Prophecy, Poetry And Hosea (The Library of Hebrew Bible Old Testament Studies)

JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT SUPPLEMENT SERIES 219 Editors David J.A, Clines Philip R. Davies Executive ...

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JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT SUPPLEMENT SERIES

219 Editors David J.A, Clines Philip R. Davies Executive Editor John Jarick Editorial Board Robert P. Carroll, Richard J. Coggins, Alan Cooper, J. Cheryl Exum, John Goldingay, Robert P. Gordon, Norman K. Gottwald, Andrew D.H. Mayes, Carol Meyers, Patrick D. Miller

Sheffield Academic Press

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Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea

Terald Morris

hhJournal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 219

Dedicated with their father's love, to William, Ethan and Grace

Copyright © 1996 Sheffield Academic Press Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Mansion House 19 Kingfield Road Sheffield SI 19AS England

Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Bookcraft Ltd Midsomcr Norton, Bath

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-85075-599-X

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations

7 9 10

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: GENRE AND INTERPRETATION

11

Chapter 2

RHETORIC AND POETRY

18

Chapter 3

REPETITION AND VARIATION

45

Chapter 4

LANGUAGE FALLING ON LANGUAGE: WORDPLAY AND HOSEA

74

Chapter 5

HOSEA AND THE LYRICAL PLOT

101

Chapter 6

CONCLUSION: GENRE AND THE PROPHETS

132

Appendix Bibliography Index of References Index of Authors

148 152 160 165

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PREFACE This study of the literary genre of biblical prophecy was first written in 1993-1994 as my doctoral dissertation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky. That form (dissertation) is itself a genre, with its own potential weaknesses (e.g. plodding recitation of past scholarship) and strengths (e.g. freshness of insight and skepticism toward the 'assured results' of earlier study). As I wrote the dissertation, I tried to avoid the weaknesses and amplify the strengths of my genre. Since the text that follows is essentially unchanged from the resulting work, I can only hope that I have succeeded. My desire to offer fresh insights was assisted by the method I chose to follow. I decided to examine the literary qualities of the book of Hosea and to place little stress on the book's historical underpinnings. I studied Hosea as art, not as artifact. In so doing, I have aligned myself with a much larger trend, of course. The 'Bible as literature' movement is surely one of the fastest growing currents in biblical scholarship. Nevertheless, while this trend has produced many excellent studies of biblical narrative, very little has been attempted with the books of the latter prophets. Thus, nearly everything that I could try was in fact a fresh approach. There are dangers in such a study. To write an informed analysis of the literary nature of Hosea required that I supplement my research in my own academic field, biblical criticism, with research in the world of secular literary theory. Such an interdisciplinary analysis, if it is to be managed in a single book, must greatly compress the two discrete worlds of scholarship, and thus it runs the risk of oversimplification. The advantages of such an approach—such as new perspectives and different interpretations of long-recognized data—make the effort well worth the risk, however. One more prefatory matter remains. In three chapters of the book of Hosea, the Hebrew verse numbers differ from the English. These are: 2.125 (English 1.10-11,2.1-23), 12.1-15 (English 11.12; 12.1-14), and 14.1-10 (English 13.16, 14.1-9). Where I refer to these chapters—and I refer to

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these chapters perhaps more than to any others—I have eschewed the awkwardness of listing both versifications and have used only the Hebrew reference. Gerald Morris

Arkadelphia, Arkansas April 1996

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As I conclude this study of the poetry of Hosea, I acknowledge my debt to several who either inspired my interest in the subject or who assisted my study. My love for poetry and interest in wordplay began at home, where my family often read and quoted poetry—or doggerel, at any rate—and even more often experimented with puns. I take considerable satisfaction in having converted the pastimes of childhood into the scholarship of adulthood (or, given my biblical subject, the scholarship of adultery). To my parents, whose love of language I absorbed, I offer my thanks. I am no less grateful to those whose assistance was more immediate, those who aided me in the labor of research, writing, and writing again. Throughout my doctoral studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Drs Gerald Keown and John D. W. Watts supported my desire to use literary theory in biblical interpretation and guided that study. I was further encouraged in this effort by Dr Herbert Marks of Indiana University, for whose 'Prophecy and Poetry' seminar some portions of this study were first written. Drs James Nogalski and Thomas Smothers, both of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, have placed their expertise in prophetic interpretation at my disposal, and because their approaches differ somewhat from mine, have provided perspective. Finally, my father, Russell A. Morris, has been an invaluable critic. His sense of appropriate written style has helped me to clarify many obscure passages and to make at least some effort to rid this work of jargon. The places where the obscure and arcane still appear are doubtless places where I ignored his advice. To my wife Rebecca I could not say enough and so will say only, Thank you.

ABBREVIATIONS

AB AnOr ARM Bib BHS BR BSac BZAW EvT HUCA IDBSup Int JANESCU JAOS JBL JNES JNSL JPOS JQR JSOT JSS KAT LCL OTL PL RHPR SBLDS SBLSP SEA UF VT VTSup WBC ZAW

Anchor Bible Analecta orientalia Archives royales de Man Biblica Biblia hebraica stuttgartensia Biblical Research Bibliotheca Sacra BeiheftzurZW Evangelische Theologie Hebrew Union College Annual Supplementary Volume to Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible Interpretation Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Near Eastern Studies Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages Journal of Palestine Oriental Society Jewish Quarterly Review Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal of Semitic Studies Kommentar zum Alten Testament Loeb Classical Library Old Testament Library ]. Migne (ed.), Patrologia Latina Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Swiss Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers Svensk exegetisk arsbok Ugarit-Forschungen Vetus Testamentum Vetus Testamentum, Supplements Word Biblical Commentary Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: GENRE AND INTERPRETATION You then, whose Judgment the right Course wou'd steer, Know well each Ancient's proper Character, His Fable, Subject, Scope in ev'ry Page, Religion, Country, Genius of his Age: Without all these at once before your Eyes, Cavil you may, but never Criticize. —Alexander Pope1

To understand any utterance, let alone to interpret it for others, requires a certain amount of shared prior knowledge. Communication, as Saussure and others have spared no pains to demonstrate, consists at least to some extent of learned codes, and if either the sender or the recipient of a message has not learned the codes, then communication fails. This is true of all communication, from gestures to mathematical notations to the entire range of verbal messages. In a verbal communication, an utterance, the most basic level of required foreknowledge is linguistic. The recipient must understand the grammar and vocabulary of the sender. After language, though, an equally basic and often overlooked prerequisite knowledge concerns the utterance's type. What sort of speech is this? Is it a question? A command? A plea? In other words, what is the genre of the utterance? In his essay, 'The Problem of Speech Genres', Mikhail Bakhtin argues that these genres are every bit as natural and as important to understanding as language. Indeed, 'we are given these speech genres in almost the same way that we are given our native language'.2 In many respects, 1. A. Pope, 'An Essay on Criticism', in A. Williams (ed.), Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 41, lines 118-23. 2. M.M. Bakhtin, 'The Problem of Speech Genres', in C. Emerson and M. Holquist (eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (trans. V.W. McGee; Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 78.

