Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Hebrew Poetry

  • Reading Hebrew Poetry in English (Brief Edition)

    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.)

  • Brief Thoughts on Hebrew Poetry

    A few days ago Wayne Leman blogged about translating Hebrew poetry, and referred to an article by Philip C. Stine Biblical Poetry and Translation. The article is really excellent, and nothing I’m about to say here is intended to criticize that article as such.

    I’ve been very interested in translation of Hebrew poetry, but I think successful translation ranges from difficult to effectively impossible. The two translations I think do the best job into English are the Revised English Bible, and New Jerusalem Bible. One key feature of the NJB is the use of the Yahweh rather than “the LORD” for the name of God, which would obviously make it unacceptable to orthodox and conservative Jewish readers. In poetic terms, however, I think that helps just a bit.

    Referring to James Kugel, Stine says:

    In fact, he examines many traditional classifications of biblical parallelism, including the categories of Lowth, synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic, and finds them wanting. The ways of parallelism are numerous and varied, and the intensity of the semantic parallelism established between clauses might be said to range from zero perceivable correspondence to near perceivable differentiation.

    Now this is a good point, and one that a couple of my professors made to me when I was in graduate school back in 1979-1980, though perhaps not so clearly as Stine has done. The problem is that in order to teach this material to Bible students a bit of terminology is necessary. One can’t just say, even to beginning Hebrew students, that there is “some relationship” between the clauses. Nonetheless, a number of errors result from oversimplification. One of these is the idea that one can determine the definition of an unknown word by finding it in parallel with another term. Now such parallelism can contribute to our understanding of a word, and can give us a starting point in studying it, but it doesn’t determine it, as some people think it does. Without knowing the meaning of the word, the very thing sought, one cannot be certain what type of parallelism one is dealing with.

    So let me just suggest here that the terms synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic are quite useful. Like any labeling system, they oversimplify. Indeed, any system of labels is by nature less complex than reality and is provided precisely to allow such simplification. In order to improve accuracy, however, students should be taught that the actual parallelism will lie along a line from complete parallelism of thought to either complete opposition or through a synthetic combination.

    Now translating this is much harder, and comes back to the issue of how much interpretation the translator should do, and how much should be left to the modern reader. I’ve been playing around with this before, and commented in Reading Psalm 46, in which I also link to a couple of “transformations.”

    Hebrew parallelism does not have the same effect on English readers as it presumably did on readers of the Hebrew original. Thus I would suggest there is room for a broad range of translation possibilities, from a version that copies the poetic forms from Hebrew into English, to ones that might take the thought and express it in an English poetic form. I believe Bible translation and exposition would benefit from more transformations, re-presentations of Biblical material not only in new languages, but in new and/or different forms.

    One further note on Stine. He goes through the problems of defining poetry, and that’s a standard problem with Biblical material. Without a solid, understandable definition it’s hard to discuss what is poetry and what’s not, and how to deal with it. I think the problem with this definition is precisely the same as the problem with labels for types of parallelism. We are putting a small number of labels on a continuum–synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic on the one hand, poetry and prose on the other. But poetry and prose do not exist in well defined pockets in real life, and thus our labels will be problematic. On encountering a Biblical passage one might ask, “Should this be presented divided into lines, or paragraphed?” rather than asking whether it’s poetry or prose. Whether it’s technically poetry or not, if it presents well in defined lines, it might be best to present it that way.