Repetition and not Parallelism as the Determinant of Poetry in the Hebrew Bible. A Case Study of Biblical Story of Creation (Gen 1)

The Person and the Challenges Volume 11 (2020) Number 2, p. 199–218 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15633/pch.3758 Marcin Majewski ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4362-4812 Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow, Poland Repetition and not Parallelism as the Determinant of Poetry in the Hebrew Bible. A Case Study of Biblical Story of Creation (Gen 1)* Abstract The article points to new research on the subject of poetics in the Bible and argues against the thesis that the basic indicator of poetry and poetic texts in the Bible is parallelism. According to the author, repetition is such an indicator. An analysis of the biblical story of creation of the world was used as the case study (Gen 1). Keywords Poetry, poetry in the Bible, parallelism, repetition, rhythm, biblical story of creation. 1. Introduction It seems that the phenomenon of poetry exists in every developed culture. It is this kind of expression that cares about content as well as about its form and expressiveness. This is the main difference between poetry and prose or narrative, * The article was prepared as part of research project No. UMO-2013/09/D/HS1/00447 financed by the National Science Center. 200 The Person and the Challenges Volume 11 (2020) Number 2, p. 199–218 where it is the content that essentially matters, while the form is subordinated to it. Poetry is a language created to influence more than to convey. Since the time of Hermann Gunkel’s monumental commentary on the Book of Genesis2, biblical researchers have been increasingly interested in the relationship between form and content. They devoted much of their studies to literary genres of biblical texts, with particular emphasis on poetic genres. Gunkel posed a question about the genres in the context of the story of the creation of the world in seven days.3 Is this a creation myth? Or maybe cosmology? Or rather cosmogony? Perhaps a cult text recited on a holy day? Depending on the definition, Genesis chapter 1 can be any of them, and at the same time, something completely unique. The key and still unresolved discussion focuses on the more basic question: is Genesis 1 poetry or prose? In this article, I want to ask a general question about the poetics in the Bible and a specific question about the poetics in Gen 1. This text is seen as a piece of prose – especially in the context of the poetic descriptions of creation found in Ps 104 or Isaiah. And so, it is interpreted and printed in Bible translations: as a narrative, a prose text. However, the contemporary debate on what characterizes biblical poetry – what distinguishes it and what is its essence – prompts to ask anew question about the literary genre of Gen 1. The standard answer to the question of poetry in the Hebrew Bible indicates parallelism as the basic determinant of biblical poetry. This approach has been re-examined in recent years and either questioned in full or overworked. On this basis, we can give a new answer to the question about the poetics of Gen 1. 2. What makes a text poetry? Researchers cannot agree on the definition of poetry. It is also difficult to bring poetry present in different languages and cultures of the world to a common denominator. Sometimes it even seems impossible to define the phenomenon of poetry in one specific language. Still, poetry is quite easy to grasp and recognize. One could apply to poetry the observation of St. Augustine on attempts to define time: “When nobody asks me, I know what it is. But when I want 2 H. Gunkel, Genesis: ubersetztunderklart (HKAT 1/1), Gottingen1910, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. The English edition I used: Genesis. Translated and Interpreted, trans. M.E. Biddle, Macon 1997, Mercer University Press. 3 Gen 1:1 – 2:3. Marcin Majewski Repetition and not Parallelism as the Determinant of Poetry in the Hebrew Bible… 201 to explain it, I don’t know.” Although poetry takes very different forms in different languages and works, it creates a special kind of language that we sense as artistic, beautiful to listen to, full of expression, and different from narrative or ordinary speech. Poetry is clearly an alternative form of language to prose, which is much closer to spoken language. While it is difficult to describe poetry satisfactorily as a comprehensive phenomenon, it is easier to point out its specific aspects and features. For example, condensing expressions is an important feature of poetry common to many cultures. Poets do not waste their words. They do not add unnecessary expressions and phrases. They do not elaborate, as we find in prose. Every word counts, every expression is thought over, accurate phrase consistency is desirable. Sometimes, however, certain aspects of poetry clash with other indicated features or are so general that they cover other types of literary expressions. How then can one recognize poetry in the Bible? Does the Bible contain poetry or poems at all? This is not a trivial question. An insightful researcher of Hebrew poetics James Kugel has shown that all the features attributed to Hebrew poetry can be found in Hebrew prose. This may lead to the conclusion that Biblical Hebrew is devoid of any particular type of poetic language.3 Indeed, the indicated features of biblical poetry can be found in the Hebrew narrative. Let us take, for example, the beginning of the well-known Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.”4 Is this text poetic? What makes it poetry? The mere fact that it is inserted into a collection called psalms? Is lining up this text in modern Bible editions enough to call it lyrical? What, in fact, is the determinant of biblical poetry: language, individual elements of the verse, the specific unit of text or the whole composition? 3 J.L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry. Parallelism and Its History, New Haven1981, Yale University Press; J.L. Kugel, The Great Poems of the Bible, New York 1999, Free Press. 4 Ps 23:1–2. Translation of biblical passages is my own, unless otherwise stated. Here: The Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV) is an authorized revision of the American Standard Version, published in 1901, which was a revision of the King James Version, published in 1611. 202 The Person and the Challenges Volume 11 (2020) Number 2, p. 199–218 3. Parallelism as an indicator of biblical poetics Psalm 23 is considered as a piece of poetry not by the sublimity and uniqueness of the metaphors used, although they are beautiful, but by undertaking a genre convention according to specific language patterns. In every introduction to the Bible we read that parallelism is such a pattern of Hebrew poetics. Parallelism – originally Parallelismus Membrorum or parallelism of the line – is a term introduced by the Anglican bishop, Oxford professor of poetics, Robert Lowth in the eighteenth century.5 For Lowth, biblical poetry is a series of couplets (twin and mirror lines) in w (...truncated)