Bible Books

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The Art of Biblical Poetry

Robert Alter
(New York: Basic Books, 1985), 238 pp., $17.95

The warhorse that supposedly characterizes biblical verse is the parallel couplet: Sisera’s mother wails, “Why do his cavalry hesitate to come? / / Why are the hoofbeats of his chariots late?” (Judges 5:28). Moses blesses two tribes, “Rejoice, Zebulun, in your going out, // And Issachar, in your tents!” (Deuteronomy 33:18).

To naive readers, such biblical formulations may seem repetitious—a mere convention of poetic form. This view has even been urged in professional scholarship, where the symmetry of the parallel stichs (or lines) is sometimes mistaken for synonymity. The view has also engendered many technical studies that focus on the structural types of parallelism. Sometimes it seems that the formal aspects of parallelism have mesmerized critics.

Robert Alter, however, promises more—insight into the organics of Hebrew poetry, into the almost erotic union of poetic form and intent, the offspring of which are art and meaning.

Parallelism, Alter begins, fosters thematic development. It is not idle repetition, but a sharpening, a refocusing of the reader’s eye on undreamt-of aspects of an object or action. “Wine” in Genesis 49:11 is parallel to “the blood of grapes,” calling to Alter’s mind their crushing, and suggesting potential violence (although this is not the real point of the text). Alter stresses parallelism’s promotion of “kenning,” using a poetic phrase to complement an ordinary term. Parallelism also provides “new perceptions”: the synonym adds scope to the first description (wine equals blood of grapes), and the fresh aspect it adduces carries the reader along, promoting narrativity.

But how do parallel lines convey movement? In chapter 2, Alter argues that concatenated couplets make up a succession of frozen frames, stills that, in sequence, like a motion picture, tell a story. The progression, Alter continues in chapter 3, amplifies themes by discrete steps building to a climax. It conveys a sense of inexorability both at the level of the line—where the first stich, or line, generates a parallel mate—and at the thematic level. A close reading of Job 3 illustrates the point, showing how the poetic argument heats up—“intensifies”—when parallel lines mount one upon the other.

Chapters 4–8 press this theoretical discussion into practice. An impressionistic exegesis of Job aims to expose the synergy of form and intention in that work. Alter demonstrates that the divine speech from the whirlwind (Job 38–41) rebuts Job’s plaint of chapter 3, in which he curses the day he was born. Strikingly, as Alter insightfully notes, this divine speech also picks up and creatively reuses the rhetoric and vocabulary of Job’s three “comforters.” However, the divine speech from the whirlwind, although drawing on the rhetoric and vocabulary of Job’s comforters, comes to a very different conclusion than theirs. This is Alter’s point. For Alter, the Book of Job derives much of its power from this irony.

But this analysis ignores a major feature of the book: its legal orientation. A great deal of Job’s own rhetoric (starting with chapter 9) is devoted to mounting a formal legal challenge to God: Job summons Yahweh into court. If form conjoins so closely with meaning as Alter insists, what significance does the legal terminology have? To his credit, Alter notes the problem, but only in passing. His literary excavations, though illuminating, do not lead to new conclusions. In the end, Alter leaves us only with the old bromide that Yahweh has created an irrational world. But justice demands that God be accountable; both his accountability and the very rhetoric of justice are repudiated, in silence, by the divine speech from the whirlwind. This is one of the book’s central ironies—and Alter fails to come to grips with it

Chapter 5, which appears in adaptation in this issue of BR, underscores the power of psalmody to engage human spirituality. Parallel lines create a sense of majesty, of disjoint awe, communicating the “morality” and passive admiration of the true devotee. Chapter 6 beats a similar drum: Alter categorizes and exemplifies the use of poetry in prophecy (to denounce, to console, etc.). He sees the essence of poetry in prophecy as an identification of concrete historical referents with cultural archetypes. Poetry, he writes, “is a particular way of imagining the world,” and its ideomorphs, the metaphors it employs, create a sweeping, swelling exuberance distinctively poetic. In prophecy, poetry achieves a thunderous roll, crashing majestically upon the rocky shores of unshakable religious conviction.

