From Line to Story in Biblical Verse

Abstract

Perhaps the greatest peculiarity of biblical poetry among the literatures of the ancient Mediterranean world is its seeming avoidance of narrative. The Hebrew writers used verse for celebratory song, dirge, oracle, oratory, prophecy, reflective and didactic argument, liturgy, and often as a heightening or summarizing inset in the prose narratives - but only marginally and minimally to tell a tale. This absence of narrative is all the more striking against the background of the surrounding and antecedent literatures of the ancient Near East that have been uncovered by archeological research. To cite the most apposite example, the literature of the city of Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Syria, written around 1300 B.C.E. in a language closely cognate to biblical Hebrew and according to the same general conventions of poetic parallelism, includes long verse narratives that have recognizably features: In an interplay of narration and dialogue, the formal burden of the poetry is the telling of a traditional tale; and the narrative tempo is leisurely enough to allow for detailed descriptions of feasts, hand-to-hand combat, even to some degree of the physical appearance of the actors, human and (for the most part) divine. There is nothing like this in the Hebrew Bible, and supposedly epic elements like the historical psalms (Ps. 78, 105, 106) are actually exceptions that confirm the rule, for they turn out to be versified summaries or catechistic rehearsals of Israelite history, with no narrative realization of the events invoked, their intelligibility dependent on the audience's detailed knowledge of the events. And even the rare biblical poems that have explicit narrative segments, like the Song of the Reed Sea and the Song of Deborah, are not, strictly speaking, narrative poems, because they lack the defining feature of independent narrative - exposition - and instead respond to an event or set of events presumably already known to