Ugaritic and Hebrew Poetic Parallelism: A Trial Cut (ˁnt I and Proverbs 2)

Description

Pardee subjects the two texts referred to in the title to minute and frequently tabulated analysis according to the systems proposed in various discussions of parallelism (principally those of T. Collins, S. A. Geller and M. O’Connor). He finds strengths and weaknesses in each, and testifies to his experience of having “gained new insights from each level of analysis” (p. 179). Thus he advocates the development of more such inclusive studies rather than limiting descriptions exclusively to one or other method, despite the practical problems of length that this raises. Beyond this, however, he is also concerned to promote the study of “distant parallelism” (often by repetition) as an aid to appreciation of the macro-structure of the passage; too often analysis of the distribution of parallelism has been limited to the bicolon or tricolon, even though these are only the “building blocks” of the poem as a whole. Two appendixes reproduce conference papers which draw out the conclusions of the detailed analysis: one presented at the First International Symposium on the Antiquities of Palestine (1981), and the other at the SBL (1982). Though they involve a good deal of repetition of what has gone before, readers may find that their more summarizing nature will provide helpful signposts to guide them through the thicket which precedes them.