Alter fails to discover a unique symbiosis of form and meaning in Job, Psalms, prophecy or, in his delightful appreciation in chapter 7, Proverbs. Rather, he spotlights the symbiosis that characterizes all good art. In treating “amplification,” for example, Alter really addresses a property of all extended metaphoric discourse. All metaphoric discourse amplifies images and themes. The thesis that this is a particular trait of poetry is in fact a blanket judgment. Restricting the discussion to biblical examples distorts its proportions.

It is a measure of this limitation that Alter’s best treatment is his last, of the Song of Songs, where figure figures formidably. Imagery here does not resound in the crash and crescendo of prophecy, but plays charmingly, in eddying, swirling idylls; the distinction between the real and the metaphoric blurs, so that the two intermingle in dreamy embrace. This is Alter at his best and most suggestive. Along the way, he stops to adjust a few blurred focuses 011of his earlier, theoretical discussion: Conventional imagery, like conventional equivalents in parallelism, numbs the reader; predictable formulae convey no “new perceptions.” He also makes a start at analyzing the effects of different sorts of parallelism. Finally, the Song’s frequent abandonment of parallel structure permits Alter to show that Hebrew poetry is not truly governed by that form. For Alter, biblical (or perhaps all) poetry revolves around “intensification.” This can mean “kenning, new perceptions,” or the “amplification” of metaphor across several lines, or the movement of a sequence toward a climax. The Song of Songs exhibits all these features, placing metaphor regularly in the foreground.

So far as it goes, all this makes a serious, workmanlike study. In particular, it is an index of the contemporary rapprochement between biblical studies and literary criticism. Still, there are faults: Alter’s occasional mistranslations will irk informed readers. (There are at least three in his rendition of Judges 5:24–31 alone.) He selects 2 Samuel 22 as “the probably more authentic text” of the hymn preserved there and in Psalm 18. This is a sweeping pronouncement that naively shunts aside the methodological principle that textual variants must be investigated severally. Such minor flaws leave one wondering about Alter’s judgment elsewhere: Has he emended Isaiah 40:7 on the basis of textual criticism or on the basis of esthetic criteria? Or has he unwittingly and erroneously accepted an emendation from another source? Alter suppresses a part of this verse, but neglects to inform the reader why.

These foibles are not debilitating and their mention is apposite for only one reason. Alter repeatedly implies that he means to illuminate the authors’ intentions (pp. 48, 52, 85f, 176): He is reading historically. Even where he consciously disengages himself from seeking a text’s historical context—in connection with the Song of Songs he decries this scholarly proclivity as “misplaced concreteness”—he merely sublimates the search, lighting in fact on the probable context: This is love poetry. Again, Alter collapses the prose and poetic versions of Israel’s rescue from Egypt at the sea (Exodus 14–15), and of Deborah’s victory over Sisera (Judges 4–5). He pillories scholars who differentiate between the prose and poetic accounts. But the alternative Alter offers, conflation of the two variants, involves a historical judgment, that the same information was available to the poet and to the prose author in each instance. Alter can get at authentic authorial intentions only by hypotheses about historical circumstances. Historical errors about language, the text or culture do not vitiate this form of literary criticism, but they do mar it

More egregious are Alter’s broad-stroke correlations between literary forms and social history: The episodic fierceness of Hebrew poetic narration may, as he at one point says, reflect Israel’s buffeting by hostile neighbors and great empires. Elsewhere, Alter makes the dubious and surprising point that only prose can capture the concept of moral choice in human affairs, that “ethical monotheism” in Israel was incompatible with epic verse. These are large propositions indeed. Alter takes history in chunks, when it, like literature, must be sifted in particles.

