The Ideas of Biblical Poetry: Aesthetics and Literary History

Abstract

The Ideas of Biblical PoetryAesthetics and Literary History Elaine T. James and Steven Weitzman While the study of biblical poetry has a venerable history of scholarship, at least since Robert Lowth’s De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii Habitae (1753), the modern literary study of the Bible since the 1980s has had much more to say about biblical prose, focusing much of its energy on analyzing narratives in works like Genesis and 1–2 Samuel. In 2007, for example, Prooftexts published a special issue dedicated to the legacy of Robert Alter and the literary study of the Bible. The essays in that volume dealt almost exclusively with what Alter had termed “the art of biblical narrative.” In the years since 2007, however, there has been a distinct rise in interest in the study of biblical poetry among scholars committed to the aesthetic turn championed by Alter and others, although they have taken research in new directions. This special issue of Prooftexts seeks to advance this conversation by calling attention to research that probes the historically contextualized ideas of biblical poetry—how biblical poetry has been received as poetry in different periods. Philip Sidney’s sophisticated and pithy Defence of Poesie, published posthumously in 1595, offers one example of a thinker grappling with ideas about poetry through the lens of biblical aesthetics. For Sidney, the valor and possibility of poetry [End Page 1] is modeled by the Bible itself, which, he noted, “hath whole parts in it poetical.”1 We point to this example because it represents a turning point in literary study and anticipates the influential work of both Lowth and Johann Gottfried Herder, forerunner of German Romanticism, two centuries and more later.2 Within the intellectual stream of European Romanticism and the rise of the university in the early modern period, these scholars brought Sidney’s passing observations into full critical examination. Lowth shed light on parallelism, a common technique in Psalms and other biblical poetic texts that he regarded as the central formal dimension of Israelite poetry. Herder pioneered a comparative approach that situated the question of poetry in a larger intellectual project of understanding the unique contributions of traditional cultures; this insight, along with his development of a philosophy of language and interpretation, led to the rise of new fields of study: linguistics, cultural anthropology, and ethnomusicology, among others. The combined influence of their scholarship elevated biblical poetry to the status of literary transcendence, a model of how to express intense emotion and the experience of the sublime. In the aesthetic turn, biblical poetry found a distinctive place in the intellectual history of poetry. The effort to understand the aesthetic dimensions of biblical poetry continued into the late twentieth century, and the subject served as something of a cultural flashpoint in the heyday of American literary criticism. In 1981, the year that Prooftexts published its first issue, James Kugel published The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and its History.3 Alter himself followed The Art of Biblical Narrative with The Art of Biblical Poetry in 1985 and, not long afterward, the wide-ranging volume co-edited with Frank Kermode, The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987). This array of volumes in fairly quick succession attests to the institutionalization of the literary approach to the Bible, which these scholars championed over against the historical criticism that had long characterized modern biblical scholarship.4 It is useful to remember, of course, that this flashpoint is only one moment in a complex history. Biblical scholars such as Hermann Gunkel, Luis Alonso Schökel, and Michael Patrick O’Connor all also wrestled with the notion that the Bible contains or is poetry and privileged a deep commitment to formal description and to the significance of verbal art in ancient Israelite culture.5 Such work reminds the reader of the diverse and [End Page 2] unpredictable paths the study of biblical poetry has taken and provides a general affirmation of Sidney’s sense that the recognition of a body of literature in the Bible as poetry is both useful and continues to require defense. But Alter and Kugel in particular—the former a scholar of comparative literature and the...