The February 1989 issue of Bible Review contained an article on biblical poetry titled “Alter vs. Kugel—Taking the Heat in Struggle over Biblical Poetry.” In his introduction editor Hershel Shanks reviews the recent controversy between James Kugel and Robert Alter. In the main article John Gammie provides an analysis of their contributions to the study of biblical poetry. Both Kugel and Alter have written recent books re-examining the concept of parallelism in biblical poetry. Parallelism is one of the characteristics that has been used to identify poetic passages in the Hebrew Bible. Most biblical commentaries identify three types of […]