Alter’s work should be read in conjunction with James Kugel’s study, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (1981). Kugel documents, in vivid, urgent prose, that parallelism is not meaningless and formal, that it contains movement, “heightening,” intensification. And Israelite poets exploited it only as one technique in their larger rhetorical repertoire, abandoning it when their sense of rhythm and movement demanded. The seeds of these insights were sown by Bishop Robert Lowth and Johann Gottfried von Herder in the 18th century.^a Contemporary scholarship had lost sight of 012their contributions until Kugel retrieved and developed them, explaining why they had lain ignored.

Alter’s work never quite succeeds in extricating itself from Kugel’s shadow. Kugel stressed the mechanics of parallelism in the individual line; Alter broadens the discussion to include whole sequences of poetry. Alter also deserves credit for observing (or conceding) that conventionalized figures and word-pairs actually retard intensification (a study of the dull in the biblical corpus is in order). Nor is being overshadowed in this instance disgrace: Kugel’s study exhibits courage and insight of the first order as well as exceptional originality.

Still, Alter shares with Kugel perhaps the only serious flaw in the latter’s treatment, a historical one. Parallelism is of course not the structuring principle of Israelite verse, as, say, sonnet form is of sonnets. Kugel shows further that simple metrical analyses are necessarily bankrupt (Alter reverts to them). But neither Kugel nor Alter wrestles with the fact that Hebrew poetry was not originally textual. To be sure, Alter takes the time to deny that the poetry was composed orally. But even if inscribed on papyrus, it was composed to be performed, a fact known to Lowth and picked up already in Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1796), where prophecy is called “the art of playing poetry to a tune.” Poetic irregularities, in meter and in syntax, were probably dissolved in Israelite music.

This circumstance affects how the text should be approached. We must listen for the strains of ancient performances echoing across the ages: Does Genesis 4:23 pose the pair “Ada and Zillah” / / “wives of Lemech” because, as Alter suggests, “it is in their capacity as wives” that they are apostrophized? Possibly, but a more prosaic logic is probably at work—the author wanted to inform his hearers that the two women were Lemech’s wives (who else could Lemech sing to?). Alter occasionally, thus, overreads his material. In good poetry, after all, there is always much contrivance. But the poem—meaning and form twinned in harness, semantic range interplaying with intent—contains more than the poet plans. A clever critic, like Alter, risks taking possibility for intention, product for project, luck for skill. To differentiate between them—as most readers of Alter’s book will want to do—requires historical work. How far luck has favored art is after all a historical question.

Alter’s errors are peripheral to his real point I dwell on them here because he outfits his book with the figleaf of methodological contribution; the errors reflect the fact that the methodology is not yet mature. But that is not the soul of the book. Alter’s mission, to redeem the text from the Dagon’s temple of historical criticism, is played out at the level of individual passages. In The Art of Biblical Poetry, Alter presents us with sound, close readings of some delightful, delicate texts. And by this service, he gives us a glimpse of those texts, and of the critic’s art, for the most part in their naked beauty, and rightly unashamed.

The Apocalyptic Imagination, An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity

John J. Collins
(New York: Crossroad, 1984), 280 pp., $24.50

The history of New Testament scholarship since the Reformation has gone hand in hand with developments in the study of Judaism in the centuries immediately preceding and following the rise of Christianity. Beginning in the 17th century, scholars saw rabbinic literature—the Mishnah (a code of laws edited in c. 200 A.D.), the Talmuds (interpretations and discussions of the Mishnah from 200–500 A.D.) and Midrashim (rabbinic interpretations of and commentary on Scripture)—as the primary resource for understanding the Jewish background of the New Testament. This approach culminated in the famous commentary on the New Testament by Hermann Strack and Paul Billerbeck¹ which assumed that rabbinic texts accurately reflected the background against which the New Testament was to be understood

