Proverbial poetry: its settings and syntax
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The Conceptual Setting of Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 809 The Canonical Setting of Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 811 The Historical Settings of Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 813 The Structural Setting of Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 817 Approaches to Hebrew Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 821 A Linguistic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 826 Literary Cohesion in Proverbs 10? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 833 A Linguistic Synthesis of the Syntax of Proverbial Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 835 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . APPENDIX I: Collins' Line Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 843 APPENDIX II: An O'Connorian Analysis of the Lines of Proverbs 10-15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 848 APPENDIX III: Ordered by First Colon Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 859 APPENDIX IV: Ordered by Second Colon Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 864 APPENDIX V: A Comparison with O'Connor's Line Configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 868 APPENDIX VI: Types of Noun Phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 869 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 889 INDEX OF AUTHORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 949 SCRIPTURE INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 963 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AB Anchor Bible AJSL American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literature ANET J. B Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts AnOr Analecta Orientalia BA Biblical Archaeologist BASOR Bulletin of the American Society of Oriental Research Bib Biblica BO Bibliotheca orientalis BSac Bibliotheca Sacra BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin BWL W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature BZAW Beihefte zur ZAW CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly Con B Coniectanea biblica CurTM Currents in Theology and Missions EvQ Evangelical Quarterly EvT Evangelische Theologie ExpTim Expository Times HTR Harvard Theological Review HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual IDB G. A. Buttrick (ed.), Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible IEJ Israel Exploration Journal Int Interpretation ITQ Irish Theological Quarterly JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion JANESCU Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society JBL Journal of Biblical Literature JBR Journal of Bible and Religion JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies JEA Journal of Egyptian Archaeology JETS Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society JJS Journal of Jewish Studies JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies JQR Jewish Quarterly Review JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament JSS Journal of Semitic Studies Or Orientalia OrAnt Oriens antiquus OTL Old Testament Library OTWSA Ou-Testamentiese Werkgenmeenskap South Africa SAIW J. L. Crenshaw (ed.), Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom. New York: KTAV, 1976. SBLASP Society of Biblical Literature Abstracts SBT Studies in Biblical Theology Scr Scripture SJT Scottish Journal of Theology TB Tyndale Bulletin TBu Theologische Bucherei TToday Theology Today UF Ugaritische Forschungen VT Vetus Testamentum VTSup Vetus Testamentum, Supplements ZAW Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft INTRODUCTION Until recently, the teachings of the ancient sages found in the book of Proverbs had been neglected by modern scholarship, which viewed the atomic statements as trite truisms too simplistic to speak to the psychologically and sociologically labyrinthical quandries faced by modern man. The bald, empirical sentences and facile, rationalistic deductions were perceived as culturally- bound expressions with little relevance to the modern pother. Proverbs' banal earthiness did not appear to rise to the lofty heights of divine encounter, as found in Isaiah; nor did its sayings penetrate the mysteries of the divine hand's piloting history from chaos to the salvation of a remnant, as beautifully narrated in the historical books. Thus, exegetes and Old Testament theologians alike, thinking that Proverbs did not participate in the major motifs of the Old Testament, left Proverbs untouched--as the orphan of the Old Testament. Its claims of being the reflections of the wisest sages were viewed as unattractive, abecedarian quips whose hugger-mugger and disarray left the more systematic western mind with a feeling of muddledness rather than mystery. The parallelistic beauty of the poetic bi-colon no longer fascinated its readers, who viewed the antitheses as redundant and banally prosaic. The purpose of this study is to recreate the pragmatic context from which the sentences arose and to which they spoke in such a way as to provide a foundation for the establishment of the vitality and applicability of these sayings to the present situation. The approach will be in two complementary directions. First, the pragmatic setting will be developed in order to provide an illocutionary (i.e. the author's/user's speech act) basis for reviving of the perlocutionary (i.e. the effect of that speech act on the original audience) appreciation of the message and artistry of the sentence literature.1 Second, the creative, poetic genius of the sages and amazing, aesthetic delight will be unlocked via modern techniques of linguistic and poetic analysis. These two major goals may be broken down into more easily obtainable sub-goals. The first goal of providing an adequate description of the pragmatic setting should not be foreign to Old Testament students, as it stresses the necessity of ____________________ 1 John Searle, Ferene Kiefer, and Manfred Bierwisch, Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics, in Synthese Language Library, vol. 10 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980), p. vii. recreating the historical poetic moment in which the proverbial sentences were originally given, both in terms of the original author's intentions (illocutions) and in terms of what it did to the initial hearers (perlocutions). Thus, the study is akin to a Sitz im Leben type of approach in that it desires