Psalms:
Bk1: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
Bk 2: 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
Bk 3: 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89
Bk 4: 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106
Bk5: 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119a 119b 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150
Additional Psalms: 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 Samuel Chronicles
Essays: Intro - Music - Form & Language
Parallelism: "is the principle of balance which is admitted by all to be the most characteristic and essential feature of the poetic form of the Psalms. By synonymous, synthetic, antithetic, emblematic, stair-like, or introverted parallelism, thought is balanced with thought, line with line, couplet with couplet, strophe with antistrophe, in the lyric upbuilding of the poetic picture or imprecation or exhortation" - so says the author of the website of the Russian Orthodox Church (click here).
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Meter: as opposed to metre: though it is the very existence of the technique, spelled either way, that is the real controversy. Is there any meter in the Psalms? The Jews of the first century CE definitely thought so, and the Jews who sing and chant these Psalms in the 21st century CE still think so. Flavius Josephus was absolutely certain when he spoke of the "hexameters of Mosheh" in "Antiquities 2-16, 4 and 4, 8, 44" and the "trimeters and tetrameters and manifold meters of the odes and hymns of David" in "Antiquities 7:xii, 3". But Christian and lapsed-Christian scholars (secular scholars from a Christian-atheist rather than a Jewish-atheist background) still argue the matter.
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Philo of Alexandria, in his "De vita Mosis, 1:5" even goes so far as to claim that Mosheh had formal training in "the theory of rhythm and harmony", which I think we can regard as overegging the matzah somewhat. And yet the earliest of the Christian writers shared his view. Origen (d. 254, also in Alexandria) likewise regards the Psalms as being written in trimeters and tetrameters, and draws particular attention to Psalm 118 as his exemplar of this.
Ditto Eusebius (d. 340), writing in his "De Praeparatione evangelica" (11:5), while Jerome, in his commentary on Eusebius ("Praef. ad Eusebii chronicon" P.L. 27, 36), is convinced that he can detect iambs, Alcaics, and even Sapphics in the Psalter; in a letter to Paula (P.L. 22,442), he explains that the acrostic Psalms 111 and 112 (110 and 111 in some versions) are made up of iambic trimeters, whereas the acrostic Psalms 119 and 145 (118 and 144 in some versions) are iambic tetrameters.
So why the squabble among the later scholars, post-Reformation? Possibly because it was necessary to find things to argue with Catholics about, and this one didn't get you sent to the stake or even excommunicated. Possibly because every generation tends, usually foolishly, to see the world-gone-by through the lens of the Zeitgeist, the world as it is now. And poetry had gone through fundamental changes over the previous thousand years, European verse-forms now employing a syllabic rather than a tonic meter; and tonic just happens to have been the determining principle in most of the ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian poetry as well as the Yehudit. This needs an example, I realise, so let us go for Psalm 109:17
109:17 VA YE'EHAV KELALAH VA TEVO'EHU VE LO CHAPHETS BIVRACHAH VA TIRCHAK MIMENU
וַיֶּאֱהַב קְלָלָה וַתְּבוֹאֵהוּ וְלֹא חָפֵץ בִּבְרָכָה וַתִּרְחַק מִמֶּנּוּ
KJ (King James translation): As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.
BN (BibleNet translation): O how he loved cursing - and it came to him; and he took no delight from blessing - and it stayed away from him.
A verse divided into four distinct parts (tetrameters), which should therefore be presented, not as a prose line but as:
VA YE'EHAV KELALAH
VA TEVO'EHU
VE LO CHAPHETS BIVRACHAH
VA TIRCHAK MIMENU
but read it out loud, in Yehudit, and you will hear too many syllables: the first in Tevo'ehu, which needs to lose that stressed middle syllable, the second wherever you wish to identify it in the fourth line, but probably it's TIRCHAK that's troubling your cadences. A case could be made for that last line being anapestic, but not for the second line; nonetheless it is a perfect tetrameter in the Yehudit, and a reader will ellide (probably slur, but theoretically ellide) the excess syllables in the singing or chanting, augmenting not diminishing the tone in so doing.
but read it out loud, in Yehudit, and you will hear too many syllables: the first in Tevo'ehu, which needs to lose that stressed middle syllable, the second wherever you wish to identify it in the fourth line, but probably it's TIRCHAK that's troubling your cadences. A case could be made for that last line being anapestic, but not for the second line; nonetheless it is a perfect tetrameter in the Yehudit, and a reader will ellide (probably slur, but theoretically ellide) the excess syllables in the singing or chanting, augmenting not diminishing the tone in so doing.
The verse also happens to be a superb example of both Zeugma and Syllepsis (for which see below): his cursing being his use of obscene language or derogations, his curse being grief, sorrow or affliction - easy for us to follow because the word "curse" works zeugmatically in English too; the syllepsis is in the second couplet. And, even better, it is a splendid exemplar of Parallelism functioning through Echo-Lines. So many standard techniques, in just the one verse!
Alliteration and Assonance/Dissonance are too frequent to be listable, but need to be mentioned because they are key factors in tonal rhythm and metre. (There are, throughout, endless alliterations along lengthy lines, thoroughly thematically entwined, endlessly ending on a thought or theme that is interconnected with the phrase's former formulations... that sort of thing).
