Formula Criticism and the Poetry of the Old Testament

Description

Formula criticism is something of a novelty in Old Testament studies, although it has been developed and used over a period of thirty years or so in classical research, primarily in relation to the origin of poetic verse in Homer. It is concerned with the use of repetition in poetry, and in particular with the collocation of specific word pairs. Hence the phenomenon of repetition and association which has become familiar to Old Testament scholars in connection with poetic parallelism is taken up here and explained in a new way as a consequence of a particular technique of verse-making rooted in an oral stage of such poetic composition. Following earlier work by R. C. Culley and W. Whallon, Watters argues that there is noticeably present in the Psalter evidence of this oral verse-making technique. The psalm authors are held to be already familiar with particular word pairs which each of them then uses in his own distinctive, but formalistic, way. Against Culley, however, Watters argues that the widespread presence of such formalistic word pairs in the Psalter cannot be taken to prove that the psalms were originally composed in a free oral fashion. We should first need to establish that such word pairs are always the product of free oral composition, which lies beyond the evidence that we have.