Psalms and Lyric Verse

21 The Psalms and Lyric Verse F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp My ambition here is to begin thinking Hebrew poetry through from the lyric point of view out. The proposition I press in what follows is somewhat more specific, namely, the view that the manner of verse underlying most psalms may be usefully and even accurately described as lyric, a notion, in fact, already articulated during the eighteenth century by Sir Robert Lowth1 and again at the end of the nineteenth century by S. R. Driver.2 I operate with an (ideal) discourse continuum in mind. It is composed of narrative at one extreme and lyric at the other, with much mixing in between. This is obviously but one way to look at literature, focusing on one set of variables; it is not intended to be a comprehensive interpretive strategy. I find warrant for such an approach both in contemporary literary theory and criticism and especially in the prose/poetry dichotomy that pervades Hebrew literature and breaks down mostly along a narrative/nonnarrative divide. Much depends on what is meant by the term “lyric,” which, at least in critical vocabulary, is notoriously “elusive of definition.”3 I deploy the term 1. R. Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory, 3rd ed. (London: Tegg & Sons, 1835), pp. 278-315. 2. S. R. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1897; Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 359-391. 3. D. Lindley, Lyric (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 1. It is a distinct honor and pleasure to offer the following essay in celebration of the life, work, and thought of J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, a man whom I am most privileged to call my friend. I hope he may perceive in my own efforts here something of his commitment to a truly interdisciplinary discourse (the only way in which I believe that humanists can actually work) and a shared interest in human rationality. But above all it is Wentzel’s generosity of spirit that I want most to emulate in my writing and in my person. A toast to Wentzel! L4Fayyîm! 344 358 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:40 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse primarily as a modal designation, what G. Genette calls a “mode of enunciation.”4 His notion is rooted in Aristotle (and ultimately Plato), who famously distinguishes between epic and drama — lyric as a nonmimetic kind of verse is apparently nowhere in view in the Poetics — by focusing on the “what” and the “how” and even the “in what” of imitation, with the “manner of imitation” (the “how?”) being critical: epic tells through pure or mixed (i.e., involving dialogue between characters) narration, and drama presents “all [the] characters as living and moving before us” (as on stage; Poetics 1448a).5 In linguistic terms, mode is chiefly a question of pragmatics, the “what” and the “how” of language use — though its literary purview extends beyond the purely linguistic. On such a construal, lyric distinguishes modally, phenomenologically, pragmatically (if you will) the various nonrepresentational, nonnarrative, nondramatic types of poetry. This is the sense of the term implicit in the (partly arbitrary) threefold distinction between lyric, epic, and drama that has been at the heart of literary criticism in the West for much of its history.6 Such an understanding of “lyric” dates at least as far back as the Alexandrians and corresponds roughly, on the one hand, to how contemporary classicists wield the term as a catch-all phrase “covering more or less all the Greek poetry of the centuries down to 350 bc apart from epic, didactic, and other verse composed in hexameters, and drama,”7 and, on the other hand, to the sense the term has in much contemporary theoretical and critical discussion, where it has become more or less synonymous with the term “poetry” — or, perhaps more accurately, it is taken as the prototype of a poem.8 “Lyric” may be construed more narrowly as well, as a more specific genre 4. G. Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. J. E. Lewin (Berkeley: University of California, 1979), p. 61. 5. Genette, Architext, p. 11; his initial discussions of Plato and Aristotle are on pp. 8-9 and pp. 10-14 respectively. 6. Tracing and demystifying the history of this three-way distinction in Western literary criticism is the project of Genette’s Architext. 7. M. L. West, Greek Lyric Poetry, World Classics (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. vii; cf. E. Bowie, “Lyric and Elegiac Poetry,” in The Oxford History of the Classical World, ed. J. Boardman et al. (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 99-100; H. Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, trans. M. Hadas and J. Willis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 133 n. 4. 8. Cf. Lindley, Lyric, p. 22. So, for example, J. Culler glosses “poetic” with “lyric” in his own discussion of the three overarching modes or genres (Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], p. 69). But more to the point, lyric is simply assumed to be the prototype of poetry in most critical discussions today (a holdover from the Romantic era and from New Criticism?). 345 359 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:40 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp designation.9 The features that are isolated in this usage, as D. Lindley well notes, are “profoundly affected by fluctuation in systems of classification and poetic practice through history”10 — and, one might add, from tradition to tradition. So, in discussing early Greek lyric, for example, to accentuate the sung quality of most of this verse makes good sense in light of scholars’ knowledge about the composition of these poems — to be accompanied by the lyre, aulos, or other instruments — and the kinds of contexts in which they were routinely performed. But when it comes to a poet like Horace, who never sang his verse, the literal use of music ceases to be a meaningful genre criteria. An awareness of such historical variation has two consequences worth underscoring. First, whatever the extent of lyric verse in the Psalms, and elsewhere in the Bible, it will inevitably be shaped and marked by the particularity of its time, place, and the larger literary tradition of which it is a part. That is, I have no investment in (and see no benefit to) uncovering specific kinds of lyric verse in the Bible, whether they be Romantic, modernist, or even early Greek. Other bodies and traditions of lyric verse are, of course, crucial to the kind of study being conducted here, but principally as a means for gauging the possibilities and varieties of lyric discourse as a backdrop for a better appreciation of the kind of lyric found in the Bible. To press my point, consider the symposium, one of the primary contexts in which Greek monody was performed. This is an especially Greek cultural institution with nothing quite like it in ancient Israel, and thus on this basis alone one can expect both qualitative and quantitative differences in the kind of lyric verse realized in the two cultures. Second, what ultimately is counted as lyric depends importantly on the specific criteria that are privileged. Is there any hope, then, “of defining ‘lyric’ as a generic label?” asks Lindley. His answer is that it “must be tentative.” He elaborates: It must be accepted that a wide variety of determinants may properly be felt as significant in allocating a poem to a lyric category. While a “personal” poem in stanza form about the pains of love and intended to be set to music would universally be accepted as a “lyric,” it is in no sense an authoritative model. For throughout literary history there has been not only a 9. Genette also distinguishes between lyric as a mode and as a genre, though his insistence that the former is purely a matter of linguistics and that the latter involves the addition of thematic elements does not seem to me to be quite accurate. 10. Lindley, Lyric, p. 5. 346 360 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:40 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse wide range of possible subject matter, but considerable divergence in the criteria that have been felt as paramount . . . , so that all decisions about a work’s generic status must be conditioned by an awareness of that history. It is also inevitable that many poems might hover on the edges, and to pretend to a certainty that can judge infallibly between a lyrical narrative or a narrative lyric [for example] . . . , would be to misunderstand the way readers actually use (or are used by) their generic awareness and the way poets play with and upon generic expectations.11 Both of these senses of lyric — the modal and the generic — factor in my discussion, though keeping straight what distinguishes the two is crucial to the kinds of claims I make about psalms as lyric. So, for example, while there surely are psalms that were composed to be literally sung, and thus would satisfy even the narrowest definition of a lyric poem, so, too, are there psalms where such a designation seems less felicitous. My aim here is not to be reductionist or to reify classificatory schemes for their own sake; nor even is it critical that all psalms fit one or another of my senses of lyric. As C. Guillén rightly observes, “there are no pure forms”;12 and in any case, the lyric’s “differences from other literary products are not radical,” as S. Langer writes, “and there is no device characteristic of lyric composition that may not also be met in other forms.”13 The chief outcome sought in the review of the several lyric practices and tendencies that follows is finally to sharpen and extend our understanding of the inner workings of psalmic verse. That is, I pursue this particular line of inquiry pragmatically and heuristically, which is to say, 11. Lindley, Lyric, p. 22. 12. C. Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. C. Franzen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 142. 13. S. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribner, 1953), p. 259. And similarly, D. Levertov remarks that lyric verse is constructed out of the everyday language of normal discourse — idle chat, news briefs, dinner table conversation (The Poet in the World [New York: New Directions, 1973], p. 87). The term “lyric” itself is not unproblematic, as demonstrated in my own attempt to disentangle at least two ways in which it might signify. Genette, too, comments on the unhappiness of this term. He notes well how “terminology” itself “reflects and aggravates the theoretical confusion. To set beside drama . . . and epic . . . we can offer [in English] . . . only the limp lyric poem” (Architext, p. 68 n. 74). That is, it is admittedly hard to hear the term “lyric” without the ghost of its ancient Greek usage coming to mind, even though the vast majority of nonnarrative, nondramatic verse before and since does not answer to such a narrow definition of lyric, and the problem is only acerbated when the term is applied to the distinctly non-Greek world of the ancient Near East. Still, as Genette observes, there is no obvious terminological alternative. So my endeavor in what follows is to illuminate the phenomenon that stands behind the term “lyric,” with the hope that the term itself will not prove too distractive. 347 361 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:40 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp in full awareness that the attraction of my thesis lies ultimately in its usefulness for reading these poems and for making sense of their prosody. To make such judgments obviously will require a more sustained effort than can be accomplished here. For the moment, then, it will be enough to (re)introduce the notion of “lyric” (in its several senses) as a critical idiom and along the way point to some of the potential payoffs that its use holds for our criticism and interpretation of psalmic poetry.14 Nonnarrative and Nondramatic Poetry One way to begin gaining a firmer fix on the lyric is, following the lead of N. Frye,15 to say what it is not: the lyric is not a narrative; or better, it is chiefly, as I have already said, a nonnarrative, nondramatic, nonrepresentational kind of poetry (here accenting the modal sense of the term).16 It is the noncentrality, and indeed frequent absence, of features and practices (plot, character, and the like) that are otherwise definitive of more discursive modes of literary discourse (e.g., narrative, drama) that so distinguishes the medium of lyric verse and shapes the basic contours of its discourse. As J. Culler succinctly states, “narrative poems recount an event; lyrics . . . strive to be an event.”17 The outstanding characteristic of biblical poetry, of course, is its fundamental nonnarrativity. R. Alter puts his finger on precisely this “peculiarity”: “The Hebrew writers used verse for celebratory song, dirge, oracle, oratory, prophecy, reflective and didactic argument, liturgy, and often as a 14. The thesis that the basic medium of the psalms is of a lyric variety will not come as a surprise to most. Indeed, as noted at the outset, the notion is already very prominent early on in the work of Lowth and Driver. What I do not always perceive on the part of contemporary interpreters of the psalms is a critical awareness of the lyric as a distinct mode of discourse, and it is to this awareness, especially when our default reading strategies are so narratively oriented in this age of novels and Hollywood movies, that I would recall us. 15. N. Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. C. Hošek and P. Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 31. 16. E.g., Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 259; B. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry, Eidos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 35; M. L. Rosenthal and S. M. Gall, The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 11. J. W. Johnson, “Lyric,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 713-714; Race, “Melic,” 755; Culler, Literary Theory, p. 70. 17. Culler, Literary Theory, p. 73; cf. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure. Or, as Langer puts it, the lyric creates a “virtual history” — “the occurrence of a living thought, the sweep of an emotion, the intense experience of a mood” (Feeling and Form, p. 259). 348 362 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:40 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse heightening or summarizing inset in the prose narratives — but only marginally or minimally to tell a tale.”18 Epic verse (narrative) is well exemplified from the various surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East; but in Hebrew literature, narrative becomes predominantly the preserve of prose,19 so much so, in fact, that the two extremes on the (ideal) discourse continuum represented by lyric and narrative are often synonymous in Hebrew with the distinction between poetry (verse) and prose. Indeed, triangulating from the various uses of verse, for example, in ancient Syria, Mesopotamia, and even Greece, on the one hand, and from the (mostly perceptible) poetry/prose divide in Hebrew literature, on the other, brings the nonnarrative, nonrepresentational nature of much Hebrew verse sharply into view. So much so, in fact, that this aspiration toward something other than narrative may well be the most tractable lyric characteristic of Hebrew verse more generally. Alter dedicates his second chapter (“From Line to Story”) in The Art of Biblical Poetry to illustrating the various ways in which Hebrew poems, though “fundamentally nonnarrative” in nature, do manifest at times a noticeable narrative impulse (e.g., incipient narrativity, episodic narratives). Among the poems he considers in more detail are 2 Samuel 22 (= Psalm 18), Job 16:9-14, Joel 2, Judges 5, Exodus 15, and Proverbs 7. Two aspects of his treatment are worth underscoring here: (1) the fact that modal and genre boundaries are easily (and even commonly) transgressed,20 and (2) that in every instance the particular impulses toward narrative on display ultimately serve larger, nonnarrative ends, for example, to hymn Yahweh, to celebrate a victory, to convey moral instruction. Alter, as he himself notes, could have made many of the same points with the “historical psalms,” Psalms 78, 105, and 106.21 In the following paragraphs I take the opposite tack from Alter. Instead of charting how Hebrew poems may move toward narrative, and as a consequence gaining a better angle from which to appreciate these poems’ defining 18. R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 27; cf. Drover, Introduction, pp. 360-361. 19. For details regarding the transformation from poetic epic to prose narrative in Hebrew, see especially D. Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genres in the Growth of Biblical Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); also cf. F. M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). 20. This is a point well stressed by Genette in his discussion of modes (Architext) and is the cornerstone of most contemporary genre theorists (e.g., A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982]). 21. Accenting these psalms’ fundamental nonnarrative nature, he writes: though epic-like, “they turn out to be versified summaries or catechistic rehearsals of Israelite history, with no narrative realization of the events invoked, their intelligibility depended on the audience’s detailed knowledge of the events” (Art of Biblical Poetry, p. 27). 349 363 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:41 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp nonnarrativity, I come at the latter by considering the swerve away from narrative in Psalm 114. Psalm 114, a somewhat unusual psalmic composition, invites the narrative comparison in two broad ways. First, it explicitly uses story — the exodus from Egypt — to frame its discourse. This is accomplished immediately in the poem’s opening line: b4j3}t yikr#}3l mimmijr#yim “When Israel went forth from Egypt” (Ps. 114:1). Psalms do not generally begin in this way, and in fact the grammar itself — “the infinitive construction with concomitant subordination of the second poetic line” — is common in narrative (esp. Exod. 13:8).22 Second, almost every line reflects an awareness of Israel’s larger narrative traditions: vv. 3 and 5 recall the events at the Red Sea (Exodus 14–15) and the crossing of the Jordan (Josh. 3:1–5:1) — though in both cases as refracted mythopoetically (e.g., Isa. 51:9-11; Ps. 74:12-17; Job 38:8-11; 40:25-32; cf. Josh. 4:23); the image of mountains and hills “skipping” (r#q4dû) like rams and lambs (cf. esp. Ps. 29:6) in vv. 4 and 6 is taken from the old hymns recounting the march of the Divine Warrior from the southland (cf. Deut. 33:2; Judg. 5:4-5; Hab. 3:3-6; Ps. 68:8-9; also KAjr 15); and v. 8 draws on the wilderness traditions (Exod. 17:1-7; Num. 20:2-13). And yet, there is no narrative here. The poem does not go on to narrate the story of the exodus, or any of these other traditions. H.-J. Kraus’s observation about the narrative episodes in Psalm 106 is applicable here as well: they “are generally presumed to be familiar and therefore taken up only allusively.”23 Indeed, the poem does not appear to make good sense discursively at all. If anything it flouts good discursive logic. For example, who or what is the poem about? The topicalized entities in the first three clauses are all differently named — Israel, Jacob, Judah.24 The clauses of the second couplet (v. 2), which 22. E. S. Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part 2, and Lamentations, Forms of the Old Testament Literature 15 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 281. Cf. 1 Sam. 10:2; Ezek. 1:19, 21; 5:16; Jon. 2:8; Est. 1:5; 2:12, 15, 19; Dan. 10:15. It is very common with wayhî (e.g., Gen. 35:17, 18, 22; 38:28; Exod. 13:17; Judg. 13:20; 1 Sam. 16:6; 23:6; 1 Kings 11:15; Ezek. 10:6; Est. 2:8; Dan. 8:15). The construction without wayhî is fairly common in poetic texts (e.g., Judg. 5:2; Ps. 4:2; 9:4; 27:2; 68:15; 76:10; 105:12; 109:7; 142:4; Job 29:7; cf. CTU 1.17.V.9), evidencing something of the typical compactness of Hebrew poetry. Given the obvious creation imagery that pervades the psalm, e.g., sanctuary (v. 2), imagery drawn from the mythology of the Chaoskampf (vv. 3, 5; see S. A. Geller, “The Language of Imagery in Psalm 114,” in Lingering over Words, ed. T. Abusch et al., Harvard Semitic Studies 37 [Atlanta: Scholars, 1990], pp. 179-194, esp. 182-184), it is tempting to hear the faintest echoes of a very specific kind of story, the epic of creation, e.g., b4r3}šît b#r#} }4lZhîm “When God first created . . .” (Gen. 1:1), e-nu-ma e-liš la na-bu-u ša-ma-mu “When on high the heavens had not been created . . .” (Enuma elish I 1). 23. H.-J. Kraus, Psalms 60–150: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1989), p. 316. 24. “Disturbing is the plethora of terms referring to the nation” (Geller, “Language of Imagery,” p. 182). 350 364 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:41 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse are grammatically subordinated to those in the opening couplet, do not appear to follow any kind of story logic, or even to make literal sense: how is it that Israel’s coming out from Egypt (literally) established Judah as “his sanctuary”? And who is the grammatical antecedent for the possessive suffix here and in the next line? (The poem never explicitly says.) And then there is the hodgepodge collection of traditions reflected in the poem. These are not sequenced or otherwise developed logically. And though the Chaoskampf imagery has attracted the attention of scholars (e.g., Kraus entitles his comments on the poem, “Miracles of Subduing the Sea”),25 the poem’s climax in v. 7 (millipnê }#dôn Fûlî }#rej “Before [the] Lord, writhe, O land!”) depends most explicitly on the old theophany traditions; the “land/earth” (}erej) “shakes” (r#{#šâ) “from before Yahweh” (mipp4nê yhwh) in Judges 5:4-5 and is shaken (lit. waymZded) by Yahweh in Habakkuk 3:6, and the whole concludes (curiously) by recalling Israel’s wanderings before entering the land. Finally, the wayyiqtol form, the paradigm grammatical trope of Hebrew narrative, is used only once (wayy#nZs, v. 3), and that for local effect.26 My point (exaggerated to be sure) is that this poem does not seem very interested in telling a story (which story?), developing characters (indeed, that which most commentators take to be the poem’s chief subject, Yahweh, is never explicitly topicalized!), or even in constructing an argument. Such a presentation, as Kraus rightly notes, cannot be called “a real narration or description.”27 That is, its basic dynamics and chief practices are other than what we routinely associate with narrative; they are, I submit, expressly lyrical in orientation. To offer a fully persuasive lyric reading of this psalm would presume much of the discussion that is to follow. Still, several considerations — beyond the absence of narrative and narrativizing devices — may be offered as preliminary indicators of the psalm’s lyricism. First, there is its hymnic nature, stipulated to by most commentators (even if uneasily so).28 The hymn is a quintessential specimen of lyric dis25. Kraus, Psalms 60–150, p. 370; cf. Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part 2, p. 283. 26. Both Langer (Feeling and Form, esp. pp. 260-279) and R. A. Greene (Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991], pp. 23-62) include interesting discussions of temporality and its linguistic manifestations (e.g., tense, deixis) in lyric verse. In this sense, the presence or absence of the wayyiqtol form in Hebrew psalms (especially in standard biblical Hebrew) can be a good barometer of “narrativity.” There are clearly psalms (e.g., Psalms 105-106) whose narrative ambitions are announced by their liberal use of the wayyiqtol. 27. Kraus, Psalms 60–150, p. 371. 28. At least since Hermann Gunkel (Die Psalmen, 5th ed. (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck, 1968], p. 493). 351 365 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:41 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp course (by any definition). As Lowth observes, the hymn (or “ode”) is “sufficiently expressive” of its origin and abiding nature, “the offspring of the most vivid and the most agreeable passions of the mind — of love, joy, and admiration.”29 It enacts “an effusion of praise” to the deity, “accompanied with suitable energy and an exultation of voice.”30 The hymn of praise in the psalms is sometimes rendered self-reflexively and declaratively, as in Psalm 146:2 (“I will praise [}$hal4lâ] Yahweh as long as I live!”), but more often it is composed of a call to praise followed by a kî clause giving the reason for the praise (e.g., Psalm 117), with the expression of praise itself more a consequence of pragmatic implicature than conventional semantics.31 But the main point, captured well by Lowth, is that the content of such hymns (what they are all about, what they do) is neither argument nor description but the “effusion of praise” itself, the expressed consciousness “of the goodness, majesty, and 29. Lowth, Lectures, p. 278. 30. Lowth, Lectures, p. 279. 31. The kî clause, which prototypically initiates the second movement in Israel’s hymns of praise and thanksgiving (cf. P. D. Miller, They Cried to the Lord [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999], p. 206), grammatically and semantically gives the reason for the praise. The underlying grammar and syntax is made clear by passages such as Judges 16:24, where the Philistines “praised their god” (wayhal4lû }et-}4lZhêhem) Dagan, “because they said, ‘. . .’” (kî }#m4rû . . .), or even Ezra 3:11, where the priests and Levites sing “with praise and with thanksgiving (b4hall3l ûbhôdZt) to Yahweh because (kî) he is good, because (kî) his steadfast love endures forever over Israel” (cf. 2 Chron. 