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the genre of the utterance expresses the purpose of that utterance even more than the actual words or sentences used.3 To misunderstand the genre of an utterance is invariably to misunderstand the utterance itself. Imagine a person who mistakes the polite but semantically empty greeting 'How do you do?' for an invitation to discuss his or her recent operation. The error is not grammatical but generic. Nevertheless, identifying the genre of an utterance is quite as important to understanding as recognizing its grammar and vocabulary. What is true of all communication is at least as true for literary communication. Following the same reasoning as Bakhtin, E.D. Hirsch describes all communication, but especially literature, as genre-bound: 'A verbal meaning is a willed type.'4 Further, 'The willed type must be a shared type in order for communication to occur'.5 This shared type provides the boundaries of valid interpretation; the reader must recognize the intended genre of the text and restrict interpretative hypotheses to the parameters of that type. If the reader does not recognize the genre, it is no longer a shared type, and the text becomes incomprehensible to that reader. 'Understanding can only occur if the interpreter proceeds under the same system of expectations [as the author], and this shared generic conception, constitutive both of meaning and of understanding, is the intrinsic genre of the utterance.'6 For Hirsch, the process of reading is a drama of generic hypothesizing. From the first line, the reader seeks to categorize the text according to learned genericcategories. As the text continues, the first hypothesis is confirmed, contradicted or refined by further information. Each successive hypothesis represents a narrowing of the class. For instance, the successive hypotheses for a given text might be as follows: narrative, fictional narrative, novel, mystery novel, English manor house mystery novel, English manor house mystery novel featuring Inspector Hemingway of Scotland Yard and so on. The earliest, most general, steps in the process are so obvious that they are taken almost unconsciously; the later, most specific, steps require the most extensive prior knowledge (even among those who read mysteries, for instance, many will not recognize Georgette Heyer's Hemingway), but also provide the most 3. Bakhtin, 'Speech Genres', pp. 84-85. 4. E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 51. 5. Hirsch, Validity, p. 66. 6. Hirsch, Validity, pp. 80-81.

1. Genre and Interpretation

13

complete, most significant, comparisons.7 Thus, for Hirsch, genres are always heuristic, always subject to further revision or even to rejection as reading continues. No canonized list of universal genres interests him. Hirsch's reasoning is compelling, and various biblical scholars have applied his work to biblical texts. Mary Gerhart uses Hirsch to make some interesting observations on the New Testament, notably on the genre 'Gospel'. She says nothing of the Old Testament.8 Indeed, the Hebrew Bible seems to resist this type of analysis, perhaps because generic identification depends on prior familiarity with analogous texts, and such analogues to the Hebrew Bible are few and of uncertain applicability. The difficulty of generic analysis in the Hebrew Bible is evident when one considers a book like Hosea. It is, of course, a prophetic book; but what is that? How can one describe the books called 'Latter Prophets'? What kind of text is a prophetic book like Hosea? The simplest answer, presupposed by more writers than would admit it, is that prophecy is prophecy, a law and genre unto itself.9 If this is all that one can say, however, then the whole investigation is a dead end. The primary purpose of determining a genre is to suggest comparisons. To say that prophecy is its own genre is to say that a prophetic book may be profitably compared only with another prophetic book. No outside analogues exist, as if this type of writing were created ex nihilo. Surely this is too restrictive. New genres may and do appear regularly, but never from thin air. They come into being in relation to existing genres, perhaps by an extension or a new use of an earlier form, perhaps by combination of two or more.10 To be content with such a designation—prophecy is prophecy and nothing more— is to suggest that the purpose of generic classification is correct filing. Thomas Overholt proposes that the prophetic books be classed under the generic title 'anthology'.11 The description is hardly new. Critics have long acknowledged that the prophetic books seem to consist of 7. Hirsch, Validity, pp. 179-89. 8. M. Gerhart, 'Genric Competence in Biblical Hermeneutics', Semeia 43 (1988), pp. 29-44. 9. See G.M. Tucker, 'Prophetic Speech,' Int. 32 (1978), p. 44, where he describes the basic genre of prophecy as 'the prophecy'. He does go on to specify two elements of that genre: that the prophecy is a divine communication and that it foretells future events—but this adds little. 10. Hirsch, Validity, pp. 105-106. 11. T.W. Overholt, 'Prophecy in History: The Social Reality of Intermediation', JSOT 48 (1990), pp. 23-24.

14


many short, often disparate, units which were combined into the present books long after at least some of the units were composed.12 The value of this description as a title, however, is much less firmly founded. One may, indeed must, still ask, 'Anthology of what?' The mere fact of being a collection is not itself enough to offer any comparative insights. Is it useful to compare prophecy simply to other anthologies, regardless of content? Overholt himself uses this generic designation only to make a historical point: that the prophetic books really were written by prophets.13 He draws no interpretative conclusions, which may indicate how little interpretative value this classification holds. The fact is, it is not easy to decide where the Latter Prophets fit or to what they should be compared. Certain portions of the individual books do invite some specific comparisons with non-prophetic books: curses, hymns, laments, parables and lawsuits all may be extracted from their prophetic settings and compared with examples from other texts.14 But these provide no real help. Any text may borrow elements from other genres for limited purposes, but these borrowed forms may easily be unrelated to the genre of the text itself. A lyrical passage in a novel does not make the novel a poem. Many compare the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible to prophetic writings from surrounding ancient Near Eastern nations, most frequently to the prophetic letters discovered at Man.15 Certainly many genuine insights have come from the comparison, 12. For one well executed and influential summary of this description, see J. Lindblom, 'The Work and Methods of the Collectors', in Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1962), pp. 239-78. See also the discussion in Chapter 5 of this work. 13. This really is Overholt's argument. How he arrives at this historical conclusion by way of Hirsch (whom he cites extensively) is a puzzle which would confound Hirsch as much as anyone. At any rate, it puzzles Robert Carroll in his response article, 'Whose Prophet? Whose History? Whose Social Reality? Troubling the Interpretative Community Again: Notes towards a Response to T.W. Overholt's Critique', JSOT4Z (1990), pp. 33-49. 14. For a survey of borrowed forms in prophetic literature, see C. Westermann, Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech (trans. H.C. White; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), pp. 194-204. 15. The bibliography is extensive. See J.-M. Durand, 'Les textes prophetiques' (Archives epistolaire de Mari, I/I; ARM, XXVI; Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988), pp. 377-412; F. Ellermeier, Prophetic in Mari and Israel (Theologische und Orientalistische Arbeiten, I; Herzberg: Erwin Jungfer, 1968); A. Malamat, 'A Forerunner of Biblical Prophecy: The Mari Documents', in P.D. Miller, Jr, P.D. Hanson and S.D. McBride (eds.), Ancient Israelite Religion (Festschrift


