Introduction

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The scholarship of biblical poetry might be thought the most benign of worlds. In fact, it has recently been rocked by a dispute that resembles a courtroom drama.

The antagonists are both experts. Their dispute is personal, as well as scholarly. Both are the authors of recent books on biblical poetry.

James L. Kugel, Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, is the author of a book published in 1981 entitled The Idea of Biblical Poetry (Yale University Press).

Robert Alter is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1985, four years after the 1981 publication of Kugel’s book, Alter published The Art of Biblical Poetry (Basic Books).

Kugel reviewed Alter’s book in the January 1987 issue of the prestigious Journal of Religion. The review is a “catalog” (Kugel’s word) of instances in which, according to Kugel, Alter has copied and appropriated from Kugel’s previously published book.

Alter’s book, The Art of Biblical Poetry, says Kugel, is so “reminiscent of my own study, The Idea of Biblical Poetry” that Kugel entitles his review-article “A Feeling of Deja Lu.” (Deja vu means previously seen; deja lu means previously read.)

Kugel goes on: The first part of Alter’s book, he says, “is most obviously derivative from my own”; there is “scarcely significant variation …. A number of Alter’s … observations and even examples seem likewise to be borrowed.” Kugel accuses Alter of implying that he, Alter, is the first to articulate certain insights when in fact they “come from my [Kugel’s] book …. Throughout, Alter seems to have mined my book for examples to illustrate ‘his’ thinking.” In short, Kugel claims that Alter has “ransacked [my book] for ideas and examples.”

Whether justified or not, Kugel concludes this part of the discussion with one of those brilliant stiletto puns that have a life of their own regardless of their truth-quotient: “I have come to think of [Alter’s book],” says Kugel, “as Kugel Slightly Altered.”

In his book, Alter does acknowledge Kugel’s earlier published book. Here is what Alter says:

“Of course, no one could be foolish enough to imagine that what he has to say on a topic so abundantly discussed [as biblical poetry] is entirely new …. Certain perceptions about the nature of parallelism proposed in the introductory chapter of James L. Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry (1981) proved close to ideas I had worked out in my Berkeley seminars in the late 1970s. It is 027in a way reassuring that different critical eyes should see the same object, though there is also much in Kugel’s general conception of biblical poetry to which I strenuously object.”

Kugel’s response to this ambiguous acknowledgment drips with ridicule and sarcasm. One can almost imagine Kugel blowing his stack:

“This is indeed telling. A mere accident of chronology, the fact that Alter’s perceptions, going back to ‘the late 1970s,’ happen to have first appeared in print in 1981 in a book by a different man, has required Alter to acknowledge as a predecessor one who in fact was not. That such a contortion should appear at all is surprising, but, as Alter likes to put it, ‘how much more so’ in a book with all the manifest dependencies enumerated above! And, not to put too fine a point on it, he goes on to assert his strenuous objections to ‘much in Kugel’s general conception of biblical poetry.’ In other words: my [Alter’s] ideas are different from Kugel’s, and even if they are the same, I thought of them first. (This is somewhat reminiscent of the old joke whose punchline is, ‘First of all, I returned your pot in perfect condition, second of all, it was already broken when you lent it to me, and third of all, I never borrowed it to begin with!’)”

In his discussion of biblical parallelism, Alter says in his book that this “is the one respect in which my own understanding of the phenomenon is close to James Kugel’s.”

Parallelism within a two-line verse is the most commonly identified structural feature of what is commonly designated biblical poetry, as opposed to prose. For both Kugel and Alter, however, this parallelism is not simply two ways of saying the same thing, but in fact the second statement intensifies and refines the first; that is, there is a dynamic movement between the two statements, from the first to the second of the two parallel statements in biblical poetry. The second statement may be characterized as “how much more so” than the first, to use Alter’s language. According to Kugel, Alter’s “how much more so” is the same idea contained in Kugel’s earlier book; as Kugel argues: “Alter’s ‘how much more so’ [is] a scarcely significant variation on my “A, and what’s more, B [the title, in fact, of the first chapter of Kugel’s book].”

Kugel claims to be “pleased” that in this “one respect” Alter acknowledges that his understanding of parallelism is the same as Kugel’s. But … Kugel has a number of “buts.”

To demonstrate that the essence of biblical parallelism is not simply equivalence between the two statements, but rather intensification in the second statement, Alter, like Kugel before him, cites examples that contain numbers. If 028only equivalence was intended, the numbers would be essentially the same, although perhaps expressed in different words, in the two statements. If, on the other hand, intensification was intended, the number in the second statement would be higher—as it is.

