Read more
Central to understanding the prophecy and prayer of the Hebrew Bible are the unspoken assumptions that shaped them-their genres. Modern scholars describe these works as "poetry," but there was no corresponding ancient Hebrew term or concept. Scholars also typically assume it began as "oral literature," a concept based more in evolutionist assumptions than evidence. Is biblical poetry a purely modern fiction, or is there a more fundamental reason why its definition escapes us?
Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms changes the debate by showing how biblical poetry has worked as a mirror, reflecting each era's own self-image of verbal art. Yet Vayntrub also shows that this problem is rooted in a crucial pattern within the Bible itself: the texts we recognize as "poetry" are framed as powerful and ancient verbal performances, dramatic speeches from the past. The Bible's creators presented what we call poetry in terms of their own image of the ancient and the oral, and understanding their native theories of Hebrew verbal art gives us a new basis to rethink our own.
List of contents
Acknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter 1. From Proverbs and Poetry to Prose: The Bible’s Own "Great Divide"; Chapter 2. The Idea of Mashal: Scholarship’s Quest for the Essence of Poetry; Chapter 3. Wisdom, Orality, and Recovering Native Poetics; Chapter 4. The Speech Performance Frame: The Case of Balaam’s Speeches; Chapter 5. Social Dimensions of Speech and its Framing in Isaiah 14 and 1 Samuel 24; Chapter 6. Titles and Tales: Framing Speech Performance; Conclusion; Bibliography; Writings Index; Subject Index
About the author
Jacqueline Vayntrub is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School, USA.
Summary
Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms changes the debate by showing how biblical poetry has worked as a mirror, reflecting each era?s own self-image of verbal art.
Additional text
"Vayntrub expertly navigates her way through the genres of biblical poetry and the history of scholarship, providing a lucid explication of the Bible’s representation of poetry as oral performance and instruction. An elegant and erudite contribution to a new wave of studies of biblical poetry." - Ronald Hendel, University of California Berkeley, USA
"Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms is necessary for any biblical scholars interested in poetry, literary cultures, or orality. Moreover, even folks outside of biblical studies will find Beyond Orality to be of interest on account of Vayntrub’s discussion of how the Great Divide has played out in biblical scholarship for the last 400 years [...] it is, undoubtedly, necessary in the Religious Studies section at any serious university." - The Biblical Review
"Beyond Orality is an indispensable work on aesthetics, hermeneutics, and book history for the biblical philologist. As a work of methodology, however, it is even more important given the idea it represents. Vayntrub demonstrates that even our most basic modern literary categories, such as “prose” and “poetry”, are not probative universals but the accidents of history. In a sense, Vayntrub has found a way to make her sources do criticism, a development that philology has awaited since the colonial critique. Beyond Orality reintegrates theory and philology in an enviable but imitable way, giving scholars of ancient literary traditions - be it Akkadian, Sanskrit, Chinese or Kʼicheʼ - all the tools they need to adapt her approach to other ancient textualities." - Reading Religion