5:13). Especially since F. Crüsemann’s Studien zur Formgescichte von Hymnes und Danklied in Israel ([Wissenschaftlice Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament 32; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1969], esp. pp. 32-35), it has been customary to construe the kî clauses here as a direct quote (e.g., NRSV; cf. Miller, They Cried to the Lord, pp. 358-362). However, this is unlikely for several reasons. First, nowhere else does hll “to praise” introduce direct discourse. Second, though kî may introduce either direct or indirect discourse in biblical Hebrew (see C. L. Miller, The Representation of Speech in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: A Linguistic Analysis, Harvard Semitic Monographs 55 [Atlanta: Scholars, 1996], pp. 97-116), the presence of “transparent deixis” (Miller, Representation of Speech, p. 65) here favors the indirect construal. And in fact one of the tendencies of late biblical Hebrew is to favor indirect discourse (see M. Eskhult, “Verbal Syntax in Late Biblical Hebrew,” in Diggers at the Well, ed. T. Muraoka and J. F. Elwolde [Leiden: Brill, 2000], pp. 86, 90 and n. 31). Moreover, as P. D. Miller observes, “in the several [other] examples where there is a call to praise and those so called are explicitly told what to say, there is never . . . any use of the kî particle” (They Cried to the Lord, p. 359). But the discursive logic here is subordinated (pragmatically) to the poem’s larger lyric ambition, which is to offer praise to Yahweh. And as such, the literal reasons given for praise (the steadfast love and faithfulness of Yahweh) are at the same time — by dent of their lyric framing, as it were — themselves expressions of praise. In other words, the poet’s chief aim is not to argue a theological point (viz. the nations should praise Yahweh because his steadfast love is mighty and his faithfulness enduring) but to offer that argument as part and parcel of the poem’s expression of praise. 352 366 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:41 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse power of God.” Psalm 114, if a hymn, is a darker kind of hymn, as epitomized by the climatic call in v. 7 for the “land/earth” to “writhe [in agony]” before Yahweh.32 The precise language used here, Fûlî }#rej, though surely intended to play off (and on) the more normative calls to praise (e.g., hal4lû y#h) that typify Israelite hymns and echo throughout the Hallel sequence in particular (e.g., Pss. 111:1; 112:1; 113:1, 9; 115:18; 116:19; 117:2; cf. 69:35; 148:7),33 is drawn from the literary commonplace depicting the reaction to bad news (Isa. 13:8; Jer. 4:19; Hab. 3:10; cf. Isa. 21:3; Jer. 6:24; 50:43),34 and thus evokes sensations of fear, dread, and anguish at the prospects of the warrior deity’s immanent theophany — very much akin to the darkness that is hymned in Psalm 29.35 Second, the poem, as we have already seen, is highly fragmented, made up of bits and pieces of various traditions, and its discourse develops mostly associatively, as is typical of lyric discourse more generally (see below). The initial reference to the exodus from Egypt (v. 1) calls to mind the mythopoetic representation of that event as Yahweh’s battle over the chaos power, Sea (v. 3; cf. Exodus 15). The similar personification of the Jordan (unique to this psalm) in the following line is a consequence of the tradition’s explicit interpretation of the crossing of the Jordan in terms of the Re(e)d Sea events (Josh. 4:23; cf. Ps. 66:6).36 The reaction of Sea and River then suggests the 32. Many would emend to millipnê }#dôn kol h#}#rej based on the phrase’s resemblances to }$dôn kol h#}#rej in Joshua 3:11 and Psalm 97:5 (e.g., CMHE, p. 138 n. 91; Kraus, Psalms 60–150, p. 371; Geller, “Language of Imagery,” p. 180). However, there is no textual support for such a reading, and the Masoretic Text makes good sense, especially when the poem is read as a hymn (if the imperative is emended away, a significant basis for identifying the poem as a hymn is lost — the so-called hymnic participle in v. 8 is “hymnic” only by virtue of being in a hymn!). Besides, I suspect that the emendation is motivated by narrative assumptions about discourse continuity and logic; for example, Cross (“The hills like lambs [danced],/Before the Lord . . .”) and Kraus “Why do you [skip] . . ./O hillocks, like the lambs of the flock? — /in the presence of the Lord. . . .”) make v. 7 a prepositional phrase dependent on v. 6, while Geller construes v. 7 as the explicit answer given to the question in vv. 5-6 (“Why . . . ?/Its from the Lord. . . .”). However, Geller, at least, concedes that the Masoretic Text is construable as is — a “bold apostrophe” (“Language of Imagery,” p. 188 n. 25). 33. The Septuagint construes the concluding hal4lû y#h of Psalm 113 as belonging to Psalm 114. 34. In Jeremiah 51:29 “the land of Babylon” (}erej b#bel) is said to “writhe” (watt#FZl) at the news of Yahweh’s impending onslaught, and it is this deity’s terrible theophany that causes “the earth to writhe” (watt#F3l h#}#rej) in Psalm 97:4; cf. D. R. Hillers, “A Convention in Hebrew Literature: The Reaction to Bad News,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 77 (1965): 86-90. 35. Geller (“Language of Imagery,” pp. 187-190) also recognizes the psalm’s darker moments. 36. Esp. CMHE, pp. 138-139. 353 367 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:41 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp analogous reaction of the Mountains and Hills prevalent in the march of the Divine Warrior traditions,37 with the latter then giving way to the poem’s climatic call to “writhe!” Without plot and character the lyric, as Langer notes, “must depend most directly on pure verbal resources,”38 and thus lyric discourse is often highly troped. Wordplay (Fûlî/hal4lû, v. 7), personification (vv. 3-5, 5-6),39 “bold apostrophe” (v. 7),40 and the like must bear more of the meaning-making burden.41 Continuity and coherence are built in through lineation and rhythm; the poem is constructed out of parallelistic couplets, all of which involve gapping (ellipsis), and the foreshortened second lines that result from the gapping create a rocking rhythm that mimes the writhing and skipping that the poem imagines.42 And finally, it is often the case in lyric discourse that as much goes on behind the scenes (or under the poem’s surface), as it were, as specifically in the text. As D. Levertov observes, lyric poetry’s “way of constructing” discourse depends as much on “silences” as on the selection of specific “words.”43 Kraus explains the purpose of Psalm 114 as proclaiming “the powerful appearance of the God of Israel.”44 Such an explanation is on the right track but ultimately goes astray for failing to appreciate the poem’s figured “silences” — that which is left unstated, the represented absences. The presence of the deity that is hymned here is that which is otherwise not manifestly apparent, that which is literally absent. Nowhere in the poem is Yahweh specifically topicalized — the direct antithesis of the olden hymns to the Divine Warrior in which we 37. Gerstenberger’s (and others’) assertion that the “mountains and hills jumping like lambs . . . should be taken as an expression of joy” (Psalms, Part 2, p. 283) seems to me to ignore the significance of the biblical (and extra-biblical) literary parallels and to misread the psalm’s basic tenor. Indeed, the nature of the image in Psalm 29:6 (the only other place where the image explicitly appears in the Hebrew Bible) is unmistakable: it registers “the convulsions and travail” (CMHE, p. 152; note also the threefold use of the root Fyl in Ps. 29:8-9) that accompany the theophany of the Storm God. Similar upheavals attend the march of the Divine Warrior from the southland, too (Judg. 5:4-5; Hab. 3:3-6). In sum, the reactions of Sea and Mountains in Psalm 114 seem to me to be very much of a piece. 38. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 259. 39. Or perhaps even better, a combination of apostrophe and personification not unlike that in “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies,” cited from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (31) by T. V. F. Brogan and A. W. Halsall in “Poropopoeia,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 994. 40. Geller, “Language of Imagery,” p. 188 n. 25. 41. See Culler’s discussion of what “distinguishes the lyric from other speech acts” (Literary Theory, p. 74). 42. Cf. Geller, “Language of Imagery,” p. 181. 43. D. Levertov, Light Up the Cave (New York: New Directions, 1981), p. 60. 44. Kraus, Psalms 60–150, p. 375. 354 368 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:41 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse witness the deity march (as it were) across the surface of the poem. No antecedents for the pronominal suffixes in v. 2 are ever explicitly identified, though the referent is obvious to all. And even in the poem’s “great dénouement” the deity appears only obliquely (millipnê }#dôn . . . millipnê }4lôah),45 as if we somehow just missed the appearance itself. And this figuring of Yahweh’s presence amid apparent absence seems to be at the core of much of the poem. For example, the reader/hearer knows only too well that it is Yahweh whom personified Sea sees and recoils from in v. 3. But by withholding the explicit mention of the deity, Yahweh’s presence is marked by literal — here linguistic — absence. And similarly in vv. 5-6. The questions put to Sea and company are not really intended to taunt or ridicule,46 but again to linguistically figure the deity’s presence amid apparent absence. With this in mind, the poem’s otherwise enigmatic concluding couplet (v. 8) comes into clearer focus. It alludes to the incident at Massah and Meribah where, according to the tradition in Exodus (17:1-7, esp. v. 7), the Israelites “quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?” (NRSV). The issue there as well, then, is the presence of Yahweh whose physical manifestation was apparently in question.47 The allusion to the episode in Psalm 114:8 would thus appear to remove Yahweh one step further from the poem’s literal surface; and yet the point, nonetheless, is to (re)affirm that even at those times where the deity’s absence is most palpable Yahweh is present. And thus if I were to commit the cardinal sin of New Criticism and offer a (brief) paraphrase of this psalm, it would go something like this: Writhe in anguish, O Jacob, for Yahweh is present even in the midst of the most tangible signs of his absence. In sum, whether one agrees with every aspect of my own (abbreviated) reading of Psalm 114, I hope it is plain to see that the poem is fundamentally nonnarrative in its basic structure and orientation. Narrative, though clearly present, is subsidiary, as is common in lyric discourse. As W. R. Johnson observes, “Behind every lyric, sometimes vaguely sketched, sometimes clearly defined, is a story that explains the present moment of discourse and accounts for the singer’s present moods and for his need or choice to sing. But in lyric poems . . . the story exists for the song, and what gives the poem its form, its resonance, and its texture” is a specifically lyric kind of sensibility 45. L. C. Allen, Psalms 101–150, Word Biblical Commentary (Waco: Word, 1983), p. 105. 46. So Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part 2, p. 282. 47. The same thing would appear to be at issue in Numbers 20:2-13, though there the point is made through the failure of Moses and Aaron to follow Yahweh’s instruction literally. See the comments by E. Greenstein in The HarperCollin’s Study Bible (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 111. 355 369 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:41 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp that is made manifest in the “selection of language, sound, and image.”48 Psalm 114 is made of the stuff of narrative — quite explicitly so — but these narrative elements are molded and deployed lyrically.49 The “Most Obviously Linguistic Creation” Lyric’s typical eschewal of narrative and its attendant devices, as summarily shown in the above reading of Psalm 114, entails important consequences for the kind of discourse that it enacts. The first such consequence, and in many ways the most basic as well, is that the fundamental resource of lyric proper, “its plastic medium,” is, by default, language itself. Since lyric poetry (habitually) makes no recourse to plot or character, it must depend, as Langer explains, “most directly on pure verbal resources — the sound and evocative power of words, meter, alliteration, rhyme, and other rhythmic devices, associated images, repetitions, archaisms and grammatical twists. It is the most obviously linguistic creation, and therefore the readiest instance of poesy.”50 That is to say, “there is a tendency,” as M. Kinzie notes, “for words [and other linguistic elements, too] in the specialized fabric of the poetic line to take on more than their usual significance.”51 This is the “babble” — those non-semantic features of language such as sound, rhythm, puns, and the like — of Frye’s famed twin constituents of lyric, “babble and doodle,”52 and it is most why the lyric, according to Frye, shows so clearly the “hypothetical core of literature, narrative and meaning in their literal aspects as word-order and word-pattern.”53 One may gain an impression of the “babbledness” of the Psalms, for example, by perusing the (sometimes mechanical) listings of figures and tropes in the late nineteenth-century compendia of I. M. Casanowicz54 and E. König,55 or in the 48. Johnson, Idea of Lyric, p. 35; cf. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 261. 49. Many psalms, of course, are far less interested in narrative, while some others move a long ways toward narrative. Psalms 105 and 106 are good examples of the latter. Both contain multiple narrative runs, in which a variety of devices (the wayyiqtol form and the like) are used to emplot action, resulting in what R. Alter aptly calls “incipient narrativity” (The Art of Biblical Poetry, pp. 27-61). 50. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 259; cf. Johnson, Idea of Lyric, p. 23; R. P. Draper, Lyric Tragedy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 4-5. 51. M. Kinzie, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 142. 52. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 275. 53. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 271; cf. Culler, Literary Theory, p. 74. 54. I. M. Casanowicz, Paronomasia in the Old Testament (Boston, 1894). 55. E. König, Stilistik, Rhetorik, Poetik (Leipzig, 1900). 356 370 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:42 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse richly evocative work of more recent literary scholars, such as A. Berlin, E. Greenstein, and D. Grossberg.56 Here, however, I exemplify the foregrounding of the non-semantic features of language in the Psalms by considering, first, the (general) nature of formal structure, and second, the use of metaphor as (or in lieu of) argument. These are intended to serve as stand-ins for the other kinds of tropes (wordplay, soundplay, and the like) that typify psalmic discourse and mark it as specifically lyric in nature. These would need to be surveyed in a more thoroughgoing statement of this particular lyric quality. One of the elemental functions of plot in narrative is to shape a story, to give it a beginning, middle, and end, and thus to provide a sense of coherence and continuity.57 Plot is, as P. Brooks states, “the principle of interconnectedness . . . which we cannot do without in moving through the discrete elements — incidents, episodes, actions — of a narrative” and “that allow us to construct a whole.”58 Without plot per se, lyric must find alternative means for organizing its discourse, for demarcating boundaries, and for guiding auditors through to a satisfying denouement. At one extreme, lyric verse routinely employs purely (or principally) formal means for articulating structure, such as with the given (conventional) forms well known from the metrical tradition of English verse (e.g., sonnet, villanelle, and the like). In Hebrew verse the most manifestly formal structuring device used is the alphabetic acrostic (e.g., Psalms 9-10; 25; 34; 37; 111; 112; 119; 145), in which the succession of letters from aleph to taw at the head of every line, couplet, or stanza articulates the poem’s basic structure, builds in a sense of coherence and unity, and guides readers and hearers through to the poem’s end. The acrostic, unfortunately, has not always been appreciated by biblical exegetes, many of whom routinely decry its patent artificiality. But, of course, such artificiality, or better, artifactuality, is one of the chief marks of poesy: the making out of language that is at the center of all literary discourse.59 And, more to the point, it is in forms like the acrostic that the lyric’s dependence on the double-sided 56. E.g., A. Berlin, “Motif and Creativity in Biblical Poetry,” Prooftexts 3 (1983): 231-241; E. Greenstein, “Wordplay, Hebrew,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 6, pp. 968-967; D. Grossberg, Centripetal and Centrifugal Structures in Hebrew Poetry, Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series (Atlanta: Scholars, 1989). 57. Cf. Culler, Literary Theory, pp. 79-81. 58. P. Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 5; cf. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p. 49. 59. Psalm 45:2 is one of the rare instances in which a biblical writer shows some conscious awareness of craft. Here the poet prefaces his poem with a statement about how his mind is teeming with a “good word” (d#b#r tôb) and that he proclaims to/for the king “my work” (ma{$kay). The latter would be the precise equivalent to the Greek notion of poesy. 357 371 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:42 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp (tropological) use of linguistic signs — Kinzie’s notion of taking “on more than their usual significance” — is so plainly on display: the appropriate letter of the alphabet functions both at the word level (i.e., as a part of the spelling of a specific lexeme) and at the composition level (i.e., as a part of the formal conceit by which the larger whole is articulated).60 Other more or less formal means for articulating holistic structure in the Psalms include large-scale envelope structures, such as inclusios (e.g., yhwh }dnynw/mh-}dyr šmk/bkl-h}rj, Ps. 8:2, 10; bny }dm, Ps. 12:2, 9; hwdw lyhwh kynwb/ky l{wlm Fsdw, Ps. 118:1, 29; hal4lû y#h, Ps. 147:1, 20)61 and chiasms (e.g., }lhym lnw mFsh w{z//mkgb-lnw }lhy y{qb, Ps. 46:2a, 12b), and the occasional use of refrains (e.g., mh-tštwFFy npšy, Pss. 42:6, 12; 43:5; ky l{wlm Fsdw, Ps. 136:126). And we should probably not discount the possibility that the conventional forms identified by form criticism (beginning with Gunkel) could themselves appeal “as form”62 (though here thematic elements begin to come into play as well). For example, the bifold structure of the (imperative) hymn of praise — call to praise (with an imperative) followed by a causal clause (usually beginning with kî) giving the reason for praise63 — can be used to structure whole poems (e.g., Psalms 100; 117) or sections of poems (e.g., Pss. 96:1-6; 98:1-3; 135:1-4).64 Far more common, however, the containing form of a Hebrew psalm is “organic,” to use a term from Coleridge (though one need not retain all of the Romantic baggage that often accompanies this term); “it shapes, as it develops, itself from within,” arising “out of the properties of the material.”65 That is, as 60. There are occasions, as well, when the tropological density on display is more than doubled, as in Psalm 9:2-3, where the opening aleph stanza also intentionally alliterates the guttural sound of the aleph in the sequence of five verbs: }ôdâ, }$sapp4râ, }ekm4Fâ, w4}e{eljâ, }$zamm4râ (cf. jôd j#dûnî kaudsjippôr in the jade stanza in Lam. 3:52). 61. As elsewhere in the Psalms, it is not easy to discern whether this inclusio is compositional or editorial. 62. For this notion of conventional form, see esp. K. Burke, Counter-Statement, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1953), p. 126. 63. E.g., Miller, They Cried to the Lord, pp. 205-206. 64. A sign of this form’s conventionality (though not precisely “as form”) is the frequency with which it is quoted (in part or whole) in later biblical compositions (e.g., Jer. 33:11; Ezra 3:11; Neh. 9:5; 2 Chron. 7:3, 6; 20:21). Moreover, a compelling case can be made that that the Joban poet uses the model hymn of praise (though semantically inverted) to shape the opening stanza of the curse of Job’s day of birth (3:3-10; an initial jussive, “let it perish,” followed after much elaboration by a closing kî clause), which if correct shows the hymn’s significance “as form.” 65. The quote is taken from “Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius,” in Selected Poetry and Prose of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. D. A. Stauffer (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 432-433, as cited in C. O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1980), pp. 92 and esp. 183 n. 4. 358 372 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:42 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse is the case more generally with non-metrical verse (or free verse poems!),66 the patterned repetition that generates formal structure67 — in lieu of a strong tradition of conventional stanzaic structure, rhyme schemes, and the like — will routinely involve a host of diverse linguistic elements (e.g., lineation, soundplay, parallelism, word repetition) distributed in a variety of overlapping and/or mutually informing and delimiting ways.68 I have already noted (in passing) a simple example of such “discovered form” in the discussion of Psalm 114. There the psalm’s gross structure is articulated formally by the uniform use of parallelistic couplets (eight of them), each involving gapping and comprised of slightly unbalanced lines. As B. Herrnstein Smith notes, our recognition of such formal patterning is properly “retrospective,” that is, we cannot be sure of it until it is concluded (or “announced as concluded”).69 The finer points of that psalm’s structure are then “figured” against this “ground” of uniform parallelism. The poem divides into three main sections (or stanzas).70 The middle section (vv. 3-6) is the longest and is characterized above all by word- and phrase-level repetition (involving Sea, Jordan, Mountains, and Hills; only ra#}â, mah-l4k#, and kî are not repeated). The opening (vv. 1-2) and closing (vv. 7-8) sections are distinguished by the presence of tighter intercouplet syntactic dependencies (i.e., both involve subordinating constructions — infinitival in vv. 1-2 and appositional in vv. 7-8), and thus form an enveloping structure that (formally) rounds off the poem. The structural ground of Psalm 133 is formed (almost) in an opposite 66. Hrushowski’s original insight that the generating principle of Hebrew prosody lies in the “free verse rhythms” of Hebrew has still not been fully (or even adequately) developed. 67. See Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, p. 38: “repetition is the fundamental phenomenon of poetic form.” This study’s relevance for an understanding of the dynamics and nature of lyric verse is much broader than the title indicates. Herrnstein Smith is an incredibly insightful and stimulating critic. 68. B. Nettl notes that “one of the best known and most widely recognized characteristics of primitive music” is “its frequently asymmetrical and irregular structure” (Music in Primitive Culture [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956], p. 62). 69. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, pp. 10, 12, 13. 70. As M. Oliver reminds us, though stanzaic forms in metrical verse traditions are routinely associated with rhyme schemes, metrical constraints, line counts, and the like, the term “stanza” itself designates “a group of lines in a poem” and “is used to indicate the divisions of a poem,” but beyond this “there is no further exact definition” and “there are no absolutely right or wrong ways to divide a poem into stanzas” (A Poetry Handbook [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994], pp. 60-61). She continues by suggesting — and this seems especially apt for free verse poetry — that “it may be useful, when considering the stanza to recall the paragraph in prose, which indicates the conclusion of one thought and the beginning of another, a sensible division” and that the “sensible paragraph” be thought of “as a kind of norm . . . from which to feel out the particular divisions that are best for a particular poem” (p. 61). 359 373 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:42 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp fashion. Here the interlinear dynamics are governed by enjambment (the carrying over of syntax from one line to the next)71 instead of parallelism — this is underscored to good effect by the threefold repetition of yZr3d at line junctures in the psalm’s central section (vv. 2, 3), escorting the reader (like the flowing oil and dew) down the page (admittedly, a very literate way of reading the trope). The poem’s central part stands out mostly thematically, being composed of two similes (though they are both explicitly marked as such, k-, and the section is otherwise punctuated by lexical repetition and phrasal parallelism), while this is framed by an opening statement (“How good it is . . . ,” v. 1) and closing rationale (“For there Yahweh commanded . . . ,” v. 3), echoing the bifold structure of the hymn of praise — sound play (gam/š#m/h#{ôl#m and n#{îm/}#Fîm/Fayyîm) reinforcing the framing effect here. The sense of closure in this poem is more pronounced than that of Psalm 114, as here the enjambed couplets give way at the end to a lone triplet, and thus the poem’s concluding movement is announced through modification of its governing pattern of repetition.72 A final, and more complex, example is Psalm 19. The poem divides into two main parts, vv. 2-7 and vv. 8-15.73 Lineation is the chief formal indicator 71. Cf. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, “The Enjambing Line in Lamentations: A Taxonomy (Part I),” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 113, no. 2 (2001): 219-239; and “The Effects of Enjambment in Lamentations (Part 2),” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 113, no. 5 (2001): 370-385. 72. For a discussion of “terminal modification” as one of the most effective ways of signaling closure, see Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, pp. 28, 43-44, 50, 56ff. Interestingly, Herrnstein Smith’s discussion of closure in lyric poems is informed throughout by similar phenomena in musical composition, and this is especially true of her discussion of terminal modification (esp. pp. 56-59). 