Here is Alter’s statement of this idea: “What does a poet do with numbers in semantic parallelism? If the system were really based on a principle of synonymity, one would expect to find pairing on the order of ‘twelve’ and ‘a dozen,’ but in fact this never happens. The invariable rule, as scholars have long recognized with out making the connection with an underlying poetic principle, is that if you introduce a number in the first verset, you have to go up in the second verset …. Thus the logic of numbers in parallel versets is not equivalence but an assertion of a fortiori, ‘how much more so,” and this impulse to intensification is also the motor force in thousands of lines of biblical poetry where no numbers are present.”

Here is Kugel’s expression of the same idea:

“The modern misunderstanding of [numerical parallelism] derives from the idea that A and B ‘mean the same thing,’ for we have lost the biblical habit of reading B as A’s completion. Their relationship here is really ‘A, and what’s more, B,’ ‘A, and as a matter of fact, B.’ ‘There are three things I do not understand, indeed four things’ [Proverbs 30:18], and in this particular proverb the fourth is definitely in an emphatic position. The same is true of ‘one cup … two flagons”—no impossibility, just a vivid instance of the ‘I’ll go you one better” mentality of parallelism.”

In this, the two men agree. Their only difference is as to whether they independently arrived at the same idea, or whether Alter copied it from Kugel. According to Alter, he had “worked out” this idea in the “Berkeley seminars [he taught] in the late 1970s,” years before Kugel published his 1981 book.

But Kugel’s charge goes far beyond accusing Alter of copying this central idea instead of arriving at it independently. Kugel goes even beyond charging Alter with using the same examples to illustrate this idea. Kugel also charges Alter with a failure to understand. Kugel claims his dynamic view of parallelism is “part of something greater, an attempt fundamentally to redefine the organizing principle of biblical poetry.” Alter, says Kugel, failed to understand this.

Alter, according to Kugel, has watered down his ideas. In saying so, Kugel resorts to a urinary metaphor that Alter will later characterize as “violat-[ing] all standards of civilized academic debate.” Here is Kugel:

“My book having been ransacked for ideas and examples, it is herein ‘altered’ in another sense, emasculated like a too-spirited tomcat lest he spray all over the comfortable living room furniture.”

Kugel then goes on to condemn Alter’s book as displaying

“broad ignorance of much of modern biblical scholarship, an ignorance that is most characteristically coupled with dismissive statements about the scholarship it ignores …. He [Alter] writes at length about the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) without so much as mentioning the seminal discussion by F. M. Cross and D. N. Freedman (or any subsequent treatments); the same holds true for 2 Samuel 22. As a result, he is constantly concluding things on comically flimsy grounds or propounding new insights that were banalities two decades, or a century, ago.”

In Kugel’s view, “Alter has little to say that is new.” According to Alter, on the other hand, there is only “one respect in which my own understanding is close to James Kugel’s.” Other wise, says Alter, there is “much in Kugel’s general conception of biblical poetry to which I strenuously object.”

According to Kugel, Alter makes “simple errors in biblical Hebrew grammar”; “he seems to assume that biblical authors spoke something close to Israeli Hebrew”; “in general, his translations seem to be reworked, ‘poeticized’ versions based on the Jewish Publication Society Bible (JPS) interspersed with the Revised Standard Version (RSV) (though this is never acknowledged).” Usually, Alter’s “poeticizations are harmless enough,” Kugel comments, but sometimes they are awkward: In one case Alter translates a phrase in 2 Samuel 22:3 as “my saving horn,” which, says Kugel, “sounds like optional equipment on an Italian sportscar.”

In the end, Kugel finds that “even the most basic facts about his chosen subject elude” Alter; his book is an “ignorance-arrogance cocktail” and “once one is past the shock of this ignorance-arrogance cocktail, the ignorance remains.”

Alter responded to Kugel’s review-article by sending a letter to the director of the University of Chicago Press (publisher of the Journal of Religion), accusing Kugel of “defamation.” In his letter, Alter calls Kugel “a junior scholar in Hebrew studies at Harvard”:

“Having published a good number of books, I have of course gotten some hostile reviews along with the good ones, and it is surely a reviewer’s privilege to say he thinks a book is bad, but the Kugel piece crosses the line into defamation, and I have frankly never seen anything like it in a learned journal.”

Kugel’s piece, Alter charges.

“violates all standards of civilized academic debate in its rhetoric of vilification, compounded of taunts and innuendoes, scatological images, puns on my name in the worst possible taste. I am astonished that the editors of The Journal of Religion should have deemed this acceptable for publication in an academic periodical.”

