding to them in parallel members or clauses. In not a few cases we are enabled by comparison of words to restore with considerable confidence an original reading now lost. The formula is in a general way as follows: ab: 110 . We know what a , b and 100 mean, but are wholly in the dark as to the sense of 10 . The problem is to find out what 10 means. We have an illustration in Judges 5:28 , which may be thus literally translated:

"Through the window she looked,

And Sisera's mother 10 through the 10 ."

Here we have two unknown, each, however, corresponding to known terms. The Hebrew verb accompanying "Sisera's mother" is ותּיבּב , watteyabbēbh , English Versions of the Bible "and ... cried." But no such verb ( yābhabh ) is known, for the Talmud, as usually, follows the traditional interpretation. We want a verb with a meaning similar to "looked." If we read יתּבּט , wattabbēṭ , we have a form which could easily be corrupted into the word in the Massoretic Text, which gives a suitable sense and moreover has the support of the Targums of Onqelos and Jonathan, and even of the Septuagint (Codex Alexandrinus and Lucian). What about the other Hebrew word untranslated above ( אשׁנב , 'eshnābh )? This occurs in but one other passage ( Proverbs 7:6 ), where it stands as in the present passage in parallelism with חלּון , ḥallōn , "window" (probably Proverbs 7:6 is dependent). We get no help from etymology or in this case from the VSS , but parallelism had suggested to our translators the meaning "lattice," a kind of Eastern window, and something of the kind must be meant. The verb shānabh , "to be cool," may possibly suggest the rendering "window," i.e. a hole in the wall to secure coolness in the house. Glass windows did not exist in Palestine, and are rare even now. There are innumerable other examples in the Old Testament of the use of parallelism in elucidating words which occur but once, or which are otherwise difficult to understand, and frequently a textual emendation is suggested which is otherwise supported.

(c) Prevalence and Value of Parallelism:

Two statements anent parallelism in the Old Testament may be safely made: (i) That it is not a characteristic of all Old Testament poetry. Lowth who had so much to do with its discovery gave it naturally an exaggerated place in his scheme of Hebrew poetry, but it is lacking in the largest part of the poetry of the Old Testament, and it is frequently met with in elevated and rhetorical prose. (ii) That it pervades other poetry than that of the Old Testament. It occurs in Assyria (see A. Jeremias, Die bab-assyr. Vorstellung vom Leben nach dem Tode ), in Egypt (Georg Ebers, Nord u. Sud , I), in Finnish, German and English Indeed, A. Wuttke ( Der deutsche Volks-Aberglaube der Gegenwart , 1869,157) and Eduard Norden ( Die antike Kunstprosa , 1898, II, 813) maintain that parallelism is the most primitive form of the poetry of all nations. It must nevertheless be admitted that in the Old Testament parallelism has in proportion a larger place than in any other literature and that the correspondence of the parts of the stichs or verses is closer.

(5) Other Literary Devices.

Old Testament poetry has additional features which it shares with other oriental and with western poetry. Owing to a lack of space these can be hardly more than enumerated.

(a) Alliteration:

E.g. "Round and round the rugged rocks." We have good examples in the Hebrew of Psalm 6:8 and 27:17.

(b) Assonance:

E.g. "dreamy seamy" (see for Bible examples the Hebrew of Genesis 49:17; Exodus 14:14; Deuteronomy 3:2 ).

(c) Rhyme:

There are so few examples of this in the Hebrew Scriptures that no one can regard it as a feature in Hebrew poetry, though in Arabic and even in post-Biblical Hebrew poetry it plays a great part. We have Biblical instances in the Hebrew text of Genesis 4:23; Job 10:8-11; Job 16:12 .

(d) Acrostics:

In some poems of the Old Testament half-verses, verses, or groups of verses begin with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. We have such alphabetical acrostics in Psalm 9 f; 34; 37; Proverbs 31:10 ff; Lam 1 through 4; compare Lam 5, where the number of verses agrees with that of the Hebrew alphabet, though the letters of that alphabet do not introduce the verses.

(e) Meter:

The view of the present writer may be stated as follows: That the poetry of the Hebrew is not in the strict sense metrical, though the writers under the influence of strong emotion express themselves rhythmically, producing often the phenomena which came later to be codified under metrical rules. Thinking and reasoning and speaking preceded psychology, logic, and grammar, and similarly poetry preceded prosody. In the Old Testament we are in the region of the fact, not of the law. Poets wrote under strong impulse, usually religious, and without recognizing any objective standard, though all the time they were supplying data for the rules of prosody. Those who think that Old Testament poets had in their minds objective rules of meter have to make innumerable changes in the text. Instead of basing their theory on the original material, they bring their a priori theory and alter the text to suit it. It can be fearlessly said that there is not a single poem in the Old Testament with the same number of syllables, or feet, or accents in the several stichs or hemistichs, unless we introduce violent changes into the Massoretic Text, such as would be resented in classical and other ancient literature. It is important, before coming to any definite conclusion, to take into consideration the fact that the poetry of the Old Testament belongs to periods separated by many centuries, from the Song of Deborah (Judges 5 ), the earliest Hebrew poem, down to the last hymns in the Psalter. In the oldest specimens of Hebrew poetry there is a naive simplicity which excludes the idea of conscious article In the latest the poet is much more conscious, and his poetry more artistic. It would be manifestly unfair to propound a theory of poetry based on the poetry of Keats and Tennyson and to apply it to the productions of Anglo-Saxon and Old English poetry. Bound up in the one volume called the Bible there is a literature differing widely in age, aim and authorship, and it needs care in educing a conception of Heb poetry that will apply to all the examples in the Old Testament. The later psalm-acrostic, etc., many of them made up of bits of other psalms, seem to have sprung from a more conscious effort at imitation. If, however, there were among the ancient Hebrews, as there was among the ancient Greeks, a code of prosody, it is strange that the Mishna and Gemārā' should be wholly silent about it. And if some one system underlies our Hebrew Bible, it is strange that so many systems have been proposed. It should be remembered too that the oldest poetry of every people is nonmetrical.

