Psalms at the Poetic Precipice

Abstract

Were we to chart twentieth century scholarly interest in the study of biblical poetry in the manner that financial analysts do the stock market, our graph would show significant peaks during the first twenty years, when some scholars were working out in fine detail the patterns of semantic parallelism that Robert Lowth had described grossly in the mid-eighteenth century, while others were struggling with Hebrew metrics, and evolving what is known as the Ley-Sievers method of determining and describing meter (e.g., Sievers, 1903; Briggs, 1906, pp. xxviii-xlviiii; Gray, 1915, pp. 143-154; Podechard, 1918, pp. 59-62). Thereafter, our graph would continue in a ho-hum, doldrum flat, undulating sporadically in the middle and late fifties as scholars applied the results of earlier work in Hebrew to the Ugaritic literary texts, and then, as work in Ugaritic severed its connection to the biblical umbilical cord, applied insights from Ugaritic to clarify features in biblical poetry (e.g., the initial work of Albright, 1934 and 1944; Cross and Freedman, 1950; Cassuto, 195 l, pp. 19-41; Gevirtz, 1963, pp. 6-14). Following this, our graph would again be flat except for some tics reflecting interest in syllable counting as a form of (Freedman, 1972; 1975; Stuart, 1976), some explorations of (Dahood and Penar, 1972; Dahood, 1975; 1981; Boling, 1960; Yoder, 1971; A vishur, 1971/l972), and discussions of oral formulaic language (Culley, 1967, pp. 33-101; Yoder, 1971, pp. 470-472, 477-480). From the mid-seventies, our graph would begin to swell and climb, spearing upwards towards the peaks reached at the beginning of the century, reflecting a surge of interest and an outpouring of research. The buzz words of this last decade are uttered on three levels: in a whisper, metrics (Garr, 1983, pp. 57-58; Watson, 1984, pp. 87-113) and more recently, morae (Christensen, l 985a, pp. 221-225; l 985b, pp. 182-183, 185-186); in a louder voice, word pairs (Berlin, 1983), rhetorical

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