On Biblical Poetry by F. W Dobbs-Allsopp

Abstract

R&L 51.1 (Spring 2019) 195 BOOK REVIEWS On Biblical Poetry F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp Oxford University Press, 2015. xxii + 575 pp. $74 cloth. There is a relatively small canon of classic texts on the literary study of biblical poetry. This canon takes up roughly a third of a bookshelf, containing one series of lectures from the mid-eighteenth century and four or five monographs published in the early 1980s. The dependence of the latter texts on the ideas established by the former exhibits the remarkable power and lasting influence of a critical idiom built largely on a single word. That word— “parallelism”—was introduced more than two hundred years ago when Bishop Robert Lowth used it to name a certain correspondence between adjacent lines of Hebrew verse, and thus to identify as “poetry” texts that had no apparent meter. Even as Lowth himself admitted that there was more to this literary tradition than parallelism, his account of this stylistic convention unwittingly set the term(s) for the critical study of biblical poetry for centuries. While parallelism remains “the best known and best understood feature of biblical Hebrew verse,” F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp claims in his new book On Biblical Poetry that it is by no means exhaustive of the style or substance of this literary tradition (3). In his excellent addition to this critical canon, Dobbs-Allsopp offers a new and expansive vocabulary for the study of biblical poetry—one that makes a promising move to extend critical engagement with this literature beyond the constraints of the term “parallelism” and the confines of its current disciplinary home in biblical studies. The ambitious title and hefty size of this text is, for once, a good measure of what you will find inside. The book is rigorous and wide-ranging. It marshals extensive historical research and comparative analysis, offering studies of the evolution of lineation in the Bible’s manuscript traditions in one moment and in the next, a close study of one stylistic feature of biblical Religion & Literature 196 verse, clarified by comparison to an analogous element in another poetic tradition (from the style of Ugaritic epic to the rhythms of Old English verse to the syntactic patterns of the Yupik Eskimo). By formulating the language of this comparative, conversational inquiry in terms that will be familiar not only to biblical scholars but to scholars of literature and poetry as well, Dobbs-Allsopp makes a compelling bid for biblical poetry to follow biblical narrative and take its own place in the canon of comparative literatures. The book is divided into five chapters. Each of the first four advances a critical term for the study of biblical poetry (line, rhythm, lyric, and orality), while the fifth puts this new critical idiom to work, offering an interpretation of the brief poem found in Psalm 133. In Chapter 1, Dobbs-Allsopp makes a case that the poetic line (rather than the parallelistic line-pair) constitutes the “prosodic motor and defining feature of biblical verse” (20). Reframing this poetic line not as a matter of graphic representation but as a structure that was originally vocalized, Dobbs-Allsopp explores the ways in which stylistic features like parallelism served this oral tradition by magnifying the singularity of the poetic line in the absence of visual representation—individuating and emphasizing that line as “the fulcrum of its play” (93). Chapter 2 lends new conceptual clarity to the absence of meter in biblical poetry, construing this absence not as a deficiency, but as evidence of the Bible’s participation in a poetic tradition associated with the rhythms of modern writers like Walt Whitman—a tradition we would now call “free verse.” Chapter 3 considers the predominance of “lyric” poetry in the biblical canon—exploring how, in the absence of plot, lyric exploits language, syntax, and rhythm beyond their normal capacities as an “alternative means for organizing its discourse, for demarcating boundaries, for guiding auditors through to a satisfying denouement” (191). Chapter 4 addresses the interpretive missteps that arise as a consequence of the “hyper-literate orientation” of modern readers by taking a closer look at the “informing orality” of biblical poetics. Here, Dobbs-Allsopp clarifies that many of the stylistic...