Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques

by Wilfred G. E. Watson

Publisher:

JSOT Press

, 1986

Overview

In spite of debatable issues, such as meter, we now know enough about classical Hebrew poetry to be able to understand how it was composed. This large-scale manual, rich in detail, exegesis, and bibliography, provides guidelines for the analysis and appreciation of Hebrew verse. Topics include oral poetry, meter, parallelism, and forms of the strophe and stanza. Sound patterns and imagery are also discussed. A lengthy chapter sets out a whole range of other poetic devices and the book closes with a set of worked examples of Hebrew poetry. Throughout, other ancient Semitic verse has been used for comparison and the principles of modern literary criticism have been applied.

In the Logos edition of Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques, you get easy access to Scripture texts and to a wealth of other resources in your digital library. Hovering over Scripture references links you instantly to the verse you’re looking for, and with Passage Guides, Word Studies, and a wealth of other tools from Logos, you can delve into God’s Word like never before!

Key Features

• Foreword by the author
• Bibliographical references and indexes

Contents

Top Highlights

“‘The difference between verse and prose or speech is not that verse has rhythm and prose and speech have not, but that in verse a rhythmical unit, the line, is superimposed upon the grammatical unit of all discourse, the sentence.” (Page 46)

“The larger units such as poems or stanzas are composed of strophes, and the strophes in their turn are made up of one or more cola. The cola consist of even smaller units. Accordingly, a poem can be considered as a set of components forming larger and larger complexes which ultimately combine to form a single unified structure: the poem.” (Page 11)

“By definition a monocolon or ‘isolated line’ is a single colon which does not closely cohere with another colon in the same sub-section of a poem.” (Page 168)

“After identifying a poetic device, therefore, its function has to be determined” (Page 31)

“Envelope figure. The envelope figure (or inclusio) is not only indicative of poetry (though it can occur in prose), it also marks off a particular segment as verse.” (Page 52)

Product Details

• Title: Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques
• Author: Wilfred G. E. Watson
• Publisher: T & T Clark
• Publication Date: 2004
• Pages: 496

About Wilfred G. E. Watson

Wilfred G. E. Watson teaches in the department of religious studies at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.