Poetic Treatment of 4Q246

Hebrew Studies, 2023

David Tsumura’s Vertical Grammar of Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew is a rigorous and intriguing study on the notion of vertical grammar in biblical Hebrew literature. Tsumura posits that vertical grammar occurs “when a sentence ‘nucleus’ is divided between two parallel lines of a bicolon” (more explanation below).1 Tsumura proposes that a vertical grammar reading of many instances of parallelism in biblical Hebrew literature is a superior alternative interpretation than what translators normally identify as ellipsis (or “verb gapping) and scansion in Hebrew poetry. He also demonstrates cases in which vertical grammar is operative in Janus parallelism, biblical Hebrew prose, and Ugaritic.

Journal of Translation, 2024

This article is a response to Ernst Wendland's article-also in this issue of Journal of Translation-which interacts with my cognitive approach to biblical Hebrew poetry, especially my recent monograph, Unparalleled Poetry (2023). In this article, I set my work within the broader context of biblical poetry studies and explain how it draws from literary and cognitive research to provide a robust framework for the concept of the poetic line-a contribution to not only biblical studies, but also broader poetry studies. The poetic line gets to the heart of the nature of poetry: the line is central to not just poetic structure (up to the level of the whole poem), but also poetry's potential for rhythm and effects and construction of meaning. My view of the centrality of the line affects how I address various issues related to parallelism. I close by discussing the role and limits of method in regard to both poetic lineation and reading of poems.

This paper seeks to explore the basic factor involved in the measured pattern of rhythm, called meter, involved in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible. Giving due acknowledgement to the difficulty of this issue, a survey is provided of some of the major movements of thought in this area, both historic and current. We also seek to study some of the features that are related to meter, such as parallelism, rhythm, and the relationship of poetry to musical composition. It is the premise of this paper that meter does exist in the poetic sections of the OT, and that this meter is related to accentual features. However, this meter is fluid and flexible, corresponding to the nature of Hebrew literature in general, and thus cannot be determined or critiqued according to the classical Greco-Roman standards.

Dead Sea Discoveries, 2006

The working hypothesis of John Strugnell and Daniel J. Harrington is that 4QInstruction (4Q415-418, also known as Instruction of the Maven and, in previous literature, Sapiential Work A) is composed with that standard device of ancient Hebrew poetry, parallelism, though they only tentatively assert its existence and question the degree to which it dominates the work. 1 They do not address the nature of this parallelism, nor do they opine on the structure of any poems within the text, other than to comment briefly on common topics or themes. Although a plethora of articles and books have appeared recently treating various aspects of this text, none to date thoroughly addresses its poetry. 2 As a first foray into this realm, therefore, I have analyzed a small segment of 4QInstruction, one that Strugnell and Harrington agree treats a common theme and one which I feel deserves 1 At two points at least the editors tentatively assert that "parallelismus membrorum" exists in the text and can be used to reconstruct the sense of broken passages (J. Strugnell and D.J. Harrington, Qumran Cave 4, Sapiential Texts, part 2: 4QInstruction [DJD 34; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999] 5, 17). A greater skepticism on the presence of parallelism in the text is expressed on page 177: "Parallelismus membrorum, though not necessarily observed in 4Q415ff.. . ." Harrington, on the other hand, comments that in Sirach and in 4QInstruction "the instructions are usually formulated with the aid of parallelism" ("Two Early Jewish Approaches to Wisdom: Sirach and Qumran Sapiential Work A," JSP 16 [1997] 26). 2 Strugnell and Harrington (DJD 34) mention "parallelism" occasionally in their commentary; Harrington in "Two Early Jewish Approaches to Wisdom" speaks of "synonymous and antithetical" parallelism (26), describes the organization of the material into short paragraphs (28), and emphasizes that the admonitions in 4QInstruction are accompanied by "reasons for following the advice" (28-29). D. Jefferies, by contrast, argues that the author of 4QInstruction does not write with parallelism, but with the "Hellenistic monostich" (Wisdom at Qumran: A Form-Critical Analysis of the Admonitions in 4QInstruction [Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2002] 320). His assertion is not supported by the present study that finds, in fact, much parallelism in 4QInstruction.

This article is intended to be an exegetically useful foundation for a theory of Biblical Hebrew (lyrical) poetry, with the center of gravity in the psalms. I take up the research on poetry of pioneer linguists and literary theorists Bühler-Jakobson and Lotman and its application to Biblical Hebrew poetry by, among others, Alter, Berlin, and Nel. I describe “repetition” (or recurrence) as the basic phenomenon. It subsumes not only parallelismus membrorum but also other forms of poetic and structural equivalence. This characteristic feature of biblical poetry establishes a multidimensional network of intra- and extratextual connections that produces a compaction and polysemy not found in the same density and complexity in other literary genres. Important insights are exemplified by three psalms that I have selected for their appropriateness (Pss 3, 13, and 130). The purpose is to elucidate the theory and make it useful for the exegesis of lyrical biblical texts.

1991

The dissertation aims to analyze parallelism in the Hodayot from Qumran and to compare it with parallelism in early biblical poetry, Isaiah 1-18, and Isaiah 40-45. Particular attention is given to basic units of composition (couplets, triplets, quatrains, etc.), grammatical parallelism, semantic parallelism, and the relationship between these last two. A topic of secondary importance is the length of poetic lines. After a few paragraphs on the purpose, importance, and overview of the dissertation, the first chapter reviews recent research on the central issues to be dealt with in the study, and then explains the method and terminology to be used in the analysis of parallelism. Chapter II analyzes 266 basic units from the Hodayot, consisting of 647 poetic lines. The third chapter is a statistical summary of the results obtained in Chapter II concerning kinds of basic units, line length, degree of semantic parallelism between the lines, degree of congruence between grammatical and sem...

Retelling the Bible: Literary, Historical and Social Contexts, eds. Lucie Doležalová and Tamás Visi (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 299-302.

This essay examines the relationship between two features of biblical poetry: (1) verb gapping between lines with matching structures (i.e. identical constituents); and (2) explicit coordination of parallel lines with waw. At first glance, the presence of an explicit conjunction between such cola may appear to be optional and completely within the realm of stylistics, even though it is statistically most frequent. However, a correlation of the precise structural features of elliptical structures with the presence (and absence) of coordination suggests instead that additional syntactic and cognitive factors are at work.