Poetics and Parallelism: Some Comments on James Kugel's the Idea of Biblical Poetry

Abstract

is one of the most disturbingly brilliant and paradoxical of biblical critics, a poet, gifted with astonishing literary sensitivity, who recoils from its exercise, who writes with compelling passion and detached irony. The Idea of Biblical Poetry is a pleasure to read and was obviously fun to write, a book which reminds us, through its mastery of critical rhetoric and immense learning, of the playfulness of being a scholar, a consummate craftsman, and thus undermines its own importance; one feels that for Kugel writing about the fallacies of interpretation and the phenomonology of remote texts is a pastime (and bread and butter), compared to the vital business of finding words for himself. The argument, to summarize it briefly, is that each generation has projected its own conventions and concept of poetry onto the Bible, which admits no such category; this further reduces the authority of the interpreter, including Kugel himself, since he too is implicated in the exposure. The last pages are a plea for such awareness. For example, wittingly or not, it is a masterpiece of deconstruction, the fashionable sado-masochistic genre whose ultimate victim is the practitioner himself, created by the illusions he unravels. The other side of this, however, is religious, and therein lies the book's mystery and urgency. For the critic is writing about the source of his tradition, the poet about the roots of his words. The text has an otherness, infinitely generative of interpretation, for which the book is quest-the Torah behind its seventy facesl-which is yet

Hebrew Poetry and the Appositive Style: Parallelism, Requiescat in pace

“…Identifying the presence of apposition in poetry is certainly not a novel idea. Apposition is mentioned by, among others, Collins (1973), O'Connor (1980 [1997]), Landy (1984), and Dobbs-Allsopp (2015). Indeed, some of these authors use apposition throughout their descriptions of BH poetic verse.…”

That’s No Literature, That’s My Bible: On James Kugel’s Objections to the Idea of Biblical Poetry

“…On this issue, Francis Landy's review pointed out the limits of Kugel's formalist and rigid distinction between prose and poetry, and offered a richer concept of poetic language. 3 Finally, on Kugel's last point, whether we should speak of 'poetry' in the Bible, he seems to be the lone dissenter against a use that has become quite common in biblical scholarship, for convenience, if for no other reasons.…”