Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible: At the Interface of Prosody and Structural Analysis . Volume Two: 85 Psalms and Job 4-14 (review)

Abstract

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCIII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2003) 653-660 J. P. Fokkelman. Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible: At the Interface of Prosody and Structural Analysis. Volume Two: 85 Psalms and Job 4-14. Studia Semitica Neerlandica 41. Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000. Pp. vii + 550. Fokkelman opens Chapter 1 with a statement on prosody: "Prosody is about the pains a poet takes about proportions. And proportions is the thing for which the poet has developed a special sense, at all levels of the text" (p. 9). Thus, according to Fokkelman, the one who assumes the task of interpreting poetry takes on the task of studying the "proportions" of poetry and striving for precision to the smallest detail. Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible, vol. 2 is exactly that. It is a monumental undertaking. Fokkelman , through a method of detailed and meticulous counting of the syllables of words, cola, and strophes, presents a prosodie and structural analysis of eighty-five psalms and eleven chapters of the Book of Job. He describes his approach: ". . . to present a short description for every poem, by way of accounting for three manifestations and levels of prosody: syllable totals, colometric division, and structure or composition of the poem as a whole" (pp. 42-43). He says he will not give interpretations of the texts: "I am aiming at a compact description, and renounce my ambition to provide text interpretations. I will have to limit myself and will concentrate on prosody and its various levels" (p. 43). The book has three chapters. Chapter 1, "Syllables, Colometrics, and Structural Analysis," gives an overview of Fokkelman's theory and method, and the problems inherent in counting pre-Masoretic syllables and determining the boundaries of cola. It explains how syllable counting can reveal the structure of the poem. Chapter 2, "A Structural and Prosodie Description of 85 Psalms (83 poems)," is a 270-page analysis of chosen psalms. The psalms are given classifications according to those whose average is a round number, without any change in the BHS text, those whose average is a round number "after the text has undergone a minimal correction in the Massoretic tradition" (p. 48), those with a round average after slight changes were made based on linguistic, structural, or poetic grounds, and those that do not have a round number of syllables per colon. A round number is the number of syllables divided by the number of cola, which come to an average without decimals or fractions. Chapter 3 performs a similar type of analysis of the poems of Job 4-14. There are three appendices. The first and major appendix presents a comprehensive compilation of the syllable count for each word, colon, verse, strophe, stanza, section, and poem, and the average number of syllables per colon. As the student of Homer's epics needs to be aware of dactylic hexameter and the reader of Shakespeare's sonnets iambic pentameter, so too, 654THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW Fokkelman says, must the student of Biblical Hebrew poetry be aware of its prosodie pattern. However, Fokkelman works from the premise that the poem's prosodie pattern does not lie in its meter, but that syllable counts were used as a structural device: "The poets of the Psalms and Job counted their syllables. They did not put the totals (or words, cola, verses, and strophes) at the service of metrics, but rather used these structurally, in interaction with the construction of the poem, so that the figures often form patterns at the levels of colon, verse, and strophe, and sometimes even at the level of the poem as a whole" (p. 383). It is not by coincidence, the author claims, that when one counts the syllables in the poems of the psalms and divides them by the number of cola, one comes up with averages of seven, eight, or nine syllables. The figures are not always round numbers. Some are averages with decimal points. However, Fokkelman has found that more than half the psalms have an exact integer. About half of this group has 8.00 as the norm; the other half has either 7.00 or 9.00. The norm for Job is...