Full Description
Uniquely considering the characteristics of biblical Hebrew poetry beyond its currently best known feature, parallelism, On Biblical Poetry demonstrates the many interesting and valuable interpretations that yield from analyses of major facets of biblical verse, as well as careful attention to prosody--rhythm, lineation, and the like--and close reading. Through a series of programmatic essays, F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp argues that biblical poetry is, in most respects, just like any other verse tradition--and thus biblical poems should be read and interpreted like other poems.
Using the same critical tools and kinds of guiding assumptions as traditional verse scholarship, this book also considers the historicity and cultural specificity that distinguishes the verse of the Bible. The literary and the historical, then, are in view throughout. Issues of orality, textuality, and literacy at the site of biblical poems are also probed extensively and there is a strong comparative orientation to much of the thinking in the volume.
Contents
Introduction - Biblical Poetry Beyond Parallelism ; Chapter One - "Verse, Properly So Called": The Line in Biblical Poetry ; Terminology ; Manuscript Evidence for the Line ; The "Verse Line" in Oral Poetry ; The Line from the Other's Perspective ; Internal Evidence for the Line ; Summary ; Chapter Two - The Free Rhythms of Biblical Hebrew Poetry ; Through Whitman's Eyes ; Biblical Hebrew Poetry is Not Metrical ; The Shape of Poetic Rhythm ; Orality, Song, and Music ; The Free Rhythms of Biblical Poetry ; Summary ; Chapter Three - The Idea of Lyric Poetry in the Bible ; The Hebrew Lyric ; Summary ; Lyric in extenso: Probing (Some) Possibilities in the Song ; Beyond Lyric: Toward a Richer Understanding of (Other) Biblical Poems ; Chapter Four - An Informing Orality: Biblical Poetic Style ; Some Preliminary Points of Orientation ; Prob(lematiz)ing the Question of Hebrew Narrative Poetry ; Nonnarrative Oral Poetry, Or: Orality Poeticized Otherwise ; Signs of (Nonnarrative) Orality in Biblical Poetry ; Emergent Textuality ; Conclusions ; Chapter Five - The Way of Poetry in Psalm 133 ; I ; II ; III ; IV ; Closing ; Notes ; Bibliography ; Index
