Hebrew Verse Structure

Hebrew Verse Structure

Introduction

Michael Patrick O’Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 1980).

Hebrew Verse Structure is an attempt to "describe the major forms, that is, the structural features basic to Hebrew verse" (p. 1). The book is notoriously difficult to read. As one reviewer warns, "potential readers should be aware that they are embarking as much on an adventure in English as in Hebrew verse structure." Yet the book is of signal importance for the study of Biblical Hebrew Poetry.

---

Summary

O'Connor views his work as a refinement of the traditional "Standard Description of Biblical Hebrew Poetry," first put forward by Robert Lowth (1753) and refined by others such as George Gray (1915). The two major components of the Standard Description are (1) Meter and (2) Parallelism. The first of these (meter) concerns the nature of the line itself; the second (parallelism) concerns the nature of the relationship between two or more lines.

O'Connor's refinement of this description may be summarized in his own words, as follows: "The feature of Hebrew verse structure Lowth believed hopelessly lost he called meter. We shall argue that the regularities he and his successors have regarded as phonological are in fact syntactic... The other construct of Lowth's description, parallelism, we will show to be a congeries of phenomena. ... these... we group together as the tropes and offer as a replacement, in the description, for the broader and partly overlapping notion of parallelism. The syntactic regularities, which take the form of constraints on line shapes, along with descriptions of dominant syntactic constellations, and the tropes act together in structuring Hebrew verse" (p. 5).

Outline

PART I: OVERVIEW

Hebrew Verse Structure

The Texts

PART II: FINE STRUCTURE

The Shape and Structure of the Line

The Word-Level Trope of Repetition

The Word-Level Tropes of Coloration: Binomination, Coordination and Combination

The Line-Level Trope of Matching

The Line-Level Trope of Gapping and Related Phenomena

The Supralinear-Level Trope of Syntactic Dependency

The Supralinear-Level Trope of Mixing

PART III: GROSS STRUCTURE

An Overview

Key Concepts

O'Connor claims that Hebrew verse is structured by

1. a syntactic constriction which defines the nature of the line itself,
2. a system of tropes used to structure one line in relation to another.

Syntactic Constriction

O'Connor argues that "meter" in Hebrew poetry is not phonological but syntactic; the line is defined in terms of a system of syntactic constraints. Just as a line of a poem in English iambic pentameter must have 5 feet and (roughly) 10 syllables in order to be a line, so a line of Biblical Hebrew Poetry, in order to be a line, must have 0-3 clauses, 1-4 constituents, and 2-5 units. The system of constraints may be laid out as follows:

clause constraint	0	1	2	3
constituent constraint	1	2	3	4
unit constraint	2	3	4	5

The terms "unit" and "constituent" may be briefly defined as follows:

• Unit: an individual word (e.g., a verb or a noun)
• Constituent: a word (e.g., verb) or a phrase (e.g., prepositional phrase, construct chain) that functions as an argument in the clause

Consider, for example, Psalm 106:10:

10a	וַֽ֭יּוֹשִׁיעֵם מִיַּ֣ד שׂוֹנֵ֑א	"He saved them from the power of those who hate them."
10b	וַ֝יִּגְאָלֵ֗ם מִיַּ֥ד אוֹיֵֽב׃	"He redeemed them from the enemy's power."

The first line (v. 10a) consists of one clause, two constituents, and three units. The second line (v. 10b) likewise consists of one clause, two constituents, and three units. It would be impossible for v. 10 (וַֽ֭יּוֹשִׁיעֵם מִיַּ֣ד שׂוֹנֵ֑א וַ֝יִּגְאָלֵ֗ם מִיַּ֥ד אוֹיֵֽב׃) to constitute only one line, since then the constraint, which states that there can be no more than five units, would be broken.

The lines in Ps 106:10 are typical. O'Connor observes that the majority of lines in his corpus (63%) "contain one clause and either two or three constituents of two or three units" (pg. 87).