The Acrostic or Alphabetic Psalms are numbers 9, 10, 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145. The letters of the alphabet begin successive lines, couplets, or strophes. In Psalm 119 the same letter begins eight successive lines in each of the twenty-two alphabetic strophes. In Psalms 13, 29, 62, 148 and 150 the same word or words are repeated many times; a technique which has no formal name in English ("boring" is a descriptive adjective, not a formal noun).
Rhymes, generally by repetition of the same suffix, can be found significantly in Psalms 2, 13, 27, 30, 54, 55, 142, and less often in many others; these rhymes occur at the ends of lines and in caesural pauses, and generally tell us what kind of musical form and tone is likely to have accompanied the Psalms. In addition, there are hundreds of Homophones - two words of different meaning but similar or even identical sound, employed to enhance either tone and/or meaning (and no, people who dislike, or even hate, homophones, are not homophobic, those two words are almost homophones; the word here would be homophonopobic).
Verse-form: The verse-form of the Tanach that we are all accustomed to was artificially imposed by the Christian translators, and is not part of the original of any of the books in the anthology. Yehudit texts tend to be parchment scrolls of continuous writing: no vowels, no punctuation, no line-breaks. But with the Psalms we can deduce form, and state with conviction that lines were grouped into strophes and antistrophes, commonly in pairs and triplets, rarely in greater multiples; at times an independent strophe, like the epode of the Greek chorus, was used between one or more strophes and the corresponding antistrophes.
Zeugma is a figure of speech in which the same word is applied to two others, but each having a different sense (John and his driving licence expired last week; the fisherman caught three trout and a severe cold...)
Syllepsis (which should correctly be sullepsis) is really just an ungrammatical form of zeugma, where the two conceits are similarly conjoined, but the grammar is only correct in one of them (neither this example of zeugma, nor any of the possible examples of syllepsis, is serving effectively as an example of both zeugma and syllepsis - would actually make a perfect illustration of both zeugma and syllepsis: the key lies in "is", which should be "are" in the second instance).
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Alliteration and Assonance/Dissonance are too frequent to be listable, but need to be mentioned because they are key factors in tonal rhythm and metre. (There are, throughout, endless alliterations along lengthy lines, thoroughly thematically entwined, endlessly ending on a thought or theme that is interconnected with the phrase's former formulations... that sort of thing).
✡
The Acrostic or Alphabetic Psalms are numbers 9, 10, 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145. The letters of the alphabet begin successive lines, couplets, or strophes. In Psalm 119 the same letter begins eight successive lines in each of the twenty-two alphabetic strophes. In Psalms 13, 29, 62, 148 and 150 the same word or words are repeated many times; a technique which has no formal name in English ("boring" is a descriptive adjective, not a formal noun).
✡
Rhymes, generally by repetition of the same suffix, can be found significantly in Psalms 2, 13, 27, 30, 54, 55, 142, and less often in many others; these rhymes occur at the ends of lines and in caesural pauses, and generally tell us what kind of musical form and tone is likely to have accompanied the Psalms. In addition, there are hundreds of Homophones - two words of different meaning but similar or even identical sound, employed to enhance either tone and/or meaning (and no, people who dislike, or even hate, homophones, are not homophobic, those two words are almost homophones; the word here would be homophonopobic).
✡
Verse-form: The verse-form of the Tanach that we are all accustomed to was artificially imposed by the Christian translators, and is not part of the original of any of the books in the anthology. Yehudit texts tend to be parchment scrolls of continuous writing: no vowels, no punctuation, no line-breaks. But with the Psalms we can deduce form, and state with conviction that lines were grouped into strophes and antistrophes, commonly in pairs and triplets, rarely in greater multiples; at times an independent strophe, like the epode of the Greek chorus, was used between one or more strophes and the corresponding antistrophes.
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Zeugma is a figure of speech in which the same word is applied to two others, but each having a different sense (John and his driving licence expired last week; the fisherman caught three trout and a severe cold...)
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Syllepsis (which should correctly be sullepsis) is really just an ungrammatical form of zeugma, where the two conceits are similarly conjoined, but the grammar is only correct in one of them (neither this example of zeugma, nor any of the possible examples of syllepsis, is serving effectively as an example of both zeugma and syllepsis - would actually make a perfect illustration of both zeugma and syllepsis: the key lies in "is", which should be "are" in the second instance).
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Anadiplosis: the reduplication of key words; words beginning one sentence that have been predominant in previous phrases (as I have just done with the word "words" here).
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Cento: A piece of writing that is built from other people's writings. With the Psalms this is invariably scriptural quotations, sometimes used to make a theological point more easily, sometimes as structural conjunctives. The most famous example of a Cento in modern poetry is T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" (click here for an explanation, here for the text), though a case has been made by some for the Harry Potter books.
Psalms:
Bk1: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
Bk 2: 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
Bk 3: 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89
Bk 4: 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106
Bk5: 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119a 119b 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150
Additional Psalms: 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 Samuel Chronicles
Essays: Intro - Music - Form & Language
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