15

particularly as regards the role of the so-called messenger formula ("Thus says...') in prophecy. However, none of the prophetic letters from Man can compare with even the shortest or simplest prophetic book of the Hebrew Bible in length or complexity. As striking as it may be to many to find a few examples of similar formulas at work in Mari and Israel, it is asking too much of these brief epistles that they should define the genre of Isaiah. In the end, one cannot help sympathizing with those who say that prophecy is prophecy, and that is the end of it. No truly analogous extrabiblical text appears to exist. What then can be done? Generic analysis of the prophets appears impossible, or worse, pointless, but only at the most specific level. As Hirsch says, the most significant generic comparisons are made at the most specific level—one will understand an English manor house mystery better by comparing it to another English manor house mystery than to an American tough guy private eye mystery— but if no analogies exist at that specific level of similarity, then one must retreat to more general categories (e.g., mystery) until some basis for comparison is discovered. Eventually, as the process continues, one arrives at a foundational level inhabited by a very few universal genres, than which nothing more basic can be conceived. As already noted, Hirsch has no interest in 'universal' genres, preferring to focus on the 'intrinsic' genres represented by individual works. But that such universal forms exist is difficult to deny. By way of example, one need only consider the proverb. From the Hebrew ^00 to the Chinese four-character saying to the French medieval proverb to the wisdom of Poor Richard's Almanack, proverbs are present in every age and every language and are amazingly similar in form and substance. The same could be said of such universal sub-genres as folk tales, love songs and fables. No more useful list of the most general genres has been made than that of Aristotle. Drawing from the Poetics and adding the one verbal genre to which he devoted a whole volume, one has a brief list: (1) epic, (2) drama, (3) lyric and (4) rhetoric.16 Others might P.M. Cross; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), pp. 33-52, among scores of others. 16. Aristotle, On Poetry and Music (trans. S.H. Butcher; New York: Macmillan, 1956), I, p. 3 and throughout; see also Aristotle's Treatise on Rhetoric (trans. T. Buckley; London: George Bell & Sons, 1894). For a twentieth-century analysis which updates but essentially leaves unchanged these Aristotelian categories, see N. Frye, "Theory of Genres,' in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: University Press, 1957), pp. 243-337.

16


easily be added—prose narrative, for instance, has much in common with epic but really deserves its own place—but these are enough for now. These genres are indeed very general, perhaps so general as to have limited comparative use, but before any more specific comparison may be made, these at least must be recognized. One must identify a work as a poem before the specific genre 'pastoral elegy' has any meaning. Returning to the original question, the genre of prophecy, particularly of Hosea, one discovers that in fact interpreters cannot agree even at this most basic level. To put briefly what will soon be expounded upon in greater length, prophecy is generally identified as either rhetoric or poetry or both. An interpreter who has not resolved even this most basic of questions—what type of communication is the prophetic book— begins at a considerable disadvantage. Before proceeding with the analysis of the basic generic disagreement between rhetoric and lyric, a few parameters must be set. First, as should already be apparent from the foregoing, the concern here is with the prophetic book, not with the individual prophetic oracle (or poem). Even granting that each prophetic book consists.of various separate units, at some point in its history those units were arranged according to some principle or other and shaped into the discrete book, at least close and perhaps identical to the book as it now appears in the canon. The study of the individual units remains a valid and useful endeavor, but as is now frequently acknowledged, the study of the whole is at least equally valid and useful.17 This is not to suggest that no analysis of individual passages will be done here, only that all such analyses will be used to draw conclusions about the entire book. The second qualification stems from the first. Where the focus is on the completed book, no emphasis need be put on the distinction between oral and written literature. The book is, by definition, a written document. Many have laid considerable stress on the originally oral nature of the prophetic books. Such an emphasis is by no means unwarranted or without interpretive value for the exegesis of individual units within the books. No matter how many oral stages may have preceded a book, however, if that book is studied as a whole, as the total compilation of the individual speeches or poems, it must be read as a written, not an oral, composition. The editorial attention which has given shape to the 17. For a representative statement of this thesis from its most influential proponent, see B.S. Childs, 'The Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature,' Int. 32 (1978), pp. 46-55.


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book is the attention of a writer, not a speaker. For this reason, among others, Michael O'Connor's comment that 'orality does not help or hinder the close reading of the text' is correct.18 Dealing with a book as a whole necessarily precludes some of the attention to minutiae in which so much prior research has immersed itself. For instance, much of what follows will have to do with poetry, but it is not our purpose here to describe every device or pattern of Hebrew verse, except insofar as those devices help to define the genre. Enumerations of Hebrew poetic devices have been done and will prove useful, but they are not the concern here.19 Indeed, at least at the start, very little will be said of prior research into the prophetic books. A basic premise of this investigation is that most of that study has skipped a step, has gone right to micro-analysis without first understanding the genre of the books, even at the most basic level. That initial step, with which too few deal seriously before diving into the many individual complexities of the prophets, is where I shall begin.

18. M. O'Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1980), p. 42. 19. The most exhaustive listings of Hebrew poetic devices are in W.G.E. Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to Its Techniques (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1983) and L. Alonso-Schockel, A Manual of Hebrew Poetics (trans. A. Geoffrey; Subsidia Biblica, 11; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1988).