73. Whatever one makes of the compositional techniques on display in this poem — a notoriously difficult matter to discern without the evidence of explicit comment — the poem itself hangs together as a whole. Thematically, vv. 12 and 15 play key roles in unifying the two parts. Verse 12 makes explicit and implicit connections with the main foci of the poem — nature and Torah. The NRSV, for example, glosses nizh#r as “is . . . warned,” construing as a Niphal Part ms Ö zhr II “to be warned,” which given the context of the second part of the poem makes sense, as it is precisely Torah that guides the psalmist in his/her life. And yet, deriving from zhr I “to shine” also makes good sense, as this root is used explicitly in the Bible (e.g., Dan. 12:3) and elsewhere of the sun shining! This latter sense is especially relevant as b#hem comes at the end of the line, formally — though not semantically, as different antecedents are involved — pointing back to b#hem in v. 5c. The tone of “illumination, seeing, shining” also fits well the adoring tone of the poem as a whole. But it is not likely a matter of choosing between the two, except perhaps for translation purposes (it is hard to get both senses into English) and for determining which is primary (i.e., at the surface of the poem), since the poet would appear to have intended both senses to resonate. I would emphasize the derivation from zhr I “to shine” only because this has not been routinely appreciated and because there are those who still continue to insist that we 360 374 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:42 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse of this poem’s structure, though form and content are mutually reinforcing throughout. The lines in the first section of the poem are generally longer, with several triplets thrown in amid the couplets. In the second half, the poem is characterized by couplets with short lines in which the first line tends to be longer than the second — the so-called qinah meter.74 The only triplet in this section comes at the very end (v. 15), thus effectively signaling the poem’s concluding movement. These main sections are composed of two stanzas apiece (vv. 2-5b, 5c-7; 8-11, 12-14); the theme of each stanza is topicalized in the initial word: “heavens” (v. 2), “sun” (v. 5c), “Torah” (v. 8), “your servant” (v. 12). In the first section, the “sun” stanza is further distinguished by its constituent triplets,75 while the “Torah” stanza is differentiated in the second part by the especially tight (syntactic, grammatical, and semantic) parallelism that is manifested among its constituent couplets. In sum, form (sometimes by itself but more frequently in tandem with thematic elements) in the lyric verse of the Psalms shoulders a great deal of the continuity and sequencing functions that in narrative more generally fall to the domain of plot, and thus does a great deal more than simply ornamenting the poem’s otherwise paraphrasable meaning(s). In a similar way, instead of argument — though, of course, there is no reason why particular lyric poems should not engage in more discursive forms of discourse, for example, as in the prophetic literature or some of the didactic psalms — one finds a variety of stand-ins, including, most interestingly, metaphor.76 Metahave two poems here instead of one. Note, too, how the notion of guarding, etc., is precisely one of the activities that is predicated of Shamash in the Mesopotamian hymn. The closing triplet in v. 15 is well known. What may be missed is that the invocation of Yahweh as “rock and redeemer” points rather clearly — if metaphorically — to the two dominant movements in the poem — nature and Torah. Redemption, of course, is itself a legal concept. Here, what is intended (at least in part) is that it is precisely through Torah that the psalmist finds well-being, salvation. 74. Free verse compositions come most generally in long-lined and short-lined varieties (e.g., C. Beyers, A History of Free Verse [Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2001], esp. pp. 3942). 75. Note further how the repetition of 3ms suffixes syntactically tracks the main actor of the stanza — the sun — but in doing so also builds (formal) coherence into the stanza. A more elaborate use of this kind of anaphora is evidenced in Lamentations. Cf. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations, Interpretation: A Biblical Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), p. 49. 76. As a way of valorizing the image as a vehicle for thought, it may be helpful to recall that, according to neurobiologists like A. Damasio, “having a mind means that an organism forms neural representations which can become images” of various kinds (e.g., visual, sound, olfactory) but which only latterly become translated into language (see Damasio, Descartes’ Error [New York: Quill, 1995], pp. 83-113, esp. 89-90). That is, image — and presumably even linguisti- 361 375 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:42 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp phor epitomizes the coming “to mean twice” that typifies the tropologically dense discourse of lyric verse.77 So in Psalm 133 the poem’s central invocation, “How good and how pleasant it is/that brothers dwell together” (NJV), is never argued or even exemplified (Gerstenberger: “these metaphors [in vv. 23] cannot very well explain the peaceful coexistence of ‘brothers’”).78 Rather, it is more a matter, as Kraus says, of being “accompanied . . . by friendly sentiments.”79 That is, the exclamation is supported by two images of superabundance and refreshment — that of oil and that of dew — and we are won over to its point of view largely by the “extravagance” of these similes. In Psalm 1, simile (metaphor) is equally crucial to the poem’s success. Here, too, we chiefly have to do with “a joyous exclamation,”80 “Happy is the man . . . !”, whose main appeal is secured, positively (v. 3) and negatively (v. 4), through similes. The inherent attractiveness of the tree metaphor, plus its elaboration in the poem, is one of the chief ways in which the poet presses this point. By contrast, the image of chaff that is blown by the wind is inherently negative (note that the negative particles in the poem, vv. 1, 4, 5, always characterize the activity of the wicked) and very brief — the chaff, once blown away, is no more! Such doubleness in the usage of metaphor — both as an image event in its own right and as (or in lieu of) argument — is analogous to the doubleness of form illustrated above, and both exemplify the tropological density (the taking on of “more than their usual sense”) that customarily (necessarily!) attends lyric discourse.81 cally stimulated images — is itself a most natural and congenial mode of thought for the human organism and one that should not be disparaged on account of our current love affair with all things linguistic. 77. On what “densely patterned” ways in biblical verse typically means, see Alter’s comment in Art of Biblical Poetry, p. 113. 78. Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part 2, p. 372. 79. Kraus, Psalms 60–150, p. 485. 80. In Kraus, Psalms 1–59, p. 115 (citing Buber). 81. It is perhaps crucial to underscore two things here: (1) that such tropological density arises in the lyric chiefly in compensation for the absence of other discourse features, and (2) that such “babbledness,” if typical of lyric discourse, also appears in other discourse mediums. In other words, we need not essentialize this characteristic in order to appreciate its typicality and significance for the lyric. 82. Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” p. 31; cf. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 260; Rosenthal and Gall, Modern Poetic Sequence, p. 3; Johnson, “Lyric,” p. 714; Culler, Literary Theory, p. 70. 362 376 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:43 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse Smallness of Scale The question of scale, though not insignificant, requires little comment. A certain smallness of scale is generally associated with the lyric. As Frye belatedly observes, “a lyric is anything you can reasonably get uncut into an anthology.”82 Such brevity results from the lyric’s general eschewal of devices (e.g., plot, argument, temporal sequence, consistency of setting) that would enable more encompassing discourse; and it means, as a purely practical matter, that lyric poems will be limited in the scope of their subject matter. And with only language itself as the chief medium of discourse, it is difficult for lyric poems to sustain themselves over long stretches of time and space. It is this smallness of scale that so typifies biblical Hebrew poetry, and especially the Psalms, suggesting the likelihood that the lyric lies at the base of much of biblical poetry83 — in contrast with the much longer and expansive epic verse from Ugarit (e.g., Keret, Aqhat) and Mesopotamia (e.g., Gilgamesh, Erra), for example. Lyric verse can be written on a larger scale, and there are any number of strategies for accomplishing this. For example, form, such as that exhibited by the villanelle or the sestina well known from Western canons of lyric poetry, offers one means by which lyric poems can extend their reach. Psalm 119 masterfully exploits the alphabetic acrostic for just this purpose (cf. Psalm 37), the formal conceit of the abecedary serving to help auditors navigate the expanded discourse space. Another strategy is suggested by the epic verse traditions of the ancient Near East, namely, engaging more explicitly in narrative or utilizing the various devices of narrative, such as is in evidence, for example, in Psalms 78, 105, and 106; as noted, this is generally the topic of Alter’s second chapter in The Art of Hebrew Poetry, entitled “From Line to Story.” A third means for increasing the lyric’s otherwise confining amplitude is to successively link a number of individual lyric poems and mold them into a greater, organic whole. What gets enacted in such a process, then, is a sequence of lyric poems whose nature and dynamic, holistically considered, are essentially that of a lyric poem writ large. As literary critics are discovering, this compositional strategy turns out to be quite common and knows very few chronological or geographical boundaries.84 That the book of Psalms it83. Driver is most emphatic: “Hebrew poetry is almost exclusively lyric” (Introduction, p. 360). He also distinguishes “gnomic” verse, but says that “the line between these two forms [i.e., lyric and gnomic] cannot always be drawn strictly” (pp. 360-361). 84. Critical research into the nature, dynamics, and extent of the lyric sequence is still very much in its infancy. Scholars have for the most part focused on the Western poetic tradition (e.g., Rosenthal and Gall, Modern Poetic Sequence; Greene, Post-Petrarchism; T. L. Roche Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences [New York: AMS, 1989]; D. Fenolaltea and D. L. Ru- 363 377 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:43 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp self may enact a more encompassing kind of fiction, on the one hand, and is comprised of various smaller and larger collections that may have had their own integrity (e.g., the “Songs of Ascent”), on the other hand, has been the focus of much research lately and would be a topic that could potentially benefit from the insights gleaned from work on other lyric sequences.85 bin, The Ladder of High Designs: Structure and Interpretation of the French Lyric Sequence [Charlottesville/London: University Press of Virginia, 1991]). Nevertheless, the potential for identifying other non-Western lyric sequences is good; see the comments to this effect by Rosenthal and Gall (“Lyric Sequence,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 729) and J. Rothenberg (“Ethnopoetics and Politics/The Politics of Ethnopoetics,” in The Politics of Poetic Form, ed. C. Bernstein [New York: Roof, 1990], p. 13). 85. Indeed, it is likely that the Psalms as a collective whole served as a model for some of the early lyric sequences in the Western tradition, such as Dante’s Vita Nuova (ca. 1292-1300 c.e.) and Petrarch’s Canzonierre (1304-1374 c.e.). Beyond the current interest in the larger collective integrity of the Psalms (for bibliography and discussion, see G. H. Wilson, The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter [Chico, CA: Scholars, 1985]; and D. M. Howard Jr., “Recent Trends in Psalm Study,” in The Face of Old Testament Studies: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches [Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999], esp. pp. 332-344) and D. Grossberg’s stimulating initial forays into the larger structures of the Psalms of Ascent, Song of Songs, and Lamentations (Centripetal and Centrifugal Structures in Biblical Poetry [Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 39; Atlanta: Scholars, 1989]), I am unaware of similar attempts to investigate the potential integrity of other biblical or ancient Near Eastern collections or sequences of lyric compositions. Still, that the technological capacity for composing integrated lyric sequences was in evidence in the larger ancient Near East can at least be suggested in a preliminary way. The Mesopotamian penchant for collection and organization is well known and is exemplified by the existence of numerous literary catalogs of various kinds, including hymnic literature (for bibliography, see A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, rev. ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977], p. 377 n. 16; and Wilson, Editing of the Hebrew Psalter, pp. 25-61), as well as a multitude of scholarly collections of all kinds — laws, omens, incantations, and so on (see Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, pp. 206-331). And then there is the outstanding example of the collection of forty-two Sumerian temple hymns that may date as early as the late twentyfourth or early twenty-third century b.c.e. (A. Sjöberg and E. Bergman, The Collection of Sumerian Temple Hymns [Locust Valley: J. J. Augustin, 1969]). Here we have an obvious collection of individual lyric compositions that have been purposefully composed and arranged as a larger whole. The first forty-one hymns share the same basic form (Sjöberg and Bergman, Temple Hymns, p. 5) and are ordered geographically in a general south/southeast to north/northwest orientation as one moves through the sequence (H. Zimmern, “Ein Zyklus altsumerischer Lieder auf die Haupttempel Babyloniens,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 5 [1930]: 247; C. Wilke, “Der aktuelle Bezug der Sammlung der sumerischer Tempelhymnen und ein Fragment eines Klagelieds,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 62 [1972]: 39, 48-49). The final hymn deviates noticeably from the formal pattern that shapes the other hymns (Sjöberg and Bergman, Temple Hymns, pp. 12, 149), effectively signaling the collection’s impending conclusion (see the discussion of “terminal modification” above). And EnDeduanna, En-Priestess and daughter of Sargon of Akkad, even explicitly articulates her authorial intent as she identifies herself as the “compiler of the tablet” that “no one has created [before]” (ll. 544-545). As for Egypt, one need only look as far as the mul- 364 378 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:43 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse The “Utterance of a Voice” In characterizing the lyric, Culler highlights the genre’s typical vocality: it “seems to be an utterance . . . the utterance of a voice.”86 This vocality has two distinguishing properties. The first is physical. R. Pinsky gets at this physicality in his notion of lyric poetry as “a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art.”87 He continues: “The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and mouth.”88 To focus as Pinsky does on the physical operation of the voice and its production of sound is to recall the lyric’s debt to music (after all, lyric was synonymous with singing and song in antiquity), to stress its sonic qualities, to appreciate that it is an art form that is/was intended to be heard. Rhythm, melody, and euphony (soundplay) are all important features of Hebrew psalmody, even if our own perception of them through the preserved textual medium(s) is muffled and dim. The rhythmic cadences of Hebrew verse are the most tractable of these musical elements today. So, for example, the mostly balanced cadences of Psalms 33, 111, and 112 contrast noticeably with the unbalanced limp of Psalms 19:8-11 and 114. And though soundplay in Hebrew verse is non-systematic, its presence and even occasional scripting for larger effect (such as in the framing of Psalm 133) is beyond doubt. One of the scandals of lyric poetry, writes Culler, is precisely that these “contingent features of sound and rhythm systematically infect and affect thought.”89 tiple collections of love lyrics (conveniently, see M. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985], pp. 3-81) to find evidence for integrated lyric sequences or collections. From a later period, one might also note the “Psalms of Solomon” (ca. 63-30 b.c.e.), which R. B. Wright believes exhibits indicators of structural integrity, including an introduction and conclusion (The Psalms of Solomon: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text [JSOPSS; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, forthcoming], p. 5). 86. Culler, Literary Theory, p. 71. 87. R. Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 8. 88. Pinsky, Sounds of Poetry, p. 8. 89. Culler, Literary Theory, p. 75. Similarly, Frye notes that what is distinctively “lyrical” is the “union of sound and sense” (Anatomy of Criticism, p. 272; Frye’s additional notion of poetic creation as specifically “oracular,” though but one way of conceptualizing the creative process, does flesh out quite vividly the lyrical fusion of “sound and sense”: “an associative rhetorical process, most of it below the threshold of consciousness, a chaos of paronomasia, sound-links, ambiguous sense-links, and memory-links very like that of a dream,” pp. 271-272; cf. Levertov, Light Up the Cave, pp. 29-45). Levertov also stresses the importance of sound to the lyric poet: “All words are to some extent onomatopoeic” (Light Up the Cave, p. 60), and also: “The primary impulse for me was always to make a structure out of words, words that sounded right. And I think that’s a rather basic foundation of a poet’s word” (p. 78). 365 379 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:43 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp Moreover, to focus the uttered-ness of the lyric is to recall as well its reutterability — the lyric is quintessentially that medium of discourse which is intended to be re-uttered.90 Again to quote Pinsky: “when I say myself a poem . . . the artist’s medium is my breath. The reader’s breath and hearing embody the poet’s words. This makes the art physical, intimate, vocal, and individual.”91 And it is through its capacity to be re-uttered that lyric verse effects the superposition of “the subjectivity of the scripted speaker on the reader.”92 Or as R. Greene writes, the hearer or reader of the lyric “might be said to shed his or her all-too-specific person, and to take on the speaking self of the poem.”93 In other words, he or she entertains the statements made by the poem’s speaker, tries them on, and reexperiences them from the inside, as it were.94 It is such re-utterability that accounts for the openness of psalmic discourse and that allows for its easy appropriation. P. D. Miller, for one, captures well this aspect of psalmic verse in his comments on the identity of the enemies in the laments: “the enemies are in fact whoever the enemies are for the singers of the psalms. . . . The laments become appropriate for persons who cry out to God in all kinds of situations.”95 Such re-utterability is strikingly confirmed by the many times psalms are historicized and embedded in biblical narrative (e.g., 1 Sam. 2:1-10; Isa. 38:10-20; Jer. 11:18–12:6). A second property of lyric vocality is its figuredness as “incantation, rather than the presentation of telling or ritual”96 — in Culler’s terms, its seeming to be an utterance. Here one notices most the absence of developed (fictional) characters, which more often than not appear to have mutated into disembodied or orphaned voices in the lyric (and if named are only equivocally or inferentially named).97 Hence the well-known idea of lyric as “utterance overheard.”98 Frye provides the image of the lyric poet literally turning his or her back on the audience.99 “It is as if each poem,” writes Culler, “began with the invisible words, ‘[For example, I or someone could say].’”100 Applied 90. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p. 5. 91. Pinsky, Sounds of Poetry, p. 8. 92. Pinsky, Sounds of Poetry, pp. 5-6. 93. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p. 6. 94. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p. 9; cf. Johnson, Idea of Lyric, pp. 59, 74. 95. P. D. Miller, Interpreting the Psalms (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), pp. 50-51. 96. R. Pinsky, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 23. 97. A. Grossman, “Summa Lyrica: A Primer in the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics,” Western Humanities Review 44 (1990): 7. 98. See Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 249-50; Culler, Literary Theory, p. 71. 99. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 271. 100. Culler, Literary Theory, pp. 71-72. 366 380 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:43 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse to the psalms: “[For example, I or someone could say] How good and how pleasant it is/when brothers dwell together” (Ps. 133:1), or “[For example, I or someone could say] My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:2). And as a result of this incantatory shaping of vocality — that “it is, precisely, invoked”101 — the lyric takes on what Johnson describes as its typical102 pronominal form. Johnson identifies three principal patterns in which pronominal forms are deployed in lyric verse.103 The prototypical pronominal pattern is the I-You form.104 The speaking voice is the lyric-I who expresses feelings and ideas on all manner of things, often addressing an unidentified and frequently absent You — who in the religious lyric of the Psalms is as often as not to be identified as Yahweh.105 What interests Johnson here is the I speaking to another, often “at a highly dramatic moment,” in which the essence of the relationship, he says, reveals itself through the lyrical discourse, in the praise or blame, in the metaphors found to re-create the emotions that are thereby described.106 The second variation is more impersonal, more meditative, as if the poet is speaking to himself or herself or to no one in particular, or even sometimes to apostrophized, inanimate objects. The last variety is more dialogic in nature. The lyric-I either recedes fully into the background, giving way to a interchange of voices, or takes part as one of the voices in a larger dialogue. That each of these kinds of discourse is prevalent in the Psalms I will simply assert, though with subjects indexed morphologically on verbs in Hebrew the presence of “literal” independent pronouns is not necessary (or so common). And perhaps as significant, in the Psalms, as elsewhere in antiquity but especially in ancient Greece, the voice heard comes in two predominant varieties: solo and choral (e.g., individual laments vs. communal laments). Both varieties, as W. R. Johnson claims, “were equally valid and equally important, each of them necessary to the total shaping of the human personality.”107 101. Pinsky, Sounds of Poetry, p. 23. 102. Johnson himself stresses the pragmatic (“somewhat dubious even to me”) nature of his categories here; they are but one grid through which to view lyric discourse and therefore should not be pressed too far or reified (Idea of Lyric, pp. 2-3). 103. For this assessment of the pronominal orientation of much lyric poetry, see Johnson, Idea of Lyric, pp. 1-23. 104. H. Vendler, Soul Says (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1995), p. 2; H. Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 104-135. 105. Kathy Rowe of Bryn Mawr College named this for me most explicitly a number of years ago while I was working on Lamentations; cf. Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose, p. 108. 106. Johnson, Idea of Lyric, p. 3. 107. Johnson, Idea of Lyric, p. 177. The trick for contemporary readers is learning to appreciate the strong communal ethos that is now missing from many of our present-day Western so- 367 381 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:43 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp The prominence of first-person voice in Greek lyric has often been reified (especially during the Romantic period)108 as the defining feature of lyric verse (see the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “lyric”). The problematic nature of such an identification is, as Lindley notes, obvious: “Though it is one of the devices that poets may employ, it is by no means self-evident that all poetry using this mode of speech is ‘lyric’, nor that poetry which does not should be excluded from the lyric category.”109 In fact, it is not only on conceptual grounds that such an identification fails, but on empirical grounds as well. To judge only by Johnson’s own (rough) statistical sampling of the distribution of his pronominal types in various lyric poets from the Greeks forward, the lyric-I, though at times absolutely dominant (as in ancient Greece), is by no means omnipresent.110 And in contemporary Anglo-American lyric verse it is the diversity of voice that is the norm and not a foreordained lyricI.111 Yet even to highlight the mode of discourse, first person or otherwise, tells us nothing in particular about the persona of that voice. Even in Greek lyric, as E. Bowie stresses, one cannot naively assume the identity of poet and the speaking I of the poem.112 My own impression about voice in biblical poetry more generally is that it is not so overwhelmingly monopolized by firstperson speech as is Greek lyric, nor perhaps as variable and multivocal as is much contemporary verse. cieties but that infused ancient lyric verse without at the same time losing track of the also mostly assumed singularity of the human organism that lies behind first-person phenomena (see A. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens [San Diego/New York: Harcourt, 1999], pp. 3-31, esp. 12, 19); the lyric-I in both of its ancient modalities gives compelling expression to these two lived-realities. 108. In his chapter on the Psalms (“Psalms: The Limits of Subjectivity”) in Poetry with a Purpose, Fisch says much that is consonant with my own approach to the Psalms as lyric, including that “the one book of the Bible that . . . seems to offer itself as a model of lyrical subjectivity . . . is the book of Palms” (p. 106), though his own understanding of lyric discourse is profoundly shaped by Romantic ideology. And since the lyric subjectivity of the Psalms is not that of the Romantic poets and thinkers, he eventually prefers to characterize the Psalms as “covenantal discourse” (p. 120), which hardly clarifies the nature of psalmic discourse. 