2.2 Job as Hebrew Poetry

• The Place of Poetry

  What is the purpose of poetry? Is it merely, as that English teacher thought, a civilized, greeting card sort of endeavor? Something gentlemen in white suits might engage in while sipping ice tea on a porch swing? Consider for a moment that much of music industry is putting rhyming words on a page with percussion accompaniment, and that adolescents (and adults) by the millions are buying this poetry and listening to it on their walkman for hours on end. If radio changed popular culture by bringing music to "everyman", then the walkman has enabled the message in that music to become the ever present subliminal thought life of millions. Poetry has impact.
  
  Poetry is coupled often with music, perhaps because they speak the same language, the language of the heart. David's Psalms, beautiful examples of Hebrew poetry, were thought to be accompanied with music at one time. Yet even without the music, the passion, the wide range of emotions can rarely be equalled in any other part of the Bible. Whenever more than intellectual interest is important, we find poetry surfacing as a potent method of communicating emotional and subjective truth. Examples can be found sprinkled through nearly every book of the Bible: Miriam's song of victory in the Pentateuch, Paul's paeans of praise interrupting his Epistles, Jeremiah's lament of the rape of Jerusalem, the many prophetic pleas, Jesus' beatitudes, John's song of the cherubim, and the list goes on.
  
  Why is poetry so ubiquitous in the Bible? Isn't it dangerous to allow such a subjective literary style to convey the unalterable truths of God's word? What if someone took literally the poetic imagery, or took the literal truths poetically? Doesn't this sort of thing introduce dangerous ambiguity into the presentation of the truth (such as the length of the days in God's creation of the world)? Surely no one has endeavored to write a systematic theology textbook in rhyming verse, so why should the Bible?
  
  If I might rephrase this question to be: what is the relationship between poetry and truth? I think the whole issue is a problem of modern thought. Theology used to be queen of the sciences, but Immanuel Kant separated the two by an impassable gulf. Science, the rational mind, the factual truth on one side, and theology, the emotions, the irrational heart on the other. We have come to believe that all truth is somehow like history facts or Newton's laws; composed of unalterable syllogisms of deductive logic and rational premises. When someone asks us "what are your true feelings?", we grope as if in the dark, cross-examining every emotion for traces of genuine fact. We are confused by this divide that did not exist in the ancient mind, that could believe with the whole heart, that could weave emotions into the truth. When King David was confronted by Nathan of his sin in killing Uriah, Nathan used a tear-jerker story of a poor man and his lamb to make the point with the king. Emotions were an invaluable aid or even necessary in comprehending the truth. When Timothy McVeigh was on trial for premeditated manslaughter, the prosecution used exactly the same technique. Why? Because emotions can cloud the intellect? No, on the contrary, emotions are an important part of the truth. If I say to my children, "I love you" with gritted teeth and fearsome demeanor, will they grow up with self-confidence? No, because "the truth" removed from proper emotion no longer is "the truth".
  
  My own personal revelation came while meditating on the words of Jesus, when he said "I am the way, the truth and the life". I could not grasp how he could equate an abstract, hard, empirical, rational fact with an emotional, subjective persona. Suddenly it hit me, the truth was a person. And people have emotions, feelings, personality, and character. The truth might even be inexpressible without all of this emotional "baggage", the truth might require a subjective response in order to be objectively real, much as Quantum Mechanics requires an observer for an object to be realized. The truth could no more be owned or manipulated than a human being could be owned and manipulated. The truth is a person.
  
  In the light of this revelation, the writer of Job is using poetry to convey all that is important and crucial, all that is true, all that is essentially lost in the history sections; the subjective response of the reader. The Cliff Notes version of Job is no longer true, the Bible notes summary is no longer true, because it misses the human, the subjective, the emotion packed replies of Job. It is my view that the poetry of Job was a necessity, not an embellishment; that the subject material required a poetic treatment. Therefore if the poetry of Job was necessary in communicating his message, let us consider carefully the characteristics of Hebrew poetry.
  
