Biblical Poetry
This week’s reading consists of Moses’ farewell song, known in Hebrew by its first word Ha’azinu (“Give ear!”). In it, Moses recounts Israel’s prior history, starting back in “days of yore,” when things were fine, but then he goes on to foretell the difficulties that are to follow his own demise. His listeners must certainly have known from the start that this song would be a mixture of good and bad because of what he says in the opening verses:
Give ear, O heavens, to what I say, and let the earth hear my words;
May my teaching come down like rain, my speech distill as the dew,
Like storm-drops on the grass, and like dew-drops on the pasture,
For I speak in the name of the Lord—give glory to our God!
These verses foreshadow Moses’ main message, and while that message is foremost in the minds of readers, these opening lines may provide us with an occasion to say something in general about biblical poetry, and the poetry of Moses’ song in particular.
Ancient Hebrew poetry is similar to the poetry of other languages: what makes poetry poetic is the sense of regularity that its structure imparts. In other languages, this feeling is achieved through a repeated structural element, such as meter. For example, every line may have a fixed number of syllables, like French alexandrines (twelve syllables per line), or like the six metrical feet of dactylic hexameter in the classical meters of Greek and Latin. Repeated in line after line, this regularity is pleasing to the ear. Of course, poets have to work to get their words to fit any such self-imposed structure, but careful composition is a lot of what poetry is all about. (And that care is not limited to poetic meters; sometimes other elements supplement or replace meter—most prominently rhyme, but sometimes other features, such as alliteration in Anglo-Saxon verse.)
Biblical poetry doesn’t have a fixed meter or rhyme, but it does have something close to that: every line divides into two half-verses—let’s call them Part A and Part B—each of which consists of 2 to 4 words or so, so that each whole line of verse usually has a total of 5 or 6 or 7 words. This isn’t so regular a feature that it could be called a meter, properly speaking; but it is fairly regular. Thus, in the first line of Moses’s song, the Hebrew text reads:
Ha’azinu ha-shamayim va’adabbera, vetishma ha-aretz imrei-fi
The first 3 words make up Part A, then there’s a comma, and then 3 more words that make up Part B—for a total of six words The same is true of the next two lines as well: 3 words, a comma, and 3 words. But the fourth line is slightly different: its Part A has four words, if the little conjunction ki (“since” or “for”) is treated as a separate word. This makes for a total of 7 words, one more than the preceding three lines. Did this bother any of the song’s original listeners? I doubt it.
But the rough equivalence in the length of each line is only part of the regularity that characterizes most of biblical poetry. There’s also that break between Part A and Part B, what I called the “comma.” It has a special role. Part B has to be simultaneously separate from Part A—usually, by the sort of separation that would be expressed by a comma or semi-colon in English—but also connected to it. This separate-but-connected quality is quite striking. Often it’s achieved by leaving something out of Part B that was explicit in Part A. Take for example the two lines of verse 7:
Recall the days of old, consider the years of ages past,
Ask your father and he will inform you, your elders and they will tell you.
The first line contains two independent clauses, but in the second line there’s a gap: “Ask your father and he will inform you, [ask] your elders and they will tell you.” We mentally borrow the bracketed word ask from Part A in order to turn Part B into a complete grammatical thought (which “your elders and they will tell you” isn’t). So, to put this in more general terms, the absence of something in Part B (often a verb, but sometimes something else) helps us to read Parts A + B as connected, even though its two parts are separated by a little pause.
Apart from a missing verb, another common way to connect Part B back to Part A is to have similar terms appear in both parts (this feature is sometimes misleadingly referred to as parallelism). Thus, in the opening lines of this song, the pairs heavens and earth, what I say and my words, my teaching and my speech, rain and dew, all reinforce the idea that Parts A and B are paired utterances. Their similarity binds Parts A and B together, even as the syntax (the “comma”) divides them.
I mentioned that the word parallelism is misleading because it is often understood to mean that A and B are just saying the same thing twice in different words. This does happen sometimes but, for example, rain and dew in line 2 are significantly different from each other here, as lines 2 and 3 make explicit. “Rain” can come down hard, like the “storm-drops”* mentioned in line 3, while “dew” is proverbially gentle, like the “dew-drops” also mentioned in line 3. So what Moses is saying is: part of what I’m going to tell you will hit you hard, but the ending of my message will be encouraging and gentle—on you, at least.
Finally, it should be said that the connectedness of A and B is sometimes rather weak. What connects the two in a line like verse 20?
He said: I will hide My face from them, I will see what their end will be.
These are two consecutive actions, not two parallel versions of the same act. Similarly, lines 31 and 35:
For our Rock is not like their rock, and our enemies are dupes…
Vengeance and punishment are mine, for the time when their foot will stumble.
Parts A and B in these lines are certainly not saying anything like “the same thing twice.” And this is often the case. The whole genius of biblical poetry lies not in its off-and-on quasi-meter, nor its off-and-on “parallelism,” but in that little comma and the separate-but-connected pattern that’s repeated line after line.
We rarely stop to consider such external features in reading biblical texts: “The message is what counts,” we rightly think. But sometimes, as here, the way things are formulated is crucial to understanding that message.
Shabbat shalom!
* “Storm-drops” is based on the fact that the verbal root s-‘-r (“storm,”usually spelled with a samekh in biblical Hebrew) sometimes represents s-‘-r spelled with the letter sin. See Isa 28:2, Ezek 27:35, 32:10.