Is there poetry in the Bible? Does it have rhyme or meter? How did ancient Hebrew writers compose their works? James Kugel's provocative study provides surprising new answers to these age-old questions. Biblical "poetry" is not a concept native to the Bible itself, he proposes, and the idea that the Bible is divided into prose and verse is merely an approximation of the reality of biblical style. Arguing that the Bible presents a continuum of speech heightened in varying degrees by different means, Kugel sets out to describe Hebrew's high style on its own terms. He also offers a thorough history of the idea of biblical poetry, starting with Philo of Alexandria and Josephus in the first century C.E. and charting its development through the Church Fathers, medieval Jewish writers, the Christian Hebraists of the Renaissance, and on into modern times. The story of how each age understood the nature biblical poetry, Kugel concludes, is a key to understanding the Bible's place in the history of Western thought.
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By challenging some of scholarship's most cherished positions, this book will undoubtedly become the sine qua non for all future discussions of biblical language.
(Journal of the American Academy of Religion )This book is a truly remarkable achievement.
(P. Wernberg-Moller Journal of Jewish Studies )A pleasure to read and obviously fun to write, a book which reminds us, through its mastery of critical rhetoric and immense learning, of the playfulness of being a scholar.
(Francis Landy Journal for the Study of the Old Testament )Consistently erudite, lucid, honest, revisionist, and awesomely comprehensive.
(Shofar )Language Notes
Text: English, Hebrew
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James L. Kugel, Starr Professor of Hebrew at Harvard from 1982 to 2003, now lives in Jerusalem. A specialist in the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation, he is the author of The God of Old and The Great Poems of the Bible. His course on the Bible was regularly one of the two most popular at Harvard, enrolling more than nine hundred students.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
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A learned study,
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This review is from: The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (Paperback)
This book is rich in its knowledge of and analysis of Biblical poetry. It sees the kind of intensification of language which poetry is by examining the device of parallelism which is a central feature of Biblical poetry.
While the book is rich in analysis and idea I found it very difficult going. And I am sure there is much more in it than my reading was able to get out of it.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
The songs and psalms of the Bible were not written in quantitative meters, as were the songs of the ancient Greeks, nor do they have regular rhyme or alliterative patterns, as do the songs of many other peoples. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
biblical meter, metrical thesis, metrical hypothesis, metrical speculation, parallelistic passages, parallelistic lines, behold thine enemies, des lettres classiques, repetitive parallelism, biblical parallelism, medial pause, biblical poetry, sensus spiritualis, semantic parallelism, approximate regularity, pause sequence, parallelismus membrorum, metrical poetry, biblical style, clause length, actual repetition, biblical songs, strict numbers, obvious parallelism, metrical theories Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Moses ibn Ezra, Song of the Sea, Middle Ages, Church Fathers, Moses ibn Tibbon, Robert Lowth, Hebrew Bible, Holy Spirit, New Testament, Ten Songs, Abraham ibn Ezra, Contemplative Life, Marianus Victorius, Moses ibn Habib, John Gray, Tel Aviv, The Forms of Hebrew Poetry, Aristotle's Poetics, David Kimhi, Expanded Colon, Near East, Samuel ibn Tibbon, Apologetic Motifs, Christian Hebraists New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
The songs and psalms of the Bible were not written in quantitative meters, as were the songs of the ancient Greeks, nor do they have regular rhyme or alliterative patterns, as do the songs of many other peoples. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
biblical meter, metrical thesis, metrical hypothesis, metrical speculation, parallelistic passages, parallelistic lines, behold thine enemies, des lettres classiques, repetitive parallelism, biblical parallelism, medial pause, biblical poetry, sensus spiritualis, semantic parallelism, approximate regularity, pause sequence, parallelismus membrorum, metrical poetry, biblical style, clause length, actual repetition, biblical songs, strict numbers, obvious parallelism, metrical theories Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Moses ibn Ezra, Song of the Sea, Middle Ages, Church Fathers, Moses ibn Tibbon, Robert Lowth, Hebrew Bible, Holy Spirit, New Testament, Ten Songs, Abraham ibn Ezra, Contemplative Life, Marianus Victorius, Moses ibn Habib, John Gray, Tel Aviv, The Forms of Hebrew Poetry, Aristotle's Poetics, David Kimhi, Expanded Colon, Near East, Samuel ibn Tibbon, Apologetic Motifs, Christian Hebraists New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 44
books:
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66
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- Literary Criticism by William and Cleanth Brooks Wimsatt on 4 pages
- The Cairo Geniza (British Academy, London, Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology Series 1930) by Paul E. Kahle on page 111, page 112, and Back Matter
- Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Book 20 (Loeb Classical Library No. 456) (Bk.XX v. 13) by Josephus on page 140, and page 141
- A Literary History of the Arabs by Reynold A. Nicholson on page 25, and page 133
- Phoenician Inscriptions and the Bible by Yitzhak Avishur on page 29, and page 84
See all 44 books this book cites
- A Prelude to Biblical Folklore: UNDERDOGS AND TRICKSTERS by Susan Niditch in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- The Creation of History in Ancient Israel by Marc Zvi Brettler on page 85, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- The Book of Ecclesiastes (New International Commentary on the Old Testament) by Tremper Longman in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and page 58
- Psalms in Community: Jewish and Christian Textual, Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions (Symposium Series (Society of Biblical Literature), No. 25.) by Harold W. Attridge; Margot Elsbeth Fassler on page 169, page 381, and Back Matter
- A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible by Leland Ryken on page 38, page 67, and page 243
See all 66 books citing this book
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