  

• Hebrew Poetry

  Before we discuss Hebrew Poetry, we should ask what are the distinguishing characteristics of English Poetry. The most obvious characteristic is rhyme, as is evident in the opening paragraph. However there have been famous poets who disdained rhyming, John Milton, for example. In his case he emphasized a second characteristic of poetry, rhythm. No doubt you were exposed to pedantic phrases such as "iambic pentameter" as an explanation for Milton's reputation when he couldn't rhyme his way out of a paper bag. Yet both of these defining characteristics, rhyme and rhythm, do not translate into another language easily. Perhaps that is why we don't find books such as "Great French Love Poetry" gracing our book shelves, it just isn't the same in translation.
  
  Fortunately for us then, Hebrew poetry uses neither rhyme nor rhythm in its construction, since it would be nearly impossible to translate. Why then do we call it poetry, rather than elevated prose? Because it has some peculiar characteristics not generally found in, say, the historical books; characteristics such as concrete language, allegory, metaphor, and perhaps alliteration. English poetry has many of these same "secondary" characteristics that we may overlook if we focus on the more obvious rhyming of words, simply because it is attempting the same task: speaking to the heart.
  
  Let me address a few of these characteristics, which is by no means an exhaustive list, but those that hopefully will give us some insight into the style of the book of Job.
  
  

  • Concrete vs. Abstract

    Forget rhyme. Forget rhythm. If one learns to be concrete, one can write poetry with the best of them. Take this example:
    (1)"He was unutterably sad, terribly confused, and weakened by grief". versus
    (2)"He stood silently, his forehead wrinkled, his eyes slowly filling with tears, leaning against the doorjamb with his knees gradually buckling under him."
    
    In the first sentence, I have analyzed the situation and told the reader how he should react. In the second sentence, I have merely observed the situation without analyzing it, letting the picture evoke its own emotional response. The first sentence used abstract concepts, such as "unutterably" or "weakened"; the second sentence used concrete descriptions "wrinkled" or "buckling". The secret to writing poetry is to write concretely, letting the reader participate in the discovery of the poem. No one wants to be told what to think, but everyone wants to share the excitement of a discovery. Poetry is participatory, it focusses on the feelings, on the co-discovery of truth. It is generally not analytic detached generalizations, but emotional involved particulars. That does not mean poetry can not talk about universal truths, rather it permits the reader to discover the universal truth on his own.
    
    In order to be concrete, I usually have to use more words. The particulars are important and take longer to say. I may have to be repetitive, saying the same thing in slightly different ways to make sure that my point is clear. Poetry may even appear intentionally indirect, as it attempts to make a surprise ending a real surprise for the reader. The key point is that concrete language is used to force the reader to participate, to make the story subjectively real, and not just objectively correct.
  
  
  

  • Allegory and Metaphor

    In my example above, I tried to convey the emotions of this person by indicating his facial and bodily responses. I picked an easy example, because we are all accustomed to reading emotions in others actions. But suppose I had wanted to convey a much more difficult concept, say, God's love for humans. What kind of image could I use? Would it even be appropriate to say, for example, "God's chest swelled as he patted Adam on the head"? Somehow it seems demeaning to anthropomorphize God, to make him have the gestures of a human being. Yet conveying his love seems to be the never-ending task of the prophets, the priests, and the Levites. How did they accomplish this?
    
    Moses' example is a good one because he tried just about everything he could think of to teach the people about God's love. He wrote laws. He wrote history. He wrote homeschooling texts, commanding that parents teach this to their children. He wrote litanies for the people to recite. And he wrote songs, Psalm 90 and 91. In Moses' own words he says (RSV):
    
    He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, who abides in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the LORD, "My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust." For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge;...
    
    God, feathers? What is Moses talking about? But once you have seen a mother hen, at the first sign of danger, collecting her yellow fuzz ball chicks under her wings, the image becomes crystal clear: God is protecting us who are helpless from the marauding hawks circling above. This is an analogy, or a metaphor, that uses a well-known image to convey an abstract concept. It is a miniature discovery, a small participation on the part of the reader, but nonetheless useful in poetry. The danger, of course, is that metaphors wear out quickly. What used to be a clever picture can turn into dead technical language. Who associates "ruthless" anymore with a Moabite woman? So occasionally the difficulty in reading old poetry, such as Job, is in pruning the dead metaphors to rediscover again the living sap of emotion in the words.
  
  
  

  • Alliteration, Assonance, Acrostics and other "ah" words

    Poetry, like music and songs, was meant to be heard. History, like the Congressional Record, was only meant to be read. If one actually read out loud the first 9 chapters of Chronicles, it would have great soporific effect. I can only get through them by either speed reading or decorating it with a highlighter pen. Poetry, (excluding some modern efforts such as e.e. cummings), should be read out loud. It was part of the oral tradition, handed down like melodies from generation to generation. And like music, poetry--the language of the heart--is meant to be memorized. Why else would we say that memorization is "learning by heart"?
    
    Now anyone who has had summer greek or a music/literature appreciation course, will know all about mnemonic devices. My music teacher even taught them to us (rather then letting us learn it on the street), telling us that symphonies could be easily distinguished so that if the bass line was rumbling "Beet-ho-ven Beet-ho-ven" it was clearly the 5th, whereas if the strings were saying "Mozart's in the closet, let him out, let him out, let him out" then it was undoubtedly the 40th. So it is in poetry; I never lose my place in the middle of the line, its remembering how that next line begins that was so difficult. If the writer had every line beginning with the same sound, or successive letters of the alphabet, then I can jog my memory and spill out the next line.
    
    Unfortunately, that is an aspect of poetry that doesn't translate well. I never could manage to keep more than a few of the 176 verses of Psalm 119 in my brain, though I reportedly had a relative who had memorized the whole thing in Hebrew. Privately I think its all the mnemonic devices that helped him; every 8 verses starting with a successive letter in the Hebrew alphabet. But we should neither begrudge the poetry nor the people for using these mnemonic devices, we can just be grateful that we didn't have to memorize Job to study it.
  
  
  

  • Hebrew Parallelism

    The most obvious trait of Hebrew poetry, and one that appears to our western eyes as a distracting habit, is the tendency for the author to repeat himself, to say everything twice. Once is okay, twice is forgivable, but three times is downright annoying. In my youth I decided to accomplish the Christian equivalent of a pilgrimmage to Mecca, I would read the Bible cover to cover. Somewhere between Job and Isaiah I can remember fading rapidly, reading every other verse to relieve the monotony. Why, I wondered, does the Bible have to be so boring? Can't they say what they mean the first time?
    
    The answer, I hope, is obvious; I wasn't reading it out loud. Hebrew parallelism is designed to be concrete, to be mnemonic, to enhance a metaphor, it was meant to be memorized. How many times have you forgotten a line in a song but remembered the rhyme at the end? "Roses are red, violets are blue, uh mm mm mm, and so are you." I really have no idea what was in the third line of the original, but we were awfully creative in grade school. In the same way, Hebrew parallelism was as ubiquitous as English rhyme, and came to be the defining characteristic of Hebrew poetry.
    
    This was providential, because several thousand years separate us from the author, and many words have lost their meaning in the intervening millennia. But due to Hebrew parallelism, we can often reconstruct the flow, depending on that valuable repetition to lead us over the river of ignorance. If you get out a KJV and compare it with a recent translation of Job, you will find many examples of KJV translators applying what my Latin teacher called, "creative translation". Fortunately in the 4 centuries since the KJV, we have uncovered many ancient documents that revealed the meaning of some of these obscure words, so by all means obtain a modern translation of Job before undertaking this study.
  
  
  

• Summary

  Thus poetry is written in a way to convey feelings, not by summarizing them for our quick perusal, but by forcing us to relive them, to participate in the rediscovery of the subjective, emotional truth. This form of discovery was meant to be heard, to be recited, to be memorized. So in addition to concrete language and metaphor, it used mnemonics, gimmicks to jog the memory and keep the story flowing. These tricks of parallelism and acrostics are really no different than our English rhyme, and in contrast to English poetry, manage to survive 3000 years of translation in language and time.
  

Copyright © 1997 Rob Sheldon