Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

POETRY

Most of the religious literature of the ancient Near East was poetic in form, as is much of the literature in the Bible. The Psalms, of course, have been widely recognized as poetic compositions, but to this poetry may be added as well the two major reflections on human wisdom: the book of Proverbs, a collection of short poetic aphorisms, and the book of Job, a succession of extended poetic dialogues. Themes as different as distress, in the book of Lamentations, and love, in the Song of Solomon, are treated in poetic form. But the major type of poetic speech in the Bible is prophecy. The prophets delivered divine oracles in poetry. Nearly all of the speeches of the major prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel — and of the 12 Minor Prophets are poetry. Some have even suggested that Israel’s great historical prose narrative, in which are embedded some poetic compositions (e.g., Gen. 49; Exod. 15; Deut. 32, 33), was a poetic narrative in its original (perhaps oral) form. Much less of the NT, composed primarily of Gospel narratives and letters, is poetry, though these prose genres contain an occasional poem, such as the Magnificat of Mary (Luke 1:46-55) and an occasional hymn in the letters (e.g., Eph. 1:3-14; Phil. 2:6-11).

Literary critics have always been at a loss to say exactly what defines poetry or makes it different from prose, regardless of the particular language within which they are working. Yet there is almost universal agreement that poetry is a distinct and unique kind of language. Definitions often describe it as intensified language, an especially concentrated and condensed form of literature. Poetry relies more heavily than does prose on recurrent patterns of words and of sounds, and it makes more concentrated use of imagery, symbol, and metaphor. Furthermore, it appeals to a broad range of human experience, engaging not just the intellect but the senses, the emotions, and the intuition of the hearer or reader as well.

The basic building block of biblical Hebrew poetry is a repetitive pattern called parallelism. This is a device by which the poet expresses an idea in one line of verse, and then in a second line repeats — better, reshapes — that idea through nuance, extension, contrast, or another kind of development. The result is an image or thought richer than possible through a single statement. An example is three verse units from the prophecy of peace in Isa. 2:4:

He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruninghooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

In each of these three two-line verses, the idea expressed in the first line is parallel and enriched in some way in the second line. In the first, the verb “judge” in l. 1 is paralleled by “arbitrate” in l. 2, and “nations” is paralleled by “many peoples.” But more than mechanical repetition by the use of synonyms is involved here. For example, the term “arbitrate” amplifies the term “judge,” since it has the sharper connotation in Hebrew of calling to account, and thus it emphasizes, within the idea of the adjudication of a dispute, the idea of “reprimand” or “admonishment.” Likewise in the second verse unit, “spears” parallels “swords” and “pruning hooks” parallels “plowshares.” As is common in parallelism, the verb (“beat”) is expressed only in the first line but also assumed in the second. Again, more than mechanical repetition is involved in this parallelism. The unifying idea in both lines is the shift from a wartime economy to a peacetime or agricultural economy, but in parallel lines the poet is able to call to mind the two major branches of Israelite agriculture: the cultivation of grain in l. 1 (“plowshares”) and the production of fruit crops (“pruninghooks”) in l. 2. In the third verse, both lines describe the end of war, but the idea is deepened when the laying down of arms in l. 1 is followed by the absence of the study of warfare in l. 2.

While by far the most common verse unit in Hebrew poetry is composed of two parallel lines like those above, three-line units also occur, as illustrated by this verse from Isaiah’s indictment against corrupt leaders (Isa. 2:12):

For the Lord of hosts has a day
against all that is proud and lofty,
against all that is lifted up and high. . . .

In this case the opening line sets the topic as the “day of the Lord,” a phrase that could mean either salvation or judgment. The following lines describe the kind of day it will be: a day of judgment, in particular against the proud and elite of the nation.

The nature of the relationship between the two, or three, parallel lines in a verse of Hebrew poetry can vary widely; poets exercised a great deal of creativity in their use of this conventional device. For example, the two lines of a verse can be almost entirely synonymous:

The voice of the Lord is powerful;
the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
(Ps. 29:4)

Here only the descriptive elements, “powerful” and “full of majesty,” break the exact repetition at the beginning of each line. However, repetition can be avoided almost completely, when the second line simply continues the thought of the first line, a practice literary critics refer to as enjambment.

From where [God] sits enthroned he watches
all the inhabitants of the earth. . . . (Ps. 33:14)

All sorts of variations on parallelistic structure that fall between these two extremes are present in Hebrew verse. One such variation employs two contrasting images to present a single idea from opposite sides:

For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
(Ps. 1:6)

This contrastive type of parallelism is especially common in the short wisdom sayings in the book of Proverbs, in which wisdom and folly are frequently contrasted in a single verse of poetry.

All Biblical Hebrew poetry, whether in a psalm or a prophetic speech or a wisdom saying, is built upon these two- (or three-) line verse units composed according to the conventions of parallelism. Older translations, such as the original King James Version, did not present the poetic sections of the Bible in lines and verses so that their poetic form and parallelistic pattern was readily recognizable; the entire Bible was simply printed as prose. Recent translations, such as the NRSV, lay out the poetic sections in lines and verses to represent the parallelistic pattern according to which this poetry was originally written. Verse numbers were added long after the poetry was composed, and while they frequently coincide with actual verse units, this is not always the case (cf. Isa. 2:4 above).

