Real And Apparent Tricola In Hebrew Psalm Poetry

About the Contributor(s): Sigmund Mowinckel was Professor of Old Testament at the University of Oslo, Norway, and a towering figure among biblical scholars in the twentieth century. Among his numerous ground-breaking works available in English are The Psalms in Israel's Worship, He That Cometh, and The Spirit and the Word.

An appreciation of the form and artistry of texts is essential to the understanding of their content, and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of biblical poetry. But poetic form is also worthy of appreciation in its own right, and as the studies in this collection show, Hebrew poetry can be seen as a monument to the literary-artistic achievement of the ancients. Great strides have been made in the investigation of the form and structure of the biblical texts, and no new study of the Hebrew Bible can afford to ignore the fruitful work that has been done in this field. This useful collection presents in a handy format an ample harvest of research by many of the world's leading Hebrew Bible scholars who have published their work in the pages of "Vetus Testamentum" in recent decades. It provides a fascinating reflection of the continuing new discoveries of the richness of the biblical text, which informs the lively present-day study of the Hebrew Bible as world literature.

A quantitative structural approach also helps to identify the focal message of the poems."--Jacket.

This book explores the little-regarded phenomenon of the tricolon in biblical Hebrew poetry, that is, those poetic lines that appear to have a tripartite form rather than the more common bipartite form. Taking the Psalms of Ascents as a sample corpus of poetic texts, it identifies tricola on an explicit and consistent basis. It draws on the rhythmical-accentual approach of Eduard Sievers, and in so doing highlights an important but neglected aspect of his method. The concept of a "para-tricolon" is developed, designating a line that is tripartite, yet rhythmically equivalent to a conventional bicolon. Analyses of psalm structures and of the syntactic and semantic structures of each tripartite line facilitate an assessment of the function of, and characterization of, tripartite lines. The significance of enjambment is explored as a distinguishing factor between different line-forms and as a means of uniting non-parallel cola. The study demonstrates clear differences between the form and function of para-tricola and those of tricola, and so will facilitate a more nuanced and realistic appraisal of the functional significance of Hebrew poetic line-forms.

In spite of debatable issues, such as metre, we now know enough about classical Hebrew poetry to be able to understand how it was composed. This large-scale manual, rich in detail, exegesis and bibliography, provides guidelines for the analysis and appreciation of Hebrew verse. Topics include oral poetry, metre, parallelism and forms of the strophe and stanza. Sound patterns and imagery are also discussed. A lengthy chapter sets out a whole range of other poetic devices and the book closes with a set of worked examples of Hebrew poetry. Throughout, other ancient Semitic verse has been used for comparison and the principles of modern literary criticism have been applied.

Volume II of Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible deals with 85 Psalms (83 poems) and the poems in Job 4-14, and aims at presenting an integrated prosodical theory which is able to bypass the highly controversial question of metrics. There are two approaches which initially are kept apart on grounds of method: structural analysis and the counting of the original, i.e. pre-Masoretic, syllables. Each poem receives a compact description of structure which gives a reasoned delimitation of cola, verses, and strophes. In a separate operation, the syllable counts for each word, colon, verse, strophe, stanza, section and poem are recorded in a comprehensive Appendix. All the poems under discussion show a precise integer as the average of syllables per colon. For half of them this is 8.00, the others have either 7.00 or 9.00. The 9.00 is a ceiling: there is no Psalm with a higher average. Combining the two approaches, the author shows that the poets themselves did count their syllables, and how they were able to mesh the syllable figures with the structural units of their compositions in a virtuoso combination. The greatest challenge of this enterprise is to delimit and objectify the correct colometry for all the songs, as the figure of syllables per colon depends on the right amount of cola. There are only about 30 Psalms which have a cola figure that can be considered beyond doubt. Fortunately, in the Book of Job the correct number of cola is certain for most chapters. Here we meet the number 8 again as a normative figure

This volume deals with the rhetoric, the formal and thematic framework, of Psalms 90-150 (the Fourth and Fifth Book of the Psalter). It is the conclusion of the Psalms Project started with Psalms 1-41, OTS 53 (2006) , and continued with Psalms 42-89, OTS 57 (2010). Formal and thematic devices demonstrate that the psalms are composed of a consistent pattern of cantos (stanzas) and strophes. The formal devices especially include quantitative balance on the level of the cantos in terms of verselines, verbal repetitions, and (on the level of the strophes) transition markers. The quantitative approach to a psalm in terms of verselines, cola and/or words in most cases clearly discloses a focal message. This massive study is rounded off by an updated introduction to the canto design of biblical poetry (including the book of Job, Lamentations, the Songs of Songs, Deutero-Isaiah and other major poems of the Hebrew Bible).