Biblical Poetry
You Can’t Go Home Again
New to the column? We’re doing a close reading of Genesis, which started in September 2022. Visit the Archive and plunge in, or look here to get oriented.
Last time, we started reading the Song of Lemekh (Gen 4:23–24), a text that is poetic rather than prosaic. As a result, I promised to use this week’s free column to discuss the phenomenon that seems to characterize biblical poetry: parallelism.
This phenomenon is not unique to the Bible of course. One of my favorite examples to demonstrate what I mean by the term parallelism comes from a poem by E. E. Cummings:
I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
Than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
I’m counting six different “pairs” of parallels in these two lines:
I’d rather / than: These are words that coordinate the relationship between the two lines. This particular set of words is actually quite common in the book of Proverbs. In the German expression that biblical scholars sometimes use even in English for shorthand (or to make ourselves sound more profound), it is a “Tob-spruch.” טוב tov means “good,” and Proverbs is always saying that one thing is better — more tov — than its opposite. (See Prov 27:5 for an example famous from Nahmanides’ description of his relationship to Ibn Ezra.)
learn from / teach [to]: These two words obviously fit together. We might say that “teaching” is the next stage after “learning,” that it is metaphorically bigger or higher. If this were a biblical poem, I would point out that both verbs use the same root letters, למד l-m-d, “learn” in the basic Qal binyan and “teach” in the more intensive Piel binyan. ⇥ See Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course for more about binyanim. ⇤
one / ten thousand: “One” is the smallest number in human experience, and “ten thousand” is more or less its opposite on the human scale. Both Greek (μῡριάς myrias, which gives us our “myriad”) and Hebrew (רְבָבָה r’vava) have words for 10,000 that also mean something like “a gazillion.” Here, as in #2, the second of the pair is bigger than the first.
bird / stars: In accordance with how many of them there are, “bird” is singular and “stars” is plural. These two words do not make an obvious pair. They are parallel because they are juxtaposed by the structure of the two lines, where every other pair is obvious. Once we see that, we can begin to think about them. We see them both in the sky — flying, as it were — and stars are of course immeasurably higher than birds, matching the “trajectory” of ## 2 and 3.
how to / how not to: These are antonyms. We are not comparing two good things in order to choose the better, but (as so often in Proverbs) two opposites that show us a good value and a bad one. In this case, all the greatness in Line B — #3 bigger than #2, and then #4 bigger than #3 — is punctured by that little not.
sing / dance: This is a “peanut butter & jelly” parallel, a pair of words that obviously go together. Biblical poetry quite commonly takes pairs of this kind — for example, “heaven and earth” — and separates them to put one in Line A of a parallel and one in Line B. Deut 32:1 (in the previous post) is a clear example. What do we lose with that little not? More than just a myriad of something; we lose a whole realm of emotion, expression, and beauty.
We didn’t need this careful analysis to understand these two wonderful lines. But because Biblical Hebrew is no one’s native language, understanding how parallelism works can steer us in the right direction to understand a biblical poem.
The analysis comes into it because parallelism is not something automatic. It is more like the sonata form in classical music than the periodic table. If you have one proton, you are hydrogen; if you have two, you are helium, and that settles it. But the forms of music and poetry are flexible. They give structure to artistic ideas but don’t force them into rigid patterns.
Let’s look at a biblical example, not from a poem, but from a collection of rules:
Deut 24:17 Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless;
nor take a widow’s raiment to pledge. [KJV]
לֹ֣א תַטֶּ֔ה מִשְׁפַּ֖ט גֵּ֣ר יָת֑וֹם
וְלֹ֣א תַחֲבֹ֔ל בֶּ֖גֶד אַלְמָנָֽה׃
Both lines begin with לא lo = “thou shalt not.”
Both continue with 2 m.s. imperfect (Qal) verbs of legal import: “pervert” and “impound.”
The object of the verb: “justice” / “garment” (her collateral).
An abject social category: “fatherless stranger” / “widow.”
Does this mean you can seize collateral from an orphan, or pervert justice from a widow? No, you obviously are not permitted to do those things either. Why then is this “law” written in the same kind of parallelism we see in songs? I presume it’s because the rhythm makes it more alive in our brains and the heightened rhetoric infuses it with greater importance than a simple statement.
Here’s a familiar example from American history:
Ask not what your country can do for you —
ask what you can do for your country.
I will leave the parallelism here as an exercise for you. I’ll just point out that “ask not” isn’t standard colloquial English; it signals something, as parallelism does in biblical poetry. Had John Kennedy started his presidency by saying, “Everybody should start thinking of things they can do to make the country better,” nobody would remember it.
For our current project of reading Genesis, that means …
Lemekh’s words can indeed legitimately be called a “song”;
comparing parallel lines should help us understand the message of the song.
Is it poetry? In this column, yes, it is. I’ll remind you that (for my purposes) “poetry” is a quick way of saying “language that calls attention to itself and not just to its meaning.” We’ll go on next time with Lemekh’s song. Sooner or later, we’ll have to think about what work it is doing in this story.