Reading Hebrew Poetry in English (Brief Edition)

As my Sunday School class is studying Proverbs, I thought I’d provide them with a bit of an explanation of Hebrew poetry. If you’re someone who reads Hebrew and has done any study of Hebrew poetry, this is not for you. Don’t bother to tell me about all the things I’m leaving out. I already know.

This actually started from my intention to explain a difference in translation, so let’s start with the verse in question.

⁸ Attend, my son, to your father’s instruction
and do not reject your mother’s teaching;

Proverbs 1:8 (REB)

Or …

⁸ Hear, my child, your father’s instruction,
and do not reject your mother’s teaching;

Proverbs 1:8 (NRSV)

Or … and here’s where the problem is revealed …

⁸ My child, obey the teachings
of your parents,

Proverbs 1:8 (CEV)

So how can the Contemporary English Version come up with the translation they did? Though I think we all can recognize that the overall meaning is essentially the same, one might wonder why the CEV would alter the way in which it is expressed so much. For a discussion of various approaches to Bible translation, see my book What’s in a Version?, or the site MyBibleVersion.com that I maintain.

But here my interest is how the difference is enabled by the nature of Hebrew poetry. In English, we use various combinations of rhyme and meter for most poetic expression, though there is also much less formal free verse or even poetic prose.

Hebrew poetry does have meter. While there are many arguments as to detail, what I was taught back in ancient times when I was in school was counting accented syllables. While there are some valid objections to this, I think it generally allows one to get a fairly clear picture of the form. Unfortunately, this method is unavailable to most English readers.

Hebrew poetry is primarily characterized by parallelism of thought, so as an English reader, if you divide a sentence in Hebrew poetry into elements, you can get an idea of how these elements work in meaning. Once you divide the poetry into these elements, you can look for parallels between them.

These parallels usually come in one of three forms: synonymous, antithetical, or synthetic. In synonymous parallel, two elements essentially express the same thought. In antithetical, the elements express the thought, but in an opposite way. In synthetic parallelism, the two elements go together to express a single idea more comprehensively.

In the prior paragraph I’m bypassing a great deal of literature and also probably confusing my readers. Let’s take it to our example verse. I’m going to translate it from Hebrew as literally as possible.

_____ | Obey ________________ | my son | exhortation of your father
and | don’t leave unheeded |_________ | the instruction of your mother.

Proverbs 1:8 (my literal translation)

Now in analyzing Hebrew poetry, we would generally not separate the conjunction, which is not a separate word in Hebrew, but rather a prefix.

Multiple things are illustrated here. First, one could call this synonymous parallelism, except that the verbs are stated antithetically, “obey” versus “do not disobey,” while the instruction is synthetic, combining the teaching/discipline of parents into “exhortation (or discipline) of your father” and “instruction of your mother.” In addition, you can see how an element can be left out of one or the other line, yet it applies to both.

You get the full impact of the verse by seeing the way these two lines stand side by side. In some cases you can get a false impression when you fail to realize that two lines are not expressing the same thing, and you will generally understand a verse, usually 2-3 lines, better if you let them work together to bring their message.

The reason I chose the REB, NRSV, and CEV is that the REB and CEV are considered functional equivalent translations, while the NRSV is a formal equivalence translation. Functional equivalence means to try to find English words for the Hebrew that have the same impact on the English-speaking audience that the Hebrew would have had on the original audience. Formal equivalent translations try to keep the forms as close as possible in a more word-for-word translation.

You can pick out the elements I identified from either the REB or the NRSV. The CEV, however, is translated primarily to be read by people whose first language is not English. It has departed from the form in order to convey the function to its audience.

Why doesn’t the REB do so? Generally because it is written in a more formal variety of English and finds the continued repetition of the Hebrew to be quite comprehensible.

Again, I have quite obviously over-summarized some things and left many out, but I hope this will help.

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI, and modified by me using Photoshop.)