Chapter 2

RHETORIC AND POETRY Music and poetry, which are.. .examples of sentiment, have not much to do with Truth, which is the main object of Religion. —John Henry Cardinal Newman1 The nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth. —Martin Heidegger2

From Aristotle's brief list of foundational genres—epic, drama, lyric and rhetoric—two may be dealt with quickly. Few if any would identify prophecy as epic or prose narrative. Though many of the prophetic books contain narrative sections of various lengths, and though Jeremiah and Ezekiel may even be outlined biographically (and biography is one sub-genre of narrative), narrative is by no one's estimate the controlling element of the Latter Prophets. Few also would hesitate long over the possibility that prophecy is drama. John D.W. Watts, indeed, proposes that Isaiah should be read as a divine drama in twelve acts, and his student Paul House has made similar claims about Zephaniah, but these hypotheses have yet to prove convincing.3 They are certainly interesting, but the various shifts that have been found necessary to make the books conform to the notion of drama soon make it difficult to suspend disbelief. Watts, for instance, assigns Isa. 11.1-10 to no less than five speakers—the chorus, an 'interlocutor', Yahweh, a 'spokesman' and a 1. J.H. Newman, The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated (repr.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 [1852]), p. 42. 2. M. Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', in Poetry, Language, Thought (trans. A. Hofstadter; New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 75. 3. J.D.W. Watts, Isaiah 1-33 (WBC; Waco, TX: Word Books, 1985), pp. xxviixxxiv; P.R. House, Zephaniah: A Prophetic Drama (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1988), pp. 44-51.

2. Rhetoric and Poetry

19

'monarchist'—dividing between verses where no apparent division exists (e.g. vv. 2 and 3).4 Much can be learned from these endeavors, particularly from their stress on reading the book as a whole and from their attention to the different speakers within the prophetic books, but the larger argument remains tenuous. After all, various voices and dialogue are not unique to drama. As Harold Fisch argues concerning the Song of Solomon, also often called drama, 'The poem manifestly lacks the shape of a drama... What we really have are impassioned voices rather than characters'.5 Fisch identifies the Song of Solomon as a lyric poem. His reasoning fits the prophets as well: though often dramatic, they lack the shape of drama. Prophecy as Rhetoric Perhaps one reason that such experiments as Watts's fail to capture much support is that most interpreters have long since accepted the last of the above genres as correct: rhetoric. The Latter Prophets are collections (Overholt's 'anthologies') of discursive speeches: sermons.6 To a large extent, this way of reading the prophetic books is founded in the nineteenth-century critical stress on history. One exemplar, the great Abraham Kuenen, argued in 1877 that the traditional Christian reading of the prophets as foretellings of Christ, pure and simple, was no longer acceptable. Instead, the appropriate study of the prophetic books would center on the historical study of the prophets themselves in their historical settings. That being the case, the primary resource for such study is not the prophetic writings but rather the autobiographical and biographical narratives about the prophets. Since the historical accounts of prophets in the Hebrew Bible stress their role as oral messengers, the prophetic books should be seen as the prophets' own collections of 'prophetical preaching' or 'discourse intended to admonish or arouse'.7 The first question to ask when interpreting a prophetic passage is not its context in the book in which it appears but its historical context: When 4. Watts, Isaiah 1-33, pp. 167-68. 5. H. Fisch, 'Psalms: The Limits of Subjectivity', in Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1988), p. 104. 6. See above, pp. 15-16. 7. A. Kuenen, The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel: An Historical and Critical Enquiry (trans. Adam Milroy; repr.; Amsterdam: Philo, 1969 [1877]), p. 26.

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and to whom did the prophet preach this sermon? All interpretation proceeds from this historical basis. The method is this: (1) To understand the prophetic books requires that one understand the historical prophets; (2) to understand the historical prophets requires that one begin with the narratives about the prophets, not the prophetic passages which dominate the books; (3) these narratives describe the prophets as divine messengers and often show them addressing individuals or groups; therefore, the prophetic books are collections of such speeches. Kuenen hardly originated this historical method, but he represents it as well as anyone. Since his time, the method and its presuppositions have become so commonplace that few writers bother to defend or even acknowledge them. Virtually anything written about prophets in the past century shares these assumptions. A few brief examples should suffice. Lindblom, in his survey of ancient Israelite prophecy, finds three general types of discourse in the prophetic books: oracles (which he never fully defines), sermons the vast majority of prophetic literature) and songs.8 Later, though, he describes only two sorts of material in the prophetic books: narratives and speeches. The latter category evidently encompasses all the types of discourse he had earlier listed. His chosen model of this category is Jeremiah's prose temple sermon as it appears in Jeremiah 7 and 26, and like Kuenen, he argues that the first step to interpretation of the prophetic speech is the recovery of its historical context.9 Form criticism, to which one would expect to turn for generic analysis of biblical prophecy, reaches the same conclusions. Claus Westermann, in his Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech, discovers the central form of all prophecy by analyzing the prophetic speeches as they appear in the Former Prophets, in the historical narratives. This form—the 'Judgment Speech to Individuals'—is, he admits, much less common in the Latter Prophets, at least in the pure form that he describes, but he nevertheless considers it the form on which all other prophetic forms are grounded.10 Gene Tucker, another prominent form critic, disagrees somewhat with Westermann's conclusion, but he reaches his own by a similar method. He too begins with narrative—in his case, prophetic call accounts—and, though he feels that the basic prophetic form is a different sort of speech 8. J. Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1962), pp. 152-53. 9. Lindblom, Prophecy, p. 223. 10. C. Westermann, Prophetic Speech, pp. 142-47.


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than Westermann describes, he agrees that the prophetic passages are speeches." This is generic classification by default. That is, the category 'rhetoric' adheres to the prophetic books almost secondhand, as a result of historical study, sometimes historical study in other books entirely, such as Kings. The historical prophets being preachers, the prophetic books must be records of their preaching. Nevertheless, by whatever method, rhetoric has become the established paradigm. Before examining the value of the generic designation, one must ask: What exactly is rhetoric? What are its features? Having begun with Aristotle, there is no reason not to continue with him to understand rhetoric. Defined by purpose, rhetoric is discourse for the sake of persuasion, though Aristotle says true rhetoric will not try to persuade an audience of a falsehood—that is sophistry—but will make plain the inherent persuasiveness of each proposition.12 Even accepting this ethical qualification, the goal of rhetoric is persuasion. For this reason, rhetoric depends on proof. Aristotle describes two kinds of proof used in rhetoric: example and enthymem, by which latter term he means rhetorical syllogism (I.ii.8). In short, then, rhetoric may proceed either inductively (by example) or deductively (by enthymem). In terms of definition, the type of proof is less important than the fact that rhetoric and proof are inseparable (see also Ill.xiii). Where there is no proof—or, at least the appearance of proof—admitting sophistry into the larger category), there is no rhetoric. One more feature of rhetoric must be treated, though this requirement is less a defining element of rhetoric itself than a defining element of good rhetoric: rhetoric requires clarity. 'Let excellence of [rhetorical] style be defined to consist in its being clear' (III.ii.1). Thus good rhetoric will use only words which are in general use, eschewing exotic words (yAATToc) and neologisms (III.ii.5).13 The rhetorician must avoid equivocation (III.ii.7), and perhaps most of all must 'not appear to speak in a 11. Tucker, 'Prophetic Speech', pp. 31-45. Similar conclusions are drawn by other form critics. See R.R. Wilson, 'Form-Critical Investigation of the Prophetic Literature: The Present Situation' (SBLSP, 1; 1973), pp. 100-127, and W.E. March, 'Prophecy', in J.H. Hayes (ed.), Old Testament Form Criticism (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1974), pp. 143-57. 12. Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.i.14. Subsequent references in this chapter will appear in the text.) 13. Contrast the Poetics, XXH; Aristotle, Poetry and Music, pp. 29-32.