The following is a brief statement of the views advocated:

(i) Philo and Josephus, under the influence of Greek models and desiring to show that Hebrew was not inferior to pagan literature, taught that Hebrew poetry had meter, but they make no attempt to show what kind of meter this poetry possesses.

(ii) Calmet, Lowth, and Carpzov held that though in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible as originally written and read there must have been metrical rules which the authors were conscious of following, yet, through the corruption of the text and our ignorance of the sounds and accentuation of primitive Hebrew, it is now impossible to ascertain what these metrical rules were.

(iii) In their scheme of Hebrew meter Bickell and Merx reckon syllables as is done in classical poetry, and they adopt the Syriac law of accentuation, placing the tone on the penultimate. These writers make drastic changes in the text in order to bolster up their theories.

(iv) The dominant and by far the least objectionable theory is that advocated by Ley, Briggs, Duhm, Buhl, Grimme, Sievers, Rothstein and most modern scholars, that in Hebrew prosody the accented syllables were alone counted. If this principle is applied to Job, it will be found that most of the Biblical verses are distichs having two stichs, each with three main accents. See, for an illustration, Job 12:16 : וּמשׁגּה שׁגג לו : ותוּשׂיּה עמּו ( 'immō ´ ‛óz wethūshı̄yah : lō shōghégh umashgeh́ : 'Strength and effectual working belong to (literally, "are with") him, he that errs and he that causes to err'). Man's rhythmical instincts are quite sufficient to account for this phenomenon without assuming that the poet had in mind an objective standard. Those who adopt this last view and apply it rigidly make numerous textual changes. For an examination of the metrical systems of Hubert Grimme, who takes account of quantity as well as accent, and of Eduard Sievers who, though no Hebrew scholar, came to the conclusion after examining small parts of the Hebrew Bible that Hebrew poetry is normally anapaestic, see W.H. Cobb, Criticism of Systems of Hebrew Metre , 152 ff, 169 ff. Herder, De Wette, Hupfeld, Keil, Nowack, Budde, Doller, and Toy reject all the systems of Hebrew meter hitherto proposed, though Budde has a leaning toward Ley's system.

(f) Budde's Qinah Measure:

Though Budde takes up in general a negative position in regard to Hebrew meter, he pleads strenuously for the existence of one specific meter with which his name is associated. This is what he calls the qinah measure (from קינה , ḳı̄nāh , "a lamentation"). In this each stich is said to consist of one hemistich with three beats or stress syllables and another having two such syllables, this being held to be the specific meter of the dirge (see Lamentations 1:1 , etc.). Ley and Briggs call it "pentameter" because it is made up of five (3 plus 2) feet (a foot in Hebrew prosody being equal to an accented syllable and the unaccented syllables combined with it). See Budde's full treatment of the subject in ZATW , 60, 152, "Das heb. Klagelied." It must, however, be borne in mind that even Herder (died 1803) describes the use in elegies of what he calls, anticipating Ley and Briggs, the "pentameter" (see Geist der ebraischen Poesie , 1782, I, 32 f, English translation. The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry , 1833, I, 40). But the present writer submits the following criticisms: (i) Budde is inconsistent in rejecting all existing theories of meter and yet in retaining one of his own, which is really but part of the system advocated by Bellermann, Ley and Briggs. (ii) He says, following Herder, that it is the measure adopted by mourning women (Jeremiah 9:16 ), but we have extremely few examples of the latter, and his statement lacks proof. (iii) There are dirges in the Old Testament not expressed in the ḳı̄nāh measure. David's lament over Saul and Jonathan is more hexametric and tetrametric than pentametric, unless we proceed to make a new text (2 Samuel 1:19 ff). (iv) The ḳı̄nāh measure is employed by Hebrew poets where theme is joyous or indifferent; see Ps 119, which is a didactic poem.

(6) Units of Hebrew Poetry.

In western poetry the ultimate unit is usually the syllable, the foot (consisting of at least two syllables) coming next. Then we have the verse-line crowned by the stanza, and finally the poem.

According to theory of Hebrew poetry adopted by the present writer, the following are the units, beginning with the simplest:

(a) The Meter:

It is commonly said that the poetry of the ancient Hebrews is wholly religious. But this statement is not strictly correct. ( a ) The Old Testament does not contain all the poetry composed or even written by the Hebrews in Bible times, but only such as the priests at the various sanctuaries preserved. We do not know of a literary caste among the Hebrews who concerned themselves with the preservation of the literature as such. ( b ) Within the Bible Canon itself there are numerous poems or snatches of poems reflecting the everyday life of the people. We have love songs (Canticles), a wedding song ( Psalm 45 ), a harvest song (Psalm 65:1-13 ), parts of ditties sung upon discovering a new well (Numbers 21:17 f), upon drinking wine, and there are references to war songs ( Numbers 21:14; Joshua 10:13; 2 Samuel 1:18 ).

(2) Species of Hebrew Poetry.

Biblical poetry may be subsumed under the following heads: ( a ) folklore, ( b ) prophetical, ( 100 ) speculative, ( d ) lyrical.

(a) Folklore:

"Poetry," said J. G. Hamann (died 1788), "is the mother tongue of the human race." In both folk-music and folk-poetry, each the oldest of its class, the inspiration is immediate and spontaneous. We have examples of folk-songs in Genesis 11:1-9; Genesis 19:24 f.

(b) Prophetic Poetry: