Divine-Prophetic Discourse in Biblical and Quranic Texts: A Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

This paper attempts to identify the stylistic aspects of the language utilized in Divine-Prophetic discourse in Biblical and Quranic texts. The most common stylistic method utilized in religious texts is the employment of different figures of speech.  Precisely, this work sets itself the task of answering the following question: what are the most prevalent stylistic devices implemented in this kind of discourse? Accordingly, the study aims at identifying the most common stylistic devices employed in Divine-Prophetic discourse and finding the interdifferences between Biblical and Quranic texts in this respect. It is hypothesized that Divine-Prophetic discourse utilizes certain stylistic techniques such as parallelism, repetition, alliteration, rhyme, simile, and metaphor. In order to achieve the aims of this paper and test its hypothesis, Leech and Short's (2007) categorization of figures of speech is utilized for the analysis of the data under scrutiny. Besides, a statistical method represented by the percentage equation is utilized for calculating the findings of analysis. The analysis is conducted on three Biblical texts taken from different books of the Old Testament and three Quranic texts taken from different suras of the Glorious Quran. Findings of the analysis reveal that the above hypothesis has been partially validated in the Biblical texts in that parallelism, repetition, alliteration, and simile have been widely implemented in these texts whereas rhyme and metaphor are not used at all. The same hypothesis, however, has been fully validated in the Quranic texts.