to show how a particular setting gives rise to a corresponding literary form. While this paper will seek to demonstrate that such a one-to-one mapping from setting to form is too simplistic, there will be an examination of the various, original, sociological and institutional settings of wisdom and the diverse forms which flowed from those settings. The pragmatic situation goes beyond the setting in life to a consideration of the Sitz im Literatur of the sayings as formulated in the other ancient Near Eastern cultures from third millennium Ebla and Sumer down to Ptolemaic Egypt. The international character of the sayings will provide a helpful backdrop for understanding how and why the Israelite sages formulated their messages as they did. Not only are the original historic and literary settings necessary for an adequate understanding, but also the canonical and philosophical settings must be forwarded. What role do the proverbial sentences play in the canon? How are they different from other canonical formulations? How are they similar? What is their unique contribution? What nexus is there between the message of
of the theological arena in which wisdom operated will help highlight wisdom's contribution. It is indeed peculiar that the great redemptive act of the Old Testament, the Exodus, is not mentioned, nor are any of the mighty acts of God in the conquest and settlement. The heroes of Heilsgeschichte are all strangely absent, as are the cutting pronouncements of divine judgment on a sinful people. These canonical expressions of the supernatural seem to give way to mundane fatherly directives to hard work and techniques for pleasing one's superiors. The literary forms employed are, particularly in Proverbs 10-15, much shorter than those used by poets elsewhere. These forms will also be examined as reflective of the sages' Weltanschauung. Having broadly introduced the historical, literary, canonical, and philosophical settings of the sentences, the study will then turn to the analysis of the text (Proverbs 10-15) itself. An attempt will be made to isolate and analyze the grammatical constraints which provide the parameters of proverbial poetic expression. In order to recapture the poetic moment from the perspective of the either sage or the student, one must come to an aesthetic appreciation of Proverbs--not just in terms of the message of its words, but more in terms of the artistic relationship between words and larger constituents of poetic expression, including the line itself. Until one can thrill in the understanding of the poetic line and the situation of the proverbial moment, the sayings will remain but trite observations of the obvious. Proverbs, more than any other Hebrew poetic expression, allows one to examine the bare bi-colon with minimal strophic constriction. This study desires to synthesize the most sophisticated techniques of poetic analysis which have recently arisen in a plethora of needed dissertations and discussions1 on Hebrew poetry (vid. studies by A. Berlin, T. Collins, A. Cooper, E. Greenstein, S. Geller, J. Kugel, and especially M. O'Connor). Recent work has moved to further refine the Lowth-Gray-Robinson semantic parallelism approach (synonymous, antithetic, emblematic, etc.) and to explicitly describe grammatical parallelism (syntactic and morphological). The merits and demerits of each approach will be discussed and a combination of the methods employed by O'Connor and Collins will be applied to the proverbial corpus (Proverbs 10-15). Geller's approach, ____________________
(1984), especially articles by Patrick Miller ("Meter, Parallelism, and Tropes: The Search for Poetic Style," pp. 99-106), Wilfred Watson ("A Review of Kugel's The Idea of Biblical Poetry," pp. 89-98), Francis Landy ("Poetics and Parallelism: Some Comments on James Kugel's The Idea of Biblical Poetry," pp. 61-87), and James Kugel ("Some Thoughts on Future Research into Biblical Style: Addenda to The Idea of Biblical Poetry," pp. 107-17). though more comprehensive, was not opted for because it was felt that its notational system would probably be too daedal for the present purposes. Not only will this dissertation seek to utilize and reflect sensitivities gained from these excellent studies, but an attempt will be made to propose a deictic linguistic tool for the collection and analysis of poetic syntactic data. There will be a survey of recent linguistic techniques and the selection of a modified form of Kenneth Pike's tagmemics. The six box tagmeme will allow the analyst to monitor and collect data from both the surface grammar and deep grammar of the poetic lines. Case grammar, which explicates deep grammar relationships, is as close as this study will get to a semantic analysis. Because both deep and surface grammar are explicitly monitored in the tagmeme, inter-lineal crossovers between surface syntax and deep grammar will manifest the craftsmanship of the ancient sages. Thus, modern linguistics provides the tool which will highlight poetic syntactic artistry both within and between lines. Such techniques are extremely important, not only because they reflect more adequate theories of language than the traditional approach, but also because they allow for the compilation of syntactic data via computer-aided
be made with syntactic data from other corpora, which, in this study, has facilitated syntactic specification of genre constraints. Chomsky's notion of syntactic transformation has been employed with great benefit, as often there are syntactic transformations between the parallel lines. This extremely potent idea will be broached and initial experimental studies and preliminary results will be compiled specifying the syntactical transformations commonly used by the sages. The presence of syntactic transformations suggests that the parallel lines may be even more closely syntactically knit than earlier proffered by approaches which merely noted syntactic repetitions. Thus describing the syntax by the most satisfying linguistic techniques available has moved the modern reader one step closer to the recreation of the syntactic constraints which the original author employed and the hearers enjoyed. Thus, syntactically, the modern reader may now participate in the aesthetic appreciation and dynamic understanding of the proverbial sentences as they were originally given. No claim to completeness or exhaustiveness has been made. Rather a method is proposed ____________________
example of a tagmemic approach to the nominal clause in the Pentateuch.