The power of poetic parallelism lies in its ability to represent the multifaceted character of religious experience. It does not approach experience primarily through the logic of a linear argument built on closely related propositions or through an expository description of ideas and illustrative details, though these are not absent in poetic parallelism. Rather, parallelism approaches experience through the presentation of multiple images, images that are at once related and different. It is as if the object of the poet’s attention were a gem, which the poet turns and describes the changing appearance of its different facets. It is as if the poet assumes different positions in a landscape, and tries to show how the same landscape appears differently from different perspectives. Such an approach represents a great appreciation for the complexity of religious experience, and achieves insight through the probing of its multifaceted character.

A great deal of attention has been devoted to the question of whether this repetitive pattern in content is accompanied by a repetitive pattern of sound. Does biblical poetry have meter, a repeating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables according to which individual lines of verse were composed? One major theory proposes a metrical system in which a line of verse is built on three primary stresses accompanied by a varying number of unstressed syllables. Thus a unit of verse would be scanned, or analyzed, as follows, with each section divided by a dash containing a primary stress and one or more unstressed syllables:

He shall judge — between — the nations,
and arbitrate — for many — peoples.
(Isa. 2:4)

According to this theory, lines could also be composed of a two-stress pattern, and verse units could be constructed of 3:3 meter, like the one above, or 2:2 or 3:2 meter, the latter being supposedly selected most often for the poetry of lamentation. An alternative theory proposes that poetic lines can be better analyzed according to their length in terms of total number of syllables, with long lines composed of seven or more syllables, short lines of six or less. According to this theory, poets were not mechanically counting syllables, but were working within the general constraints of long lines or short lines of verse.

Both of these theories are able to bring to light a kind of symmetry within verse units, but neither works with the kind of regularity that might be expected if biblical poetry in fact employed a distinct meter and if the particular theory actually understands it properly. The central, and possibly insurmountable, problem for detecting and describing the meter of biblical poetry is that Biblical Hebrew is no longer a living language that can be heard as originally spoken, and, moreover, its pronunciation has changed over the years since the biblical period. Thus contemporary theories about meter appear to be approximations of the actual metrical conventions used in the composition of biblical poetry rather than precise descriptions.

The repetition of sound for effect is present in biblical poetry in other ways besides its use in larger metrical patterns. Assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds, and alliteration, the repetition of consonants, are frequently present in lines of verse, though rhyme is seldom employed. A common device is the practice of playing on words that sound alike. Isaiah concludes the Song of the Vineyard (Isa. 5:1-7) by contrasting God’s expectations for Israel with their actual behavior:

[God] expected justice (mišpāṭ), but saw
bloodshed (miśpāḥ);
righteousness (ṣĕḏāqâ), but heard a cry
(ṣĕʿāqâ). (5:7)

In each line of this verse, Isaiah uses terms for God’s will and Israel’s failure to follow it that sound almost exactly alike but are vastly different in meaning. The similarity of sound clashes with the difference in meaning and makes the disparity between divine expectation and human reality sharper and more unsettling. This effect is highlighted by the fact that such plays on similar sounding words in Hebrew are usually employed to reinforce their similar meanings. The opposite case here makes the point even more jarring and incredible.

Unfortunately, the sounds of Hebrew poetry, whether in metrical rhythms or wordplays, can almost never be rendered properly with English words or pronunciations, as the above example from Isaiah illustrates. Thus the English reader will unavoidably miss many patterns and connections imbedded in the Hebrew original. Because poetry relies so heavily on the precise placement of sounds, and because these sound patterns cannot be duplicated in another language, some have argued that poetry is the one kind of language that is essentially untranslatable. Occasionally, however, modern translators will alert readers to such uses of sound in Hebrew in notes to the translation.

One further aspect of biblical poetry that deserves attention is its heavy reliance on images and symbols to explore and communicate the central elements of religious life. A fine example is Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard (Isa. 5:1-7), in which the prophet uses the vineyard as a metaphor for God’s people. In this poem, Isaiah describes a vineyard for which the ground has been thoroughly cleared, and in which the best vines have been planted and have been tended with great care; but the vineyard, against all agricultural logic, produces only rancid fruit. Through this representation of Israel as a well-tended but worthless vineyard, Isaiah is able to place the blame squarely on Israel for its failures and to depict such behavior as contradicting the very orders of nature itself. The poetry of the Psalms is also full of imagery aimed at describing the character of God and the experience of the psalmist. For example, God is pictured as shield (Ps. 3:3[MT 4]), rock (18:2[3]), shepherd (23:1), light (27:1), king (47:2[3]), and judge (50:6). To communicate the experience of the psalmist, such images as trees (Ps. 1:3), deer (42:1[2]), sheep (100:3), and the prey of the lion (17:12) are common.

