Religious booknotes

...the second line thus intensifies the first...

...Actually, Alter restricts his observations to semantic parallelism, since stress and syntax cannot readily be reproduced in translation...

...Modern biblical scholarship, it seems, has not lent itself well to the devotional reading of the Bible...

...In other words, he wants to reinstate traditional ways of reading the biblical text, yet without falling into the trap of Jewish orthodoxy or Protestant fundamentalism...

...On the whole, the nascent taxonomy of parallelism provided by Alter is convincing and certainly illuminating...

...If we ask Professor Alter where in all creation he finds sensible observations on Hebrew narrative and poetry, he responds candidly: in the midrashim and in traditional Hebrew commentaries from late antiquity to the Renaissance...

...The author vigorously opposes the widely accepted notion of synonymous parallelism: the first two lines of Psalm 24 are not, strictly speaking, identical in meaning, according to Alter: "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof/the world and those who dwell therein...

...It is a pity that this book, like the earlier one on Hebrew narrative, is marked by what seems to me an excessively critical attitude towards biblical scholarship...

...It is clear to me that much of this criticism, if not wholly merited, is painfully close to the mark...

...At the same time, I may innocently observe that much that passes for literary criticism is not notably better than what passes for biblical criticism...

...This failure is the result of not having developed as a discipline: it did not emerge from lower criticism, but "dug itself into a still lower, or sub-basement, criticism in which disintegrating the text became an end in itself...

...Narrative, Alter states, was "discovered" by biblical scholars barely a decade ago as a subject for investigation...

...through movement from the literal to the figurative (your lot/one purse...

...I detect two impulses at work: one is the proclivity to contradict, as frequently as possible, every proposal to emend or partition the traditional Massoretic text, yet without becoming programmatic in its defense...

...darkness" > "gloom...

...No one item dominates to the exclusion of others, and the elements occur in a variety of configurations...

...Bible scholars are not as adept at "literary'' literary criticism as they ought to be...

...Commonweal: 620...

...Frye is blunt: Critical biblical scholarship is of no use because it does not furnish a guide on how to read the Bible...

...This is but one example of several types of dynamic movement Alter finds in Hebrew verse...

...He elects to call the unit of poetry the "verset," with Hrushovski, in part because traditional terms like hemistich and colon (plural: cola) carry wrong overtones...

...while there is a vast literature on biblical poetry going back nearly two centuries, unfortunately, "most of what has been written is...

...Alter is no less scathing...

...The other is a streak of piety: in both books Alter hopes his way of reading the Bible will allow the "values and moral vision" of the Bible to break through...

...Space prohibits the elaboration of the larger structures he describes in the Book of Job, of his acute observations on aphorisms and proverbs (one-liners like '' Spare the rod and spoil the child''), and of the differences he develops between prophetic poetry and prose, on the one hand, and between prophetic poetry and poetry elsewhere, on the other...

...Yet Alter is not alone in his vituperations...

...As Alter says, we have been preoccupied with seminars on law in the ancient Near East and with decorated pottery in the Late Bronze Age...

...the kind of literary criticism they have practiced since the middle of the nineteenth century is historical: who wrote what, when, and where, and for what reasons...

...A verset is a half-line in the case of dyadic parallelism, a thirdline in triadic parallelism...

...But parallelism of meaning is quite adequate to his purposes in most instances...

...In The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter writes frequently about the "dim" wits that biblical scholars are and suggests that they are like students who are laboring to learn a foreign language (in trying to master literary criticism), "whose accents and intonations they have not yet gotten right...

...That is what has made it difficult for scholars to come to a clear understanding of Hebrew verse over the last two centuries...

...Put more generally, both Alter and Frye charge that Bible scholars have dismembered the Bible line by line, tradition by tradition, source by source, redactor by redactor, until nothing is left worthy of comment: the Bible as book has been replaced by a series of unrelated fragments, a pastiche without design...

...Benjamin Hrushovski, however, has cleared away all the misconceptions and false starts in a few pages of the Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971), and Robert Alter has put those brilliant insights to work in his review of verse in Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, and the Prophets, as well as in scattered other occurrences in the Hebrew Bible...

...Northrop Frye (The Great Code) and, to a lesser extent, Frank Kermode (The Genesis of Secrecy) are also down on biblical scholars...

...Like the earlier volume, it is a wellcrafted work, a delight to read...

...darkness,/for effulgence, and in gloom we go./We grope like blind men a wall,/like the eyeless we grope...

...by replacing a verb with a noun or adjective...

...Rather, Alter argues in a series of persuasive examples, there is normally a dynamic movement from one half-line to the next, as in this pair of lines from Isaiah 59:9-10: "We hope for light and behold...

...Robert W. Funk ROBERT ALTER has written a new book on Hebrew poetry as a sequel to his The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981...

...There is more to this exchange of insults than appears immediately on the surface...

...As a result its essential discoveries were made quite early, and were followed by a good deal of strawthrashing...

...And 1 November 1985: 619 these are to mention only a few memorable items on a much longer list...

...Hebrew verse is marked by "free rhythm," which means that it is "a cluster of changing principles," including stress, syntax, and meaning...

...Others are: a heightening or intensification takes place through focusing (cities of Judea/streets of Jerusalem...

...Could it be that part of the peeve on the part of literary critics is the result of their absence from the biblical field for a century...

...We can be certain that he has made significant progress in the analysis of Hebrew verse...

...The movement is from ordinary to more literary terms ("light" > "effulgence...

...I found myself reading and rereading sections in order to soak up the rich detail of a master at close reading, and in order to ponder the consequences of sweeping generalizations (e.g., there is virtually no epic poetry in the Hebrew Bible...

...In Alter's case at least, I should put the hostility down to a fresh outbreak of conservatism...

...misconceived" and "guided by rather dim notions of how poetry works...

...and by many other such deCommonweal: 618 vices...