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More serious than this, says Alter, is

“Kugel’s repeated accusation that I have lifted my ideas about biblical verse as well as my principal examples from his 1981 book, The Idea Biblical Poetry. In order to sustain this accusation, he dismisses as a patent subterfuge the statement in my preface mat I worked out my understanding of biblical parallelism in my Berkeley seminars in the 1970s. In point of fact, all me participants of my first seminar on biblical poetry are prepared to testify that all the ideas spelled out in my book, together with the examples analyzed, were fully in place by 1977.”

Alter reproaches the Journal for having placed itself in an “unseemly moral position.”

Alter asks that steps be taken to insure that the Journal “will not repeat this kind of scurrility.”

Alter also asks that the Journal publish a letter from one of his students, based on her 1977 lecture notes, testifying to the fact that Alter’s ideas and examples were already in place in 1977. To this letter, Kugel should be given no opportunity to respond. “Finally,” writes Alter.

“the editors of the Journal owe me public apology, which can take the form of a very brief published statement that they regret their lapse of judgment in publishing a review that contained not merely criticism of book but me unwarranted imputation of dishonesty to its author. Let me say that publishing such an apology is in the interest of the Journal, for it has already compromised its own reputation by running the Kugel piece, and I have heard a number of expressions of shock from people in the field that a learned journal could do such a thing.”

Alter’s letter obviously caused problem for me University of Chicago and its press. Alter is an important scholar. According to a recent review in Newsweek of a book he co-edited (The Literary Guide to the Bible), Alter “has done as much as anyone to promote [the Bible as literature] and give this point of view the prominence that it now enjoys.” Alter sent a copy of his letter to the university president. He there noted that he had been discussing me possibility of doing a book with the University Press.

The editors of the Journal of Religion were miffed that Alter had not written to them, but to the University of Chicago Press. Differences on what do about Alter’s letter of protest emerged between me press and the editors of the journal. At least one of the editors wanted to do nothing, to stand firm.

Eventually, a compromise was reached between the editors and the press. The editors agreed to and did publish an “Editorial Statement” in the October 1987 issue of the Journal. The statement begins:

“The editors have received a number of communications regarding the review that appeared in the Journal of Religion, vol. 67, no 1 (January 1987), of Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Poetry. In that review, James Kugel contests the originality of Alter’s treatment of biblical parallelism, citing a number of similarities between Alter’s work and Kugel’s own book, The Idea of Biblical Poetry, and suggesting that Alter’s study contains a good deal of unacknowledged borrowing.”

The statement the editors published acknowledges receipt of a letter from one of Alter’s students, which says:

“I can state categorically, and I am not the only witness, that the ideas which Kugel claims were lifted from him, were discussed and developed in Alter’s graduate seminars in 1977 …. All of us who participated in me seminars vividly recall Alter’s detailed discussion of several examples of these ideas which appear in both Alter’s book and Kugel’s book.”

The Editorial Statement in the Journal of Religion concludes:

“The editors regret that a critical evaluation of me book should have been taken as a reflection on Professor Alter’s honesty in recounting the development of his own research.” No apology.

Alter and Kugel, who have never met one another, say they have no intention of taking any further action. So that is probably the end of the affair.

It does seem clear that the two authors were working independently and simultaneously on some of me same ideas.

Alter is naturally concerned at the charge of copying—a charge that gives Kugel’s review its special bite. But from our viewpoint, the student’s or learner’s viewpoint, we are equally if not more concerned with the books’ content, what they tell us that is the same or different about biblical poetry. In effect, Alter says that only in one respect are his ideas similar to Kugel’s, and that, otherwise, he disagrees with much in Kugel’s book. Kugel, in effect, says that there is almost nothing new in Alter’s book and that Alter fails to understand the subtleties in Kugel’s ideas.

Here, it seemed to us, was an opportunity to learn more about biblical poetry, at the same time we looked at a vociferous, personal scholarly slugfest.

So we asked Professor John Gammie of the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to examine the arguments and the books and to tell us not only who is right and wrong, but to explain to us what both scholars have to teach us about biblical poetry and how that is the same or different.

Professor Gammie has special qualifications to undertake this daunting task. He is a member of the Biblical Poetry Group of the Catholic Biblical Association. In 1987, this group devoted itself to Alter’s book on biblical poetry. In 1988, the group devoted itself to Kugel’s book. So Professor Gammie has had the benefit not only of his own intensive study of these two books, but also of the insights of a larger group of scholars who are studying them as part of their own particular interest.

The scholarship of biblical poetry might be thought the most benign of worlds. In fact, it has recently been rocked by a dispute that resembles a courtroom drama. The antagonists are both experts. Their dispute is personal, as well as scholarly. Both are the authors of recent books on biblical poetry. James L. Kugel, Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, is the author of a book published in 1981 entitled The Idea of Biblical Poetry (Yale University Press). Robert Alter is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of […]