of Hebrew poetry. If nothing else this study demonstrates the infinitely intricate beauty both in terms of the expression of poetic features of syntactic equivalence and variation. The stressing of syntax and the relative avoidance of phonetics and semantics leave the present study knowingly lop-sided. Various phonetic equivalences and sound-sense relationships have been observed in a non-structured way and the reader does well to pay attention to the brief comments which suggest that formal phonetic studies are needed for a fuller appreciation of proverbial poetry.1 Since the discipline of semantics is presently developing, it is hoped that an approach retaining the meaning orientation of traditional semantics, the lucidity of componential analysis, and the scientific precision of formal semantics will be forthcoming within the next decade. The need ultimately is for a composite approach to poetry which includes linguistically sophisticated approaches to syntax, phonetics, and semantics in such a way that equivalences and variations between and within parallel lines may be monitored as well as plays between categories (vid. Prov 11:18). Until then, modern perceptions of the rich hues of Hebrew poetry will remain faded into monochromic ____________________
Hebrew," JSS 28 (1983):49-63. prosaicness. An exordial discussion will, in an intuitive manner, demonstrate the fecundity of such a comprehensive approach by validating the presence of literary cohesion in Proverbs 10--a text in which literary cohesion is almost universally ignored or rejected. The actual chapters of the dissertation break down basically into two halves. The first examines the various types of settings: (1) the comparative literary setting; (2) the conceptual wisdom setting; (3) the canonical setting of wisdom; (4) the historical setting of wisdom; and (5) the structural setting of wisdom. These background chapters will be followed by a more linguistically and textually oriented section which will introduce various approaches to poetics (ch. VI) and linguistics (ch. VII) and then apply the scheme designed in this study to the text of Proverbs 10-15 (ch. VIII). The corpus (ch. VIII) is included, as it is in most recent dissertations (vid. Geller and O'Connor), so that the results may be checked and the method illustrated. Finally, chapter IX will demonstrate the literary cohesion of Proverbs 10. This is one of the discoveries made by this study--demonstrating the vitality of the method employed. Chapter X will provide a desultory analysis of selected syntactic patterns which the corpus has brought to light. The goal of this study has not been the production of results, but of a methodology which will adequately, not exhaustively, describe Hebrew poetic syntax. The model will be tested on the corpus of Proverbs 10-15 and the results compared to the analyses of Collins and O'Connor. The study corroborates O'Connor's suggestion that there are syntactic constraints on the Hebrew line. It goes on to suggest that there are many sub-lineal binding techniques, which occur below the isomorphic matching of syntactic lines, between the units/constituents of the paralleled lines. These iso/homomorphic syntactic mappings between lines often manifest surface structure equivalences and at other times evince deep structure equivalences with all sorts of aesthetically pleasing combinations in-between. It is hoped that the reader will be able to go beyond the mechanical details of the linguistic system employed to begin to intuitively read and delight in the artistic creativity of the ancient sages. Only then will one be able to return and recreate the original poetic moment in his own culture and blissfully inculcate its trans- cultural principles into the memory (זכר) of his own son. CHAPTER I THE COMPARATIVE LITERARY SETTINGS OF WISDOM Introduction Renewed scholarly attention to wisdom literature has received impetus from two sources, which have provided not only an inchoation for initial studies but also have biased the direction which those inquiries have taken. The first source of stimulation was the discovery of The Teaching of Amenemope in 1888, its consequent publication by Budge in 1924,1 and, later, Erman's2 elucidation of the nexus between Amenemope and the book of Proverbs. Erman's work created a tidal wave of publications, which has continued unintermittently to the ____________________
and Co., 1923), p. 12; also E. A. W. Budge, The Teaching of Amen-em-Apt Son of Kanekht: The Egyptian Hieroglyphic Text and an English Translation with Translations of the Moral and Religious Teachings of Egyptian Kings and Officials Illustrating The Development of Religious Philosophy in Egypt During a Period of About Two Thousand Years (London: Martin Hopkinson and Company, 1924). 2 Adolf Erman, "Ein agyptische Quelle der 'Spruche Salomos,'" Sitzungs-berichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenchaften zu Berlin: Phil.-hist. Klasse 15 (May 1924):86-93. present.1 Further discoveries of numerous "Instruction" texts from Egypt, several proverb collections from Sumer, and the libraries of Ashurbanipal have provided the needed texts to sustain this recent interest in wisdom literature. The second source of stimulation has come from the discipline of Biblical Theology. Major tensions have arisen in the attempt to fit wisdom into theological models which have myopically focused on the
This chapter will briefly survey the ancient wisdom materials from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Syro- Palestine. The following chapter will summarize the discussions which have taken place under the province of biblical theology in its struggle with the relationship between alleged Mitten and wisdom.
Ptahhotep to 'Onchsheshonqy A survey of the ancient Near Eastern sources provides a requisite Sitz im Literatur for a study of the biblical book of Proverbs, in terms of the literary forms, ____________________ 1 Glendon E. Bryce, A Legacy of Wisdom: The Egyptian Contribution to the Wisdom of Israel (London: Associated University Presses, 1979). Bryce gives the most recent, thorough treatment of the subject. Coming to quite a different conclusion is John Ruffle, "The Teaching of Amenemope and its Connection with the Book of Proverbs," TB 28 (1977):29-68. genres, and motifs utilized in wisdom literature. Such materials greatly aid our understanding of Proverbs and Yüklə 6,58 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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