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studied manner' (III.ii.4). In other words, rhetorical language calls attention to its subject matter, never to itself. What is true of diction is true also of syntax: words must be arranged in the least ambiguous fashion (III.v), The same strictures apply to the devices used. Rhetoric may use metaphors, for instance, but these must be tightly controlled so as not to confuse or to draw too much attention to themselves (III.ii.9-13). There can be no persuasion except where hearers understand (or believe they understand) the message. Aristotle wrote of oratorical rhetoric, but his basic definition and most of his other comments apply to written discourse as well. Indeed, Northrop Frye, after discussing the literary genres, concludes his generally Aristotelian essay "Theory of Genres' with a section on "The Rhetoric of Non-Literary Prose', which freely mixes oral and written discourse.14 Frye divides rhetoric into more sub-categories than Aristotle did: Aristotle found only three sub-genres (I.iii) whereas Frye ranges expansively from oratory to bureaucratic double-speak. Moreover, Frye allows for more types of 'proof, including such sophistic devices as attack and invective.15 Nevertheless, the defining features remain the same in both oral and written rhetoric. Both intend to persuade; both require proof; and the purposes of both are best served by clarity. Aristotle and Frye make specific mention of one characteristic device of rhetoric: repetition. The verbatim repetition of a word or phrase serves, above all, the purpose of clarity. Careful not to let a central idea fade from the audience's memory, the rhetorician repeats it. Repeated often enough, at significant moments, the phrase may serve a structural purpose as well. Thus Frye speaks of 'the emphatic patterns of repetition...characteristic of rhetorical prose'.16 In many cases, the repetition becomes a part of the persuasive strategy, as occurs in Antony's funeral speech in Julius Caesar, where 'Brutus is an honorable man', begins as a tribute and grows in ironic power until it becomes a condemning mantra. Aristotle correctly observes that such repetitions are more evident and thus more effective in oration than in writing (III.xii.34), but the difference is one of degree only. This, in brief, is rhetoric, to which category so many automatically assign the prophetic books. As presented here, 'rhetoric' is a relatively limited category of utterance, and as such must be distinguished from two 14. Frye, Anatomy, pp. 326-37. 15. Frye, Anatomy, pp. 327-31. 16. Frye, Anatomy, p. 327.


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more general uses of the term. Following the lead of James Muilenburg, biblical interpreters tend to speak of any stylistic analysis of a text as 'rhetorical analysis', without regard to whether the text has persuasion as its end.17 Muilenburg's own stylistic analyses are always insightful; his nomenclature is regrettably imprecise.18 In secular literary study too, 'rhetoric' is often used in a more general sense. Wayne Booth speaks of the 'rhetoric of fiction', referring to the persuading that is necessary in a novel—persuading the reader to like a hero and dislike a villain, for example.19 While these broad uses of the term have evidently proved useful, rhetoric as a genre—describing an utterance whose entire purpose is persuasion—is a much more restrictive category. Analysis of prophecy as rhetoric in this limited sense must wait until later chapters. For now, it is worth noting that many recent interpreters have begun to question this traditional classification. First, some are no longer satisfied with its historical basis (the biblical narratives show prophets preaching, and so the prophetic books must be rhetoric). F.E. Deist argues that the old Romantic historicism has played out. If it was ever valid to begin all interpretation with history and to pursue it solely for historical goals, it is so no longer.20 Graeme Auld, in a study of the eighth-century prophets, attacks an intermediate step in the usual thesis. Without arguing about what historical prophets were like, he wonders whether the authors of those books were prophets.21 Surveying two 17. 'Rhetorical criticism' was auspiciously inaugurated by Muilenburg's presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature: 'Form Criticism and Beyond', JBL 88 (1969), pp. 1-18. The term first appears on p. 8. 18. Another who finds Muilenburg's use of the term to be too broad is Y. Gitay, Prophecy and Persuasion: A Study of Isaiah 40-48 (Forum Theologiae Linguisticae, 14; Bonn: Linguistica Biblica, 1981), p. 36. As Gitay eventually defines rhetoric as communication whose words are chosen 'to appeal to the audience' (p. 36), he is hardly a model of precision himself. 19. W.C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1983). M. Sternberg uses rhetoric in this sense in The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloornington, IN: Indiana University, 1987), pp. 441-515. This wide sense of the word might be what is meant in such books as DJ.A. Clines, D.M. Gunn and A.J. Hauser, Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical Literature (JSOTSup, 19; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982). 20. F.E. Deist, 'The Prophets: Are We Heading for a Paradigm Switch?', in V. Fritz, K.-F. Pohlmann and H.-C. Schmitt (eds.), Prophet und Prophetenbuch (Festschrift Otto Kaiser; BZAW, 185; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989), pp. 1-18. 21. A.G. Auld, 'Prophets Through the Looking Glass: Between Writings and Moses', JSOT27 (1983), pp. 3-23.

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representative terms for prophet, R*1?] and nfn, he finds little sympathy for prophets or seers among the writers of Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah 1-39. He concludes that the early 'prophets' did not claim that title but instead were 'inspired men' who had the title assigned to them later by others. Thus, 'sound method requires us to start our quest from [the texts], and not from any institution or office'.22 Auld's argument by way of word study is hardly persuasive, as H.G.M. Williamson demonstrates in his response,23 but Auld nevertheless asks valid questions: Do we really know that these books are by prophets such as appear in Kings? Is it valid to assume that Hosea, for instance, is a book of rhetoric just because Elijah was a preacher? More and more, critics have begun to doubt the historical conclusions so long taken for granted in the study of the prophets.24 This alone might cast doubt on the traditional generic designation of the prophetic books as rhetoric. The conclusion was reached by means of history; if that history is dubious, then so is the conclusion. An even better reason to doubt the conclusion, however, is methodological: no genre should be decided by means of external information. To decide a book's genre on the basis of externally derived information about its author sounds reasonable but is methodologically suspect. Would anyone argue that D.H. Lawrence's Selected Poems must be a novel because all prior information about Lawrence indicates that he was a novelist? To do so is to ignore the work itself. Auld is right: sound method begins with the written words, not with the assumed role of the writer. When we turn to the words themselves, other doubts arise. The prophets frequently violate the rules of rhetoric, most thoroughly the precept that good rhetoric should always be clear. Even those who argue that the books are collections of rhetorical prose admit that the prophets are often extremely wnclear. Lindblom, for instance, notes that prophetic oracles—the heart of the prophetic preaching—are 'often intentionally obscure or ambiguous'.25 Prophetic passages leap from idea to idea with22. Auld, 'Prophets', p. 14. 23. H.G.M. Williamson, 'A Response to A.G. Auld', JSOT27 (1983), pp. 33-39, especially pp. 33-34. 24. See, for instance, R.P. Carroll, 'Prophecy and Society,' in R.E. Clements (ed.), The World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 204-205,207, where Carroll systematically argues that no reliable historical data exist regarding the Hebrew prophets. 25. Lindblom, Prophecy, p. 152.


