609 - The Art of Biblical Poetry

The Art of Biblical Poetry

By Robert Alter

New York, Basic Books, 1985. 228 Pp. $17.95.

The author's earlier work, The Art of Biblical Narrative, has had a large impact on biblical studies and established itself as a basic work in the literary study of the Bible. This more recent work seeks to do a similar thing for biblical poetry, that is, describe its basic features and demonstrate its

610 - The Art of Biblical Poetry

presence in various segments of the Old Testament in a way that enables the reader of such poetry to understand how poetic features serve as a vehicle for meaning. Alter's focus is on the phenomenon of parallelism and the types of movement from one part or colon of the line to the next. He sees the characteristic movement of meaning as "one of heightening or intensification (as in the paradigmatic case of numerals), of focusing, specification, concretization, even what could be called dramatization." His concern "is to point to the direction in which the reader can look for meaning, not to undertake an exercise in taxonomy." One of the positive features of the book is that Alter not only characterizes the dynamics of parallelism in a way that helps one see the movement of a line of poetry, but he goes on to show the movement of the whole poem from line to line. A series of chapters takes the reader into the Psalms, Job, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and prophecy to see how the poetic dimensions of these books work and convey the meaning of the poem. Along with James Kugel's The Idea of Biblical Poetry, Alter's book will be of great help to those who not only want to understand the nature of biblical poetry, but also want to be sensitive to the interpretive possibilities that reside in that poetry.

Patrick D. Miller, Jr., Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N.J.