A Manual of Hebrew Poetics.

• Author: Greenstein, Edward L.

Alonso Schokel's Manual presents the major features of ancient Hebrew poetry in a format designed for the student. A "translation and adaptation by the author and Adrian Graffy" of a Spanish original published in 1987, it distills Alonso Schokel's pioneering and linguistically sophisticated Estudios de poetica hebrea (Barcelona: Juan Flors, 1963) and incorporates literary observations and interpretations drawn from the author's many subsequent works on Biblical prophecy and wisdom texts. The Manual is generally comparable to Wilfred G. E. Watson's Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to Its Techniques (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984; 2nd ed, 1986), covering virtually everything from sound patterns to imagery. Alonso Schokel's volume is somewhat slimmer, however, and its bibliographic references are little tailored to the Anglophone reader. M. O'Connor's meaty Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1980), for example, is barely cited.

To appreciate what is distinctive about Alonso Schokel's Manual, it is useful to contrast it with Watson's introduction. The Manual differs from Classical Hebrew Poetry in at least two substantial ways. First, unlike Watson, Alonso Schokel does not place the corpus of ancient Hebrew poetry in its historical-cultural context. He views the body of ancient Hebrew poetry, for which purpose he includes Ben Sira (but without any reference to its Hebrew version), as a more or less discrete and uniform literature. Indeed, he expresses doubt concerning scholars' ability to draw chronological distinctions within the corpus. The poetic conventions he describes are therefore assumed to characterize the entire Hebrew corpus. They also characterize, by and large, the literature of most of the ancient Near East, a fact made particularly evident in Watson's book.

Second, and perhaps more significant, although both Alonso Schokel and Watson recognize metaphor in the broad sense (metaphoric or paradigmatic modes of representation, including imagery and figurative language) as "the essence of poetry" (Alonso Schokel, p. 95; cf. Watson, p. 251), Alonso Schokel devotes a fifty-page chapter to imagery and figurative language, while Watson gives them relatively short shrift. Alonso Schokel's descriptions of how metaphors and other figures function in Hebrew poetry may be the most valuable of the book's contributions for the initiated. Indeed, the book's attention to imagery and metaphor make it the most comprehensive of the...