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out discernible transitions, contradict themselves willy-nilly and make bald assertions without proof. If this is rhetoric, it appears to be very poor rhetoric. The opinion of one classically trained rhetorician, the young Augustine, that the Scriptures were 'unworthy of comparison with the grand style of Cicero' and filled with 'absurdities' is particularly true of the prophetic books.26 The difficulties can be resolved by neither textual nor cultural answers. While certain obscure words and phrases may perhaps be clarified by slight textual emendation (e.g., Hosea 4.4; 8.6), such means can hardly explain every difficulty, certainly not such anti-rhetorical peculiarities as direct contradictions within a passage (e.g., Hosea 2.9, 14). The cultural answer—that rhetoric in Ancient Israel was just different from rhetoric in Aristotle's Greece or in Augustine's Milan or in modern society—is just as weak.27 Jeremiah, after all, preserves examples of perfectly acceptable Aristotelian rhetoric (Lindblom's paradigm example of prophetic rhetoric, the prose temple sermon of Jeremiah 7 and 26) side by side with more typically turgid, truncated and altogether puzzling prophetic writing. There is no way to avoid the conclusion that on both external (historical) and internal grounds, the normal generic designation of the prophets as rhetoric is suspect. It may not be wrong, but it is certainly worth re-evaluating, and other generic designations are thereby worth exploring. Prophecy as Poetry One need not look far for another generic label that has been applied to the prophetic books: poetry. If most interpreters tacitly assume that prophecy equals rhetoric, those same interpreters will almost invariably speak of most prophetic passages as poems, or at least as 'poetic'. As commonplace as it is now, however, this designation has not always been an option. For most of the history of biblical interpretation, the idea that divine revelation could be expressed in lyrical form has seemed vaguely blasphemous. The assumption, baldly stated by Cardinal Newman in the passage used as an epigraph to this chapter, was that poetry's goal was to give pleasure and expressed only 'sentiment'. Truth, on the other 26. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine (trans. R. Warner; New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 57 (ffl.v.l) and p. 118 (VI.v.2). 27. See, for instance, Lindblom, Prophecy, p. 156; Kuenen, Prophets and Prophecy, p. 62; and Tucker, 'Prophetic Speech', p. 34.

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hand, was best expressed by didactic prose, preferably that of Paul, Augustine or Aquinas. Consequently, prophets were never called poets; instead, poets were called prophets.28 In 1753, Bishop Robert Lowth presented his justly celebrated lectures De sacra poesi Hebraeorum, in which he identified and gave names to several different types of poetic parallelism. It is often overlooked in the ubiquitous summaries and restatements of Lowth's categories that Lowth pursues the topic in the context of arguing that the prophetic books are poetic.29 He so argues on several grounds, first by etymology, pointing out that the word for prophet, K'33, also refers to the temple singers in 1 Chronicles 25.1, and that Kto, 'oracle' is used for various poetically arranged sets of proverbs (Prov. 30.1; 31.1).30 Next he introduces his often reproduced discussion of parallelism as a Hebrew poetic device at work in the prophetic books (Lecture XIX). Finally he describes the poetic obscurity and ornamentation of the prophetic poetry.31 In two hundred years of interpretation since then, Lowth's assessment of the prophets as poetry has remained as enduring and as essentially unchanged as his description of parallelism. The prophets, all Lowthians agree, are frequently poetic. If it should appear oddly contradictory that most exegetes agree that the prophets are rhetoric and yet nevertheless add that they are poetic in form, this is because, by any reasonable standard, it is in fact oddly contradictory. Rhetoric and poetry are, after all, two distinct genres: two genres, moreover, which even upon casual consideration appear different to the point of being irreconcilable. How exactly do rhetoric and poetry differ? Rhetoric we know; what is poetry? To attempt a definition of poetry is daunting, even to a specialist. Still, much of what is known about poetry is known by all, unconsciously perhaps, but known all the same. Nearly everyone feels able to distinguish between poetry and prose, and usually will agree with the specialists. Poetic speech seems to be one of 28. An exhaustive survey of interpreters' attitudes towards the phenomenon of biblical poetry in general, specifically of biblical parallelism, comprises the final five chapters of J.L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 29. R. Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (trans. G. Gregory; ed. C.E. Stowe; Andover: Codman, 1829), pp. 157-59 (Lecture XIX, 'The Prophetic Poetry Is Sententious'). 30. Lowth, Sacred Poetry, p. 149 (Lecture XWI, 'Of Prophetic Poetry'). 31. Lowth, Sacred Poetry, pp. 168-70 (Lecture XX, "The General Characteristics of the Prophetic Poetry').


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those genres which all acquire along with their native languages.32 Perhaps the discussion here, relying as much on intuition as on research, may not be too far off the mark. One preliminary comment may be useful. As every communicative act has both a sender and a receiver, the message may be described from either perspective, and the two descriptions may differ considerably. A speech might be described by the orator in terms of its outline, its chosen diction, the devices used and so on; and described by the audience in terms of its persuasiveness, or lack thereof. To define poetry from the former perspective only would be to commit what Wimsatt and Beardsley have called 'The Intentional Fallacy', the notion that the sole determinant in either classifying or understanding a work is the mind of the author.33 At the same time, to concentrate solely on the latter would be to commit 'The Affective Fallacy', the idea that only the reader's response to a work counts.34 Both perspectives must be admitted to the discussion.