Tropes

O'Connor argues that "parallelism" is best broken down into "a group of phenomena which occur regularly and serve as part of the verse structure" (p. 87). He refers to these phenomena as "tropes." There are at least six different tropes, which may be organized according to three linguistic levels:

Linguistic Level	Trope	Definition	Example
Word-Level Tropes	Repetition	"The use of one word twice over" (p. 109)	"He saved them from the hand of the one who hated them. / He redeemed them from the hand of the enemy" (Ps 106:10).
	Colouration	"Words which constitute a single phrase in ordinary language are split apart" ( p. 112)	"They vexed Moses in the camp. / [They vexed] Aaron, the holy one of YHWH" (Ps 106:16).
Line-Level Tropes	Matching	"Lines match... if their syntactic structures are identical" (p. 119).	"They learned their customs. / They worshipped their idols" (Ps 106:35).
	Gapping	"Ellipses which obscure the structure of one of the clauses involved" (p. 126)	"They vexed Moses in the camp / and [they vexed] Aaron, the holy one of YHWH" (Ps 106:16).
Supralinear-Level Tropes	Dependency	One line is syntactically dependent on another.	"He stood in the breach before him / to turn his anger from destruction" (Ps 106:23).
	Mixing	"Involves two dependent and two independent lines which occur in sequence, in which both dependent lines depend on both independent clauses" (p. 132)	"Save us, YHWH our God, / Gather us from the nations, / to praise your holy name, / to laud you for your triumphs" (Ps 106:47).

Key Arguments

Argument

[Hebrew verse structure]: Hebrew verse is structured according to a syntactic constraint and a system of tropes.
 + <1225 lines>: "The proposed description is adequate for a diverse corpus of 1225 lines" (p. 5).
 + <Analogy>: The poetic systems of some other languages are similarly structured.

Key Evidence

• "1225 lines of Classical Hebrew verse" (p. 167): Genesis 49; Exodus 15; Numbers 23-24; Deuteronomy 32; 33; Judges 5; 2 Samuel 1; Habakkuk 3; Zephaniah; Psalms 78; 106; 107

---

Impact

A number of scholars have received, clarified, and refined O'Connor's work. William Holladay, for example, thinks that "O'Connor has really solved the nagging question of the analysis of the structure of Hebrew poetry," and he offers some minor suggestions for clarification and refinement. Robert Holmstedt attempts to refine O'Connor's analysis in the area of interlinear relationships, arguing that the syntactic category of "apposition" best accounts for the relationship between lines traditionally described as "parallel." Holmstedt's student, Rachel Krohn, has modified and simplified O'Connor's syntactic constraints to better account for the data: "Lines contain between 1 and 4 phonologically expressed constituents; Lines contain between 2 and 5 prosodic words."

Important ideas

• Biblical Hebrew poetry is not metrical (in the traditional phonological sense of the word).
• Biblical Hebrew poetry is language and should be described linguistically.
• The line in Biblical Hebrew poetry is defined syntactically by a matrix of syntactic constraints.

Critique

• Corpus too limited. Fokkelman points to a number of lines in the Psalter in which O'Connor's system does not appear to work. Rachel Krohn has also demonstrated that some of the constraints fail when the model is applied to other poems.
• Linguistic method not adequate. "Linguistics or the analysis of sentence structure are not the obvious disciplines to do justice to the unicity of poetry... Poetic license, and its surprising forms of expression, are matters that do not conform easily to the grids of logic and linguistics" "[O'Connor's work] is extremely good as far as linguistic theory is concerned, less so with regard to ancient Hebrew"
• Syntax alone not adequate. Emmylou Grosser argues that the line is based on all aspects of the language, not syntax alone. "The most serious problem [with Hebrew Verse Structure] is that the biblical Hebrew poetic line as a unit of verse structure cannot be accounted for based on syntactic features alone." Pardee has noted that "O'Connor's system has nothing to say about the phonetic structure of Hebrew poetry."
• Not enough attention to line groupings. "O’Connor’s system focuses on the line at the expense of the whole line-grouping (Geller 1982: 71; Pardee 1983: 301). While O’Connor is correct in motivating the line as the basic unit of biblical Hebrew poetry, the biblical line does not exist—or in any sense possess poetic verse structure—apart from relationships to other lines. That is, we cannot proceed by first and independently establishing the line according to constraints, and by subsequently analyzing the tropes. This method does not fit the nature of biblical poetry, in which single lines are the exception (which still require a context in order to be perceived as lines) and line-groupings are the norm."
• Not of practical help for lineation. "I am told that a single colon can contain zero, one, two, or three predicates. What does this mean? This message is tantamount to saying: anything goes. It is the loosest formulation possible, with the paradoxical result of being almost completely devoid of meaning... For actual cola the matrix has next to zero predictive or prescriptive power."