Through the use of symbolism such as this, insight is achieved through a comparison of things that are at once different and alike. At the beginning of the narrative of the vineyard the listener has no reason to connect it with the people of Israel at all. But when the connection is finally made at the end, the listener is forced to recognize certain things about Israel’s faithlessness that are uniquely clear by this comparison. Symbols used for such comparison are taken from common experience, and are thus familiar and readily understandable. This quality of the poet’s symbols means that biblical poetry is concrete and vivid, not theoretical and abstract. It communicates religious truth with reference to the ordinary realities of experience rather than through ideas and concepts that appeal to the intellect alone.

While building poems from the two- and three-line verse units described above, biblical poets also followed well-defined conventions in their creation of larger compositions. These conventions prescribed certain structures for particular types of compositions. Psalms, e.g., are by and large composed according to a number of major forms or genres that provided the basic framework for the poet’s creative expression. The two most common psalm forms are the hymn and the lament, each with its own distinctive pattern. The hymn contains three major parts: a call to praise God; a description of the reasons to praise God, focusing on God’s beneficent deeds; and a renewed call to praise. Some noteworthy examples of the hymn form include Pss. 8, 19, 33, 100, 104. The lament is a more complex form, containing in its most complete examples six parts: an address to God; a description of the problem faced by the psalmist; a confession of trust in God; a plea for help; words of assurance delivered to the psalmist promising God’s help; and the psalmist’s vow to praise God after help arrives. Noteworthy examples include Pss. 3, 22, 42–43 (originally a single psalm, as its reflection of the lament form proves), 51, 90, 130. Psalmists did not follow these forms woodenly, but adapted them creatively so that each psalm is a unique variation on the typical pattern. Yet there is enough consistency in the use of these patterns to indicate that the psalmists employed them consciously in their compositions.

Just as there are formal patterns according to which the psalms were composed, so there are larger patterns according to which prophetic poetry was composed. One of the most common of all prophetic speech forms is the judgment speech, within which the prophet delivered an indictment of Israel’s behavior followed by an announcement of the judgment imposed by God to punish it. An example is Amos 6:1-8 in which Amos indicts Israel’s leadership for its self-indulgence and luxury (vv. 1-6) and announces their coming judgment as exile (vv. 7-8). The following two-line verse unit illustrates well the larger indictment of which it is a part:

Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory,
and lounge on their couches . . . (v. 4)

The salvation speech, in which a description of distress is followed by an announcement of salvation, is a kind of positive counterpart to the judgment speech (cf. Amos 9:11-15). An almost bewildering array of larger speech forms are employed by prophets, two of which are the woe oracle (Amos 5:18-20) and the prayer (7:2, 5).

Within Wisdom Literature, the most characteristic literary form is the proverb, a two-line aphorism that coincides with the ordinary two-line verse unit employing parallelism. An example is this proverb lauding the value of hard work:

A slack hand causes poverty,
but the hand of the diligent makes rich.
(Prov. 10:4)

Most of the book of Proverbs (chs. 10–31) is made up of such two-line sayings that have been collected and simply listed one after the other, sometimes apparently organized by subject but often arranged quite randomly in the eye of the modern reader. Prov. 1–9 is composed of more extended poems on wisdom, still making use of the two- and three-line verse units characteristic of biblical Hebrew poetry. Such is also the case in the book of Job, in which the truth of divine justice and the value of wisdom are debated by Job and his friends in the form of long poetic discourses organized as a lengthy dialogue.

These observations on biblical poetry have been directed primarily to the OT, which contains major kinds of literature — psalms, wisdom, prophecy — in which poetry was the primary medium of expression. Since the NT is composed primarily of Gospels and letters, both of which employ prose for narrative and exposition, little poetry is found here. The few instances include occasional quotations in the Gospels of OT poetic texts, primarily from the prophets (e.g., Matt. 4:15-16; 12:18-21; Luke 3:4-6; 4:18-19). These quotations are already the product of a translation, since they are taken not directly from the Hebrew but from the LXX. Even in Greek translation, however, the parallelism of the Hebrew is still obvious. In other cases, the Gospels employ hymnic material, such as the poetic compositions in Luke 1:46-55, 68-79, which resemble, and appear to be drawn from, various psalms. Outside of the Gospels, early Christian hymns or hymnic fragments, reflecting the poetic parallelism of Hebrew poetry, appear to be preserved in some of the NT letters: Rom. 11:33-36; Eph. 1:3-14; Phil. 2:6-11; Col. 1:12-14, 15-20; 1 Pet. 1:3-5. Though the major genres of the NT are not poetic, it is clear that the early Church was familiar with the use of poetry for religious expression, as can be seen in its contact with poetic texts from the Hebrew Scriptures and in the hymns preserved from its liturgical life.

Bibliography. R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York, 1985); A. Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism (Bloomington, Ind., 1985); J. L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (1981, repr. Baltimore, 1998); D. L. Petersen and K. H. Richards, Interpreting Hebrew Poetry (Minneapolis, 1992); W. G. E. Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry. JSOTSup 26 (Sheffield, 1984).

Theodore Hiebert

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

POETRY

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)