Poetry Defined by Content A few recurrent, almost traditional, themes appear in the various attempts to define poetry. Whereas in most academic discussions, traditional notions are mentioned so that their apparent plausibility may be shown to be false, these recurrent themes generally appear implausible, even absurd, but upon closer examination disclose grains of truth. Not least among these is the idea that poetry may be defined in terms of its subject matter. At various times in history, when poetic practice was more rigorously controlled than it is now, some themes were deemed 'poetic' and others were not. As Roman Jakobson puts it, 'The traditional requisites—the moon, a lake, a nightingale, a cliff, a rose, a castle, and the like—are well known'.35 Even now, many sense that a poem is, or at least ought to be, about nature, beauty or romantic love. Such a view 32. M.M. Bakhtin, 'Speech Genres', p. 78. See above, pp. 13-14. 33. W.K. Wimsatt, Jr, and M.C. Beardsley, 'The Intentional Fallacy', in W.K. Wimsatt, Jr (ed.), The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 3-18. 34. W.K. Wimsatt, Jr, and M.C. Beardsley, The Affective Fallacy', in Wimsatt (ed.), Verbal Icon, pp. 21-39. 35. R. Jakobson, 'What Is Poetry?', in K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (eds.), Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 368.

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is undoubtedly absurd, at least as an attempt to define the genre of poetry. Not only may poems deal with subjects which taken by themselves seem distinctly non-'poetic' (a leech-gatherer, ajar in Tennessee), but the 'poetic' themes may quite easily be treated in other genres (a French neo-classical essay on Love, a scientific treatise on a flower). Nevertheless, the identification of poetry with certain subjects can hardly be dismissed. Why are such subjects as beauty and romantic love so often treated in poetry? What is the common element? For a host of writers, the common element is strong emotion, or as many put it: Feeling. Certain subjects tend to evoke stronger feelings than others, and these subjects are best described by a genre which they consider to be feeling incarnate. Wordsworth's famous dictum in his 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads in 1802—'For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'—comes immediately to mind.36 Wordsworth's sometime collaborator Coleridge, a more rigorous theorist than Wordsworth, agrees in this. He frequently speaks of poetry as the language of 'excitement'.37 Writers as diametrically opposed in other respects as John Stuart Mill and Ezra Pound concur. Mill, the rationalist, describes the very best poetry as that in which feeling is central and thought often obscured by the fragmented exuberance of the emotion.38 Pound distinguishes prose from poetry in this manner: You wish to communicate an idea and its modifications, an idea and a crowd of its effects, atmospheres, contradictions. You wish to question whether a certain formula works in every case, or in what percentage of cases, etc., etc., you get the Henry James novel. You wish to communicate an idea and its concomitant emotions, or an emotion and its concomitant ideas, or a sensation and its derivative emotions, or an impression that is emotive, etc., etc., etc. You begin with the

36. W. Wordsworth, 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads', in M.H. Abrams et al. (eds.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 4th edn, 1979), II, pp. 163-64. Wordsworth actually argues that the subject of the poem is unimportant so long as it is imbued with proper poetic feeling (p. 165), but the essential point, that poetry is defined by emotion, remains unchanged. 37. S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in J. Engell and W.J. Bate (eds.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Bollingen Series, 75; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, p. 65 and often. 38. J.S. Mill, 'Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties', in Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical (repr.; New York: Henry Holt, 1873 [1859]), I, pp. 109-10 (Originally two essays—'What Is Poetry?' and 'The Two Kinds of Poetry'—both written in 1833.)


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yeowl and the bark, and you develop into the dance and into music, and into music with words, and finally into words with music, and finally into words with a vague adumbration of music, words suggestive of music... 39

Certainly more than one definition of poetry is implied here, but for now it is enough to note that for Pound, poetry begins with emotion. To define poetry in terms of its emotive content is less obviously absurd than to define it in terms of its referential content. Still, feeling alone is equally unsuitable as a definition of poetry. To begin with, to stress feeling above all is to commit the Affective Fallacy, to define the written text solely in terms of its effect on the reader. Poetry is that which inspires deep emotion. Wordsworth, of course, argued that poetry begins with the emotions of the poet, but even he added that the poem itself was not written during the heat of emotion but rather after the poet 'had also thought long and deeply'.40 In other words, poetry is the calculated attempt to communicate 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' to the reader. Any useful definition of poetry should also consider that calculating. To describe the emotion alone is insufficient. The affective focus is insufficient for simpler reasons as well. In fact, not all poetry lives up to Wordsworth's emotional demands. In English, much twentieth-century poetry and virtually all eighteenth-century poetry are marked rather by restraint than by emotion. Are these then less poetic? Some Hebrew psalms resound with exuberant praise, others offer calm and measured moral advice. Moreover, other genres may express a great a deal of feeling. Poetry and feeling are neither the same nor are they inseparable. But the identification of poetry with feeling does help to set some parameters for a definition: a satisfactory definition of poetry should explain why the genre is so frequently chosen to describe deeply felt objects and to communicate deep emotion. Poetry Defined by Indifference to Content Another traditional argument in the effort to define poetry stands at the opposite extreme from the first. For many, poetry is that which may deal with any content at all, or none. What is important, the argument goes, is not what is presented or if anything is presented, but rather the way the presentation is made. Art, and poetry in particular, does not

39. E. Pound, "The Serious Artist', in T.S. Eliot (ed.), The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1954), p. 51. 40. Wordsworth, 'Preface', p. 164.

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have to present any external subject at all, but rather by calling attention to its own techniques, its manner of presenting that subject matter, ultimately presents itself as a work of art. In Archibald MacLeish's frequently quoted comment, 'A poem should not mean, but be'.41 A poem does not exist to communicate some external idea but exists rather for its own purposes. 'Art for art's sake' goes the call, trumpeted especially by poets themselves, frustrated by polite inquiries of 'What does it mean?' and frustrated still more by well-meaning critical apologists (such as J.S. Mill in the essay cited) who seek to show that in spite of appearances poetry really does serve some social or moral purpose. In Pound's astringent words, Art never asks anybody to do anything, or to think anything, or to be anything. It exists as the trees exist, you can admire, you can sit in the shade, you can pick bananas, you can cut firewood, you can do as you jolly well please.42

Certainly Pound's prose is enlivening, as certainly as it is hyperbolic. Still, despite the probable excesses of such rodomontade—and the still worse artistic excesses which have been committed by some of those who cry 'Art for art's sake'—one cannot help feeling that some truth lies beneath it all. To the extent that a poem seeks seriously to discourse on any external subject, the poem seems less of a poem. Dr Johnson's 'Vanity of Human Wishes' may contain much of interest, but when one compares it to Poe's virtually subject-free poem, 'The Bells', one inevitably senses that the latter is somehow more 'poetic'. Psalm 8, not Psalm 15, represents the usual ideal of Hebrew poetry. What is it about poetry that shuns external purposes? One aesthetic theorist who describes this self-referential, as opposed to externally referential, action of poetry is Martin Heidegger. In his 1936 essay, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', Heidegger writes that the function of the art work, including the poem, is to set up a world. By that, Heidegger means that through the art work the object presented reveals its essential character, but also that the art work reveals itself, its own essential character. 'Towering up within itself, the work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force. To be a work means to set up a world.'43 41. A. MacLeish, 'Ars Poetica'. Anthologized frequently, here taken from A.W. Allison et at. (eds.). The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 3rd edn, 1983), pp. 1027-28. 42. Pound, 'The Serious Artist', p. 46. 43. M. Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', p. 44.


