Language Studies

Aramaic Thoughts

Digging into the Peshitta! - Part 5

As indicated at the end of last week’s column, Hebrew poetry is terse, a characteristic it shares with much English poetry. I’m not sufficiently familiar with poetry in other languages to comment on them, but I suspect the same is the case in many other languages as well. Consider, for instance the Japanese haiku, which condenses an entire poem to seventeen syllables.

A second characteristic of Hebrew poetry is that it tends to use rare words. Practically speaking this means that many words that occur in the poetry of the Old Testament don’t occur much, if at all, elsewhere. For example, the most common word for land in Hebrew is erets. It occurs in all parts of the Old Testament. Another word for land is the word tebel. It seems to mean about the same thing as does erets, but it occurs only in poetry. It is never found in the prose sections of the Old Testament. Psalm 110 contains 65 words, some of them, such as YHWH, occurring more than once, so fewer than 65 different words are used. Of these, thirteen words occur fewer than thirty times in the entire Old Testament. In other words, more than twenty percent of the vocabulary of Psalm 110 is rarely found in the Old Testament. What that means is that sometimes the meaning of the word may be difficult to pinpoint. If you peruse half a dozen different English translations of Psalm 110, this will become clear. For example, in verses 5,6 the same word is rendered in English by "strike through," "crush," and "shatter." The particular word thus translated occurs only fourteen times in the Old Testament, all of them in poetic passages.

A third characteristic of Hebrew poetry is that it makes frequent use of strong visual imagery. The meaning in these images is not to be found by adding up the meaning of the individual words in order to reach some sort of "verbal total." Rather the meaning is to be found in the image that is conjured up by the words. Thus verse 3 says, "from the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours." The meaning here is not to be found in some imagined connection between dew, morning, and youth, but instead in the image itself. Consider looking out on a dew-covered field very early in the morning, as the first rays of the sunlight strike the dew. The viewer sees, as it were, a host of dewdrops on the field. The image is that of a vast army encamped on the field. That is the meaning conveyed by the image of verse 3—a vast army, fresh and new, encamped under the leadership of the Lord’s anointed. Another way of thinking about this is that Hebrew poetry is often impressionistic. That is, the meaning of the poem is to be found in what it impresses on the mind of the reader, rather than in the details of the individual words or even clauses.

Next week we will bring this little study of Psalm 110 to a close by considering the quality of the Peshitta translation.

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