The 20th century saw marked progress in the study of early Judaism, sparked by the publication of many apocryphal^b and pseudepigraphal^c texts and the discovery of the Hebrew manuscripts of the Cairo Genizah^d and the Dead Sea Scrolls. These newly discovered Hebrew texts caused a complete reorientation of the picture of Judaism in the Hellenistic period. Instead of seeing the Jewish community as primarily Pharisaic, with small groups of deviant sectarians, scholars now realize that Second Temple Judaism was exceedingly variegated, and that many competing groups and ideologies must be given equal weight if the period is to be studied scientifically. This new picture of early Judaism has now made its impact on the study of the New Testament.

Recent years have seen a proper reevaluation of the assumption that rabbinic literature provides the backdrop for understanding the history of early Christianity. Indeed, much of the rabbinic material was edited later. On the other hand, we now have a substantial collection of texts from the two centuries preceding the rise of Christianity and the first Christian century. These documents indicate that Christianity must be understood against backdrop of the Jewish sects and their literature. To the study of part of this literature, John J. Collins has devoted this work

Collins established his credentials for the present volume by publishing studies of numerous texts from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D. After setting out his basic presuppositions regarding the apocalyptic genre, he turns to the Enoch literature (pseudepigraphal works which recount the experiences of the biblical figure Enoch after being taken up into heaven), Oracles 013(“historical” apocalypses), and testaments (works purporting to be the last words of biblical figures), Qumran material (the War Scroll and the Thanksgiving Hymns), post-70 A.D. texts and Diaspora texts, such as the Sybylline Oracles. For each text he presents a wealth of detailed analysis, and in many ways this book serves as an excellent introduction to the literature of the varieties of Judaism of this period.

At the outset, Collins attempts to determine the scope of apocalyptic literature, a problem that has plagued scholars for many years. Collins concurs with the definition of apocalyptic literature as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation [at the end of days], and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”² He sees apocalyptic literature as originating in post-Exilic prophecy from the sixth through fourth centuries B.C., with some significant contributions from Babylonian culture. Certain influences come as well from Persian ideas. Hellenistic civilization provides many motifs and what the author calls “codes,” of expression through which Jewish ideas are expressed in the Hellenistic era. He emphasizes that there was no single apocalyptic movement, but rather only a genre used by different groups in various situations. Collins sees this genre as extremely important for understanding early Christianity and as having shaped many of its presuppositions.

While this book is extremely well written and interesting, two questions must be raised. First, it is not certain that the apocalyptic genre represents a useful categorization of Second Temple Jewish literature. Collins notes that the apocalyptic genre derived its name from the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse) of the New Testament The terminology and definition of the genre seem to have been shaped not by issues germaine to the study of Judaism in the Hellenistic period, but rather by those relevant to the study of emerging Christianity. Yet the documents of the varieties of Judaism of the Second Commonwealth period need to be studied on their own terms, and a categorization which fosters such study would be more helpful.

Second, only in the epilogue is the relevance explicated of apocalyptic literature to the “matrix” of Christianity, and there only in the briefest of terms. The book would have been more convincing had a more thorough argument been made for the relevance of this material to early Christian documents. The reader is left to take on faith that apocalyptic literature does indeed illumine the background of early Christianity.

This book is an excellent survey of the literature usually termed apocalyptic by students of early Judaism and Christianity. Collins is to be congratulated for assembling a vast amount of material and presenting it in an extremely useful manner. The book will become a basic text for those wishing to study these important texts which do indeed constitute “the Jewish matrix of Christianity.”

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From The Apocalyptic Imagination …

The form of the apocalypses involves a narrative framework that describes the manner of revelation. The main means of revelation are visions and otherworldly journeys, supplemented by discourse or dialogue and occasionally by a heavenly book. The constant element is the presence of an angel who interprets the vision or serves as guide on the otherworldly journey. This figure indicates that the revelation is not intelligible without supernatural aid. It is out of this world. (p. 4)