109. Lindley, Lyric (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 3. 110. See the various rough statistics reported by Johnson himself throughout his Idea of Lyric (e.g., Catullus: 70 percent I-You; 14 percent meditative; 16 percent dialogic; etc.). 111. Cf. Lindley, Lyric, pp. 12-13. 112. Bowie, “Lyric and Elegiac Poetry,” p. 99. Besides, the idea that a poet could speak through different personae was already well articulated by Plato (Lindley, Lyric, p. 2). 368 382 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:43 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse The “Rhythm of Association” B. Herrnstein Smith identifies two principal means for generating thematic structure in poems: parataxis and sequence.113 Of the two the latter will be well known, as sequence (of some sort) usually lies at the heart of story and plot. And while there are psalms in which the sequential order of thematic elements is generated primarily from some “extraliterary principle of succession,”114 such as the tradition-historical rehearsal of Yahweh’s “glorious deeds” in Psalm 78, more often psalm lyrics hew closer to the paratactic end of the structuring continuum. And indeed parataxis is prototypical of lyric discourse — perhaps, as Herrnstein Smith suggests, reflecting the lyric’s origin in song.115 “When repetition is the fundamental principle of thematic generation,” as so often in traditional or naive song styles, “the resulting structure will tend to be paratactic”116 and associative in nature — what Frye aptly labels “the rhythm of association.”117 In such instances, the lyric’s centers of “emotionally and sensuously charged awareness,” according to M. L. Rosenthal and S. M. Gall, radiate out and relate to one another associatively, through “felt relationship.” The resulting play of tonal depths and shadings and shiftings is achieved through “strategic juxtaposition of separate . . . passages without a superimposed logical or fictional continuity.”118 And thus, the dislocation or omission of individual thematic units, unlike in sequentially structured discourse, will not render the whole unintelligible or make it incoherent. To the contrary, one of the hallmarks of paratactic structure is that thematic elements may be added, omitted, or exchanged quite happily. Junctures or gaps between a lyric’s component elements without explicit scripting become a prominent part of the discursive fabric that is to be negotiated, and as a consequence fragmentation and disjunction — a susceptibility to disintegration119 — become 113. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, pp. 96-150. Aristotle identified the same two organization structures in prose, which he termed lexis eiromena#, “strung-on or continuous” style, and lexis katestrammen#, “periodic or rounded” style. See R. L. Fowler, The Nature of Early Greek Lyric: Three Preliminary Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 53. Fowler helpfully goes on to make clear that parataxis need not imply a lack of logic or rationality. 114. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, p. 110. 115. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, pp. 57-59, 98-99. 116. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, pp. 98-99. 117. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 270ff. 118. Rosenthal and Gall, “Lyric Sequence,” p. 728; cf. Rosenthal and Gall, Modern Poetic Sequence, p. 15. Alter’s discussion of “structures of intensification” in biblical poetry offers another way of articulating the generative dynamic that most distinguishes lyrical structure (Art of Biblical Poetry, pp. 62-84). 119. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p. 18. 369 383 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:43 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp central to the founding fiction of the paratactically structured lyric poem. Any reading of such a lyric “must accommodate discontinuity as well as continuity, allow for the spatial dimension of lyric temporality, and offer a means of getting into and over” the junctures between elements “without brutally closing them.”120 Whatever fiction, whatever stratagem of discourse is manifested, therefore, necessarily partakes in and celebrates or otherwise gives prominence to fragmentation. On my reading, it is the nonsequentiality of parataxis that governs the thematic structure in Psalm 114. There it is not a matter of temporal or logical sequence, but of association and juxtaposition — the events of the Red Sea calling to mind the crossing of the Jordan, nature’s similar reactions to Yahweh’s variously traditioned theophany attracting one another. Herrnstein Smith identifies the “list” as one of the most obvious forms manifesting paratactic structure.121 Lists are especially prominent, for example, in Mesopotamian hymnody, but they are recognizable as well in various aspects of Israelite psalmody, such as in the typical use of the so-called “hymnic participle” or in the listing of Yahweh’s various qualities.122 But no doubt the paradigm of paratactic structure in the Psalms comes in the conventional (given) forms isolated by the form-critical study of the Psalms. Here, as H. Gunkel saw better than most, it is chiefly a matter of thematic (as opposed to strictly formal) structure that is most definitive of the various verse forms. And what is more relevant here, only rarely are these forms thematically sequenced. The psalms of lament are a case in point. These poems, communal and individual alike, have a recognizable set of family resemblances (comprised of common elements such as addresses, petitions, complaints or laments, motivational clauses, affirmations of trust). But, as is well known, “they are rarely precisely alike, though repeated formulas are not uncommon . . . ; and they may vary significantly in their length and the degree of elaboration of their component parts. Some are very succinct while others are extended in one or more of their basic elements. Some do not contain all of the elements that other [laments] do.”123 What Miller describes here is the epitome of paratactic structure! Moreover, the play of parataxis effects a dynamic interaction among dif120. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p. 20. My discussion of the fragmenting effects is dependent on Greene. His own discussion at this point has lyric sequences principally in view. But insofar as lyric sequences are essentially lyric poems writ large, his observations, as he himself would maintain, are very much applicable to the structure of individual lyric poems. 121. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, p. 99. 122. E.g., H. Gunkel and J. Begrich, Introduction to the Psalms, trans. J. D. Nogalski (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), pp. 30-31, 34-35. 123. Miller, They Cried to the Lord, p. 57. 370 384 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:44 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse ferent (and sometimes conflicting and competing) perspectives that is not unlike the montage effect in film, which R. Alter describes in a different context.124 Alter quotes the following description of montage offered by S. Eisenstein: The juxtaposition of two separate shots by splicing them together resembles not so much a simple sum of one shot plus one shot — as it does a creation. It resembles a creation — rather than a sum of its parts — from the circumstance that in every such juxtaposition the result is qualitatively distinguishable from each component element viewed separately. . . . Each particular montage piece exists no longer as something unrelated, but as a given particular representation of the general theme.125 Of course, the analogy is not exact. The seams that result from the paratactic splicing of different perspectives or images in language are much more noticeable than in photography and film, resulting in a more complex image. Not only does one have the “particular representation” created by the montage, but the component elements also signify on their own. As but one example of the montage effect of parataxis in the Psalms consider Psalm 74:1217.126 The passage, as J. Levenson notes, “is the locus classicus of the idea that the God of Israel . . . defeated the Sea and its monsters . . . and then created the familiar world.” Levenson then continues: Surely no text would seem more imbued with [Y.] Kaufmann’s “basic idea of Israelite religion,” that “there is no realm above or beside YHWH to limit his absolute sovereignty.” But the context of these verses [vv. 10-11, 1820] belies the unqualified note of triumphalism in this theology. For the context of vv. 12-17 in Psalm 74 shows that the celebratory language of victory is invoked here precisely when conditions have rendered belief in God’s majesty most difficult.127 124. Alter uses the analogy of film montage in his discussion of the “composite artistry” of Hebrew prose (The Art of Biblical Narrative [New York: Basic Books, 1981], pp. 140-141). But the analogy is equally (if not more) applicable to paratactic verse of the kind found in Lamentations. 125. Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, p. 140; quoting S. Eisenstein, The Film Scene, ed. and trans. J. Leyda (London, 1943), p. 17; emphasis in Eisenstein’s original. 126. The reading is that of J. D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 17-20. 127. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, p. 18. The Levenson quotes from Y. Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel (New York: Schocken, 1972), p. 60. 371 385 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:44 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp The upshot of this (paratactic) juxtaposition, according to Levenson, is that the psalmist in Psalm 74 “acknowledges the reality of militant, triumphant, and persistent evil, but he steadfastly and resolutely refuses to accept this reality as final and absolute.”128 Such a stance is manifestly the result of the montage-like juxtaposition of two different moods, the seams of which are readily apparent; and indeed it may well be, as Levenson contends, that “the continuity between v. 11 and v. 18 strongly suggests that the hymn in vv. 12-17 has been interpolated.”129 What is crucial to see in all of these examples is the centrality of fragmentation and discontinuity to the type of discourse enacted, and that any minimally adequate reading of them, as the quote from Greene given above makes clear, must accommodate the discontinuity that is so definitive of paratactic structure and offer ways of getting into and over the resulting gaps and junctures. Such a way of reading, of course, is in many respects the very antithesis of how we habitually read narratives. Representative of Music I conclude my brief inventory of lyric practices and properties by considering one of lyric’s most widely acknowledged attributes, its musicality. To speak of the musical quality of lyric has often meant to foreground its manner of presentation — whether it was sung or not. This has been the predominant way in which classicists, for example, have tended to approach Greek lyric. And certainly during the effluence of Greek lyric from the seventh to the mid-fifth centuries bce many of the solo (monody) lyrics were composed to be sung at symposia to the accompaniment of the aulos (an oboe-like wind instrument) or lyre, while choral songs were mostly performed at festivals (such as the great Panhellenic festivals) or on other special occasions. Greek lyric shares this use of music with “many other bodies of high lyric poetry” (e.g., Chinese, Provençal), among which W. R. Johnson counts Hebrew.130 That many of the Psalms were, in fact, a specifically “sung” kind of word can be inferred (but only inferred) from a variety of considerations. First, although there is no extant body of criticism from ancient Israel and Judah commenting on the musicality of psalmic verse, there are nonetheless aspects of the texts themselves indicative of the presence of music. Several stand out. To begin with, 128. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, p. 19. 129. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, p. 18. 130. Johnson, Idea of Lyric, p. 28. 372 386 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:44 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse there is the terminology used for this kind of verse, which in several instances refers explicitly to “song” and “singing.” The most generic term is šîr “song” (šîrâ only in Ps. 18:1).131 As Lowth writes: “These compositions which were intended for music, whether vocal alone, or accompanied with instruments, obtained among the Hebrews the appellation of Shir.”132 The noun occurs approximately forty-three times in the Psalms (e.g., ûmiššîrî }$hôdennû “and I will thank him from133 my song,” Ps. 28:7), and very frequently in psalm titles (e.g., Pss. 35:1; 45:1; 67:1; 68:1; 76:1; 88:1; 96:1; 98:1; 108:1; 123:1; 149:1). The verb is used another twenty-seven times (e.g., }#šîrâ layhwh “I will sing to Yahweh,” Ps. 13:6). The other common designation for psalms, mizmôr, appears fiftyseven times, all in psalm titles (e.g., Pss. 13:1; 19:1; 23:1; 29:1; 48:1; 88:1; 98:1). The verb zmr “to sing” occurs an additional forty-one times (e.g., zamm4rû layhwh b4kinnôr “sing to Yahweh with [i.e., accompanied by] the lyre,” Ps. 98:5). Both designations by their semantics alone imply at least an originary concern for music for the compositions so named. Moreover, references to musical instruments are common in the Psalms (e.g., Pss. 33:1-3; 47:6; 49:1-5; 81:3, 4; 92:4; 98:6; 144:9; 147:7; 150:3-5),134 and most scholars assume that some of the obscure technical terms in the superscriptions to individual psalms (e.g., {al hašš4mînît, Ps. 6:1; 12:1; cf. 1 Chron. 15:21) likely refer to instruments or to melodic or rhythmic patterns and tones.135 Also there are textual indications of the existence of a professional group of singers and musicians (e.g., Gen. 4:21; Ps. 68:26; 1 Chron. 15:16-24; 16:4-6); “male and female musicians” are listed among the tribute sent by Hezekiah to Sennacherib in 701 bce (according to the latter’s annals), and among those deported to Babylon by Nebuchadrezzar and receiving oil rations was the “director of singers from Ashkelon.”136 A second consideration consistent with the sung quality of Hebrew lyrics is the plethora of material remains from the Levant and surrounding areas at131. A. Cooper, “Biblical Poetics: A Linguistic Approach” (unpublished dissertation, Yale University, 1976), p. 3. 132. Lowth, Lectures, p. 278. 133. The preposition min here is sometimes questioned (cf. Syr, Symm, Jerome), but is perhaps intelligible if a more material understanding of “song” is assumed (cf. Gen. 2:19 and comment in WOC 11.2.11d). 134. Cf. P. King and L. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), pp. 290-298; J. Braun, Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine, trans. D. W. Stott (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 8-32. 135. Cooper, “Biblical Poetics,” pp. 3-4; Braun, Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine, pp. 37-42. 136. J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), p. 288. See also King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, p. 286. 373 387 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:44 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp testing to the cultivation of music. Remains of musical instruments have been recovered, as well as numerous iconographic representations of instruments and musicians and singers (playing and singing), and even a complete hymn (in Hurrian) with instructions for performance.137 Finally, from an ethnomusicological perspective, “in the earliest cultures words and music are closely associated,” while solo instrumental music is clearly a secondary development.138 That is, most “primitive” music is vocal (or partly vocal) — “music produced by the human voice.”139 In other words, where we have cultivation of music in antiquity (as we surely do in ancient Israel and Judah and the Near East more generally) we can expect most of that activity to be concerned with voice, and therefore — though we mostly lack indications of melody, tune, and the like from antiquity — the words that are preserved are in fact a most decisive indicator of ancient song; the nonnarrative poems themselves attest to the reality of ancient music and song.140 In sum, then, we may conclude that, as in ancient Greece,141 many of the 137. See A. D. Kilmer, “Music and Dance in Ancient Western Asia,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. J. Sasson, 4 vols. (New York, 1995), vol. 4, pp. 2601-2613; King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, pp. 285-300; Braun, Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine, pp. 47-320. On the hymn recovered from ancient Ugarit, see A. D. Kilmer, R. L. Crocker, and R. R. Brown, Sounds from Silence: Recent Discoveries in Ancient Near Eastern Music (Berkeley: Bot Enki Publications, 1976). Of course, lyric forms (e.g., the hymn) commonly embed references to singing (“Sing of the goddess,” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 22 170: I; “Let me sing of Nikkal-Ib,” The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani, and Other Places, ed. M. Dietrich, O. Loretz, and J. Sanmartín [Münster, 1995], 1.24.1), and sometimes more explicit information about performance is provided as well, as in Revue d’Assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 35 3 iii 14: “one of the kalû-singers stands up . . . and sings an e r s e m m a–song to Enlil to the accompaniment of the DalDallatu-drum” (The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956- ], Z, 37a). For the musicality of Sumerian verse, see P. Michalowski, “Ancient Poetics,” in Mesopotamian Poetic Language: Sumerian and Akkadian, ed. M. Vogelzang and M. Vanstiphout (Groninge: STYX, 1996), pp. 145146. 138. M. Schneider, “Primitive Music,” in The New Oxford History of Music I, Ancient and Oriental Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 31; Nettl, Music in Primitive Culture, p. 57; G. Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 34-35; M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Cambridge, MA: Clarendon, 1992), p. 39. Nagy points out that accompaniment by instrumental music is another way in which song is marked (and thus distinguished) from speech (Pindar’s Homer, pp. 33-34). 139. Nettl, Music in Primitive Culture, p. 57. 140. As Nettl notes (Music in Primitive Culture, pp. 6-7), the most important role of music in “primitive” culture is “assisting in religious rituals,” which, of course, is precisely the generative context for much of the lyric verse preserved from the ancient Near East, and especially in the Psalms. 141. Johnson, Idea of Lyric, pp. 26-29. 374 388 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:44 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse Psalms (and no doubt much else from the Bible as well) evolved as song and were frequently accompanied by instrumental music. But to limit talk of a poem’s musicality to its manner of presentation (whether it was literally sung) is to leave out much verse that has traditionally been described as lyric, including much Greek lyric (e.g., elegies and iambics were evidently not necessarily sung or accompanied by music) and is to risk missing what attracts most of us to lyric poetry in the first place: its language. Bowie surmises that “doubtless” many of the Greek lyrics selected for copying and transmission “were those whose words were of greater moment than music.”142 If there is a pervasive musicality to lyric verse beyond a narrowly performative aspect, it is to be found in “those elements which it shares with the musical forms”143 — rhythm, meter, a pervasive heightening of sonority through alliteration, assonance, and the like. And though all literature may use such musical resources, it is “the frequency and importance” of such musical practices, “rather than their exclusive use,” wherein lies their lyric distinctiveness.144 And it is this kind of musicality — the thump of rhythm and the play of sound — that we surely have in the Psalms, whether or not they were ever literally sung.145 Conclusion As I noted at the outset, my chief ambitions for my comments here were to (re)introduce the notion(s) of lyric as a critical idiom, to illustrate some of its 142. Bowie, “Lyric and Elegiac Poetry,” p. 100. 143. Johnson, “Lyric,” p. 714. 144. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 260; cf. Lindley, Lyric, p. 43; Johnson, “Lyric,” pp. 714-715. 145. About rhythm Nettl writes: it “is in some ways the most basic musical principle” (Music in Primitive Culture, p. 62). A satisfactory account of the basic rhythm(s) of Hebrew verse is still very much a desideratum, though B. Hrushovski [Harshav] with his notion of “free rhythms” has most definitely (in my opinion) pointed us in the right direction (see “Prosody, Hebrew,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica [New York: Macmillan, 1971-72], vol. 13, pp. 1200-1203; “On Free Rhythms in Modern Poetry,” in Style in Language, ed. T. Sebeok [Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960], pp. 173-190). At the core of Hrushovski’s thesis is the idea that the rhythmic organization of Hebrew verse is analogous to that of free verse poetries more generally. That is, it is variable and organized by other than numerical (i.e., metrical) modes and involves any number of features (e.g., lineation, stress or accent, syntax). The resulting asymmetry is precisely the “most conspicuous characteristic” of primitive musical rhythm (Nettl, Music in Primitive Culture, p. 63; Bruce Zuckerman put me onto the connection between the free verse–like rhythms that typify Hebrew verse and the dominant rhythmical shape of pre-classical music). 375 389 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:44 PM f. w. dobbs-allsopp chief practices and tendencies, both modally and more narrowly, and to probe some of the possibilities that thinking psalmic verse through the lens of lyric may open up. If I happen, also, to find attractive (if mostly on a priori grounds) the stronger thesis, namely, the notion that most of the psalms are describable in differing degrees as lyric, I realize that to make such a thesis more fully persuasive would require a great deal more thoroughgoing study than I have mounted here. Still, even from this abbreviated discussion I think the Psalms’ overriding and informing lyricism is recognizable. The cluster of features just reviewed, from the ghost of music that ever so faintly haunts this poetry to its tropological density, pervasive parataxis, typical brevity, and the like, especially in cumulation, distinguishes this verse as lyric. And what is more, these features are not simply present intermittently but are themselves central to and defining of the poetic experience achieved in the Psalms, individually and collectively. Here I need to stress, moreover, that by identifying the Psalms’ basic mode of discourse as lyric and by foregrounding the poems’ evaluative, expressive, and even aesthetic dimensions is not in any way to diminish the seriousness and intellective rigor of this poetry. The sentimentality of some contemporary lyric verse should not mislead us into thinking that lyric poetry in general is unable to accomplish serious work.146 It can and it does. Indeed, part of the benefit of lyric poetry lies precisely in the kind of discourse that it models and enacts and what this tells us about human understanding and reflection. As S. Heaney writes, “it is obvious that poetry’s answer to the world is not given only in terms of the content of its statement. It is given perhaps even more emphatically in terms of metre and syntax, of tone and musical trueness; and it is given also by its need to go emotionally and artistically ‘above the brim’, beyond the established norm.”147 Therefore, to (re)appreciate the Psalms’ underlying lyric medium (in its various manifestations) is to be poised to think anew how these poems themselves think, to move beyond a commentary tradition that in the main has relegated its estimation of the intellective capacities of psalms to that which can be translated into conceptual paraphrase alone, to recover those parts of psalmic thinking that thrive in ambiguity and complexity, that emerge rhythmically and through the play of syntax, that are implicit in a poem’s tone and get argued through the precision of an image. And as important as what psalmic thinking has to show us 146. See the critique in M. Kinzie, The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. pp. ix-xix, 271-290. 147. S. Heaney, Redress of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 25. 376 390 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:44 PM The Psalms and Lyric Verse and teach us is what it may engender in us as we take up and re-utter these poems. M. C. Nussbaum’s comments on Greek lyric hold true for a lyrically inspired psalmic verse as well: The image of learning expressed in this style, like the picture of reading required by it, stresses responsiveness and an attention to complexity; it discourages the search for the simple and, above all, for the reductive. It suggests to us that the world of practical choice, like the text, is articulated but never exhausted by reading; that reading must reflect and not obscure this fact, showing that the particular (or: the text) remains there unexhausted, the final arbiter of the correctness of our vision; that the correct choice (or: good interpretation) is, first and foremost, a matter of keenest and flexibility of perception, rather than of conformity to a set of simplifying principles.148 That is, psalmic poetry through its very lyricism may even inspire us to new ways of seeing and imagining, even to new ways of thinking. Human rationality, after all, as J. W. van Huyssteen, our honoree, well notes, “can never be adequately housed in one specific reasoning strategy only.”149 Lyric thinking — and by extension the kind of thinking embodied by the Psalms — is most assuredly a different kind of thinking, a thinking otherwise. 148. M. C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 69. 149. J. W. van Huyssteen, Duet or Duel? Theology and Science in a Postmodern World (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1998), p. xiv. 377 391 Shults first page proofs Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:20:44 PM