Overview

"For more than 250 years, biblical Hebrew poetry scholarship has been dominated by metrical assumptions and the idea of parallelism. While a consensus is emerging that biblical poetry is not metrical, no consensus has arisen regarding what parallelism is, or what makes biblical poetry ""verse"" or ""poetry"" in the absence of meter, graphical lineation, and end-marking of lines.Unparalleled Poetry claims that a new paradigm for biblical poetry is needed, a paradigm that is disentangled from parallelism as well as meter. Drawing from the Cognitive Poetics work of Reuven Tsur, Emmylou Grosser reorients the discussion of biblical poetic structure to how poetic structure can be heard and perceived. She argues that the line-units of biblical poetry emerge in the cognitive experience of the listener/reader and provides an account of the free-rhythm versification system of biblical poetry.Grosser's cognitive approach to biblical poetry accounts for the wide diversity of lines and poems in the Bible and illuminates both the structures of biblical poetry and the artistry of potential effects. Unparalleled Poetry presents a rewarding new paradigm for readers of the Bible, while modeling new possibilities for the study of nonmetrical poetries and phenomena called ""parallelism"" throughout the world."

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9780190902360

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"What are the distinctive features of a biblical Hebrew poem? In the centuries since Robert Lowth's pioneering work, scholars have explored every conceivable aspect of parallelism. Others have tried to describe the essence of Hebrew poetry through various counted constraints, whether they be stresses, or syllables, or grammatical slots in a clause. Still others stress the importance of the cantillation marks and allow them to be the guide to interpreting biblical poetry. But for all that effort, it still seems that we are missing something fundamental. In this book, Emmylou Grosser provides a new and groundbreaking model for describing the genius of Hebrew poetry and for interpreting individual texts. The cognitive poetics approach she advocates is a major insight and provides a powerful tool for the analysis of the poems of the Bible."" * Duane A. Garrett, Professor of Old Testament, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary *"

What are the distinctive features of a biblical Hebrew poem? In the centuries since Robert Lowth's pioneering work, scholars have explored every conceivable aspect of parallelism. Others have tried to describe the essence of Hebrew poetry through various counted constraints, whether they be stresses, or syllables, or grammatical slots in a clause. Still others stress the importance of the cantillation marks and allow them to be the guide to interpreting biblical poetry. But for all that effort, it still seems that we are missing something fundamental. In this book, Emmylou Grosser provides a new and groundbreaking model for describing the genius of Hebrew poetry and for interpreting individual texts. The cognitive poetics approach she advocates is a major insight and provides a powerful tool for the analysis of the poems of the Bible. * Duane A. Garrett, Professor of Old Testament, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary *

Author Information

Emmylou J. Grosser, PhD, is a Research Fellow for the Department of Hebrew, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. Her research interests include the language and literature of the Hebrew Bible and interdisciplinary approaches to biblical poetry.

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