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This reflexive action of art stands in stark contrast to the action of equipment, that is, to everything that exists for an external purpose. Because it is determined by usefulness and serviceability, equipment takes into its service that of which it consists: the matter. In fabricating equipment—e.g. an ax—stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists perishing in the equipmental being of the equipment. By contrast the [art]-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of the work's world.44

To extend the analogy, not only does the material of the ax disappear into the ax, but the completed ax itself disappears into its function. The woodcutter consciously considers the ax only when it grows blunt or in some other way resists its purpose, just as one thinks of one's shoes only when they pinch. But the art work, having no external function, does not hide but rather calls attention to its material and to itself. At the same time, though, the art-work 'sets forth the earth'. The 'earth', in Heidegger's idiosyncratic terminology, represents the perpetually hidden properties of a thing, those features which are sensed but never fully disclosed: the burden of a stone, the brightness of a color. 'The earth is essentially self-secluding. To set forth the earth means to bring it into the Open as the self-secluding.'45 Heidegger's argument is, for better or worse, more complex and certainly more abstruse than this summary, and to elaborate further would very likely only increase confusion, Heidegger's style of expression being rather self-concealing in its own right. One simple but profound point may be gleaned from this: the art work operates by means of an interplay between self-disclosure and self-concealment. On the one hand, it brings itself and its constituents to light, often in a startling way. On the other hand, even while the art work reveals its hidden self, themore obvious properties both of its subject and of itself are hidden and obscured. This reversal is what Heidegger means in the quote used as an epigraph to this chapter, that the nature of art, specifically the nature of poetry, is the founding of truth. "The setting-into-work of truth thrusts up the unfamiliar and extraordinary and at the same time thrusts down the ordinary and what we believe to be such.'46 44. Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', p. 46. 45. Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art', p. 47. 46. Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', p. 75.

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The self-revelation of art does not mean that the only proper subject of art is art itself. A poem after all may have some external referent— love, beauty, a leech-gatherer. The point is that the poem is not defined by that referent. The subject matter is irrelevent, as far as definition goes. One recognizes the poem by how it presents that subject and by the fact that in the process it presents itself as well. Heidegger writes from the perspective of the receiver, the one who beholds the work of art. The issue for him is above all how the art-work is experienced, not how it is executed. The argument may nevertheless be made from the sender's perspective as well. The Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky does so in 'Art as Technique' (1917). The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they arc perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.47

The artist, then, creates art by 'defamiliarizing' its subject matter so that it may be experienced as if for the first time. The techniques of defamiliarization include unexpected juxtapositions or novel perspectives (Shklovsky's own example is Tolstoy's story 'Kholstomer', in which a horse explains human behavior), and unfamiliar names for familiar things or familiar names shown to bear unfamiliar meanings.48 All of these techniques call attention to themselves, force the reader to acknowledge the presence of the unexpected. In the process, the technique becomes an end in itself. The work's devices are laid bare, and this laying bare, not any external referent, defines the art work. There remains only to narrow the focus from art as a whole to poetry. Heidegger and the Russian Formalists (and, for that matter, the AngloAmerican New Critics) all find poetry to be particularly representative of art defined this way. After all, a play or novel without any referents— that is, without characters or plot—is inconceivable, but poems without subject matter are not even surprising. Poe's poem 'The Bells' noted above, could be summarized as to content with something like, 'different bells make different sounds', but the poem itself, an extravagant clamor 47. V. Shklovsky, 'Art as Technique', in L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis (trans. and eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 12 (Shklovsky's emphasis). 48. Shklovsky, 'Art as Technique', pp. 13-15.


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of rhythms and tones, is a clinic on verbal technique. Unlike rhetoric, in which language is equipmental in the sense that it should disappear behind its referent, poetry is not shy. The poem, more than any other form of verbal utterance, calls attention to itself in every word and to every word within itself. This calling of attention to itself; this self-disclosure defines poetry. Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality.49

Poetry Defined by Its Devices When an English-speaking schoolchild begins to study poetry, the first and perhaps most difficult lesson to learn is that poetry is not defined as something that rhymes. Whether it be rhyme or meter or another 'poetic' scheme, the temptation is always strong to identify a poem by a device or class of devices. Among those most likely to succumb to temptation are critics of biblical poetry. Beginning with Lowth, biblical poetry has always been identified as writing marked by parallelism. Lowth, indeed, felt that biblical poetry had two distinguishing marks—to parallelism he added meter, since all poetry is written in numbers—but he conceded that the original meter was unrecoverable, and generations of his disciples have accepted his judgment.50 More recent writers added many poetic devices to the known repertory of the Hebrew poet, but parallelism has remained for most the essential identifying mark of biblical poetry. A moment's reflection is all that is necessary to reject any definition of poetry which depends solely upon any one device, or even any group of devices. None of the usual devices work. However characteristic rhyme might be in the history of English poetry, not all English poetry rhymes, nor is rhyme restricted to poetry. However characteristic parallelism is in Hebrew poetry, not every Hebrew poetic line is parallel,51 49. Jakobson, 'What Is Poetry?', p. 378. 50. Lowth, Sacred Poetry, pp. 31, 35-36 (Lecture III, 'The Hebrew Poetry Is Metrical'). The most complete discussion of parallelism, as noted above, is Lecture XIX, 'The Prophetic Poetry Is Sententious', pp. 154-66. 51. Witness the almost desperate efforts of the editors of the Biblia hebraica stuttgartensia, Lowthian to the core, to make difficult passages conform to Lowth's categories, typographically if possible, by emendation if not. For instance, Hosea 4.10 begins with a clearly parallel phrase:

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nor is parallelism confined to poetic passages.52 J.S. Mill writes, 'It has often been asked, What is Poetry? And many and various are the answers which have been returned. The vulgarest of all...is that which confounds poetry with metrical composition',53 His argument, and perhaps his scorn, applies just as well to all definitions of poetry in terms of devices. But if poetry is too broad a genre to be restricted to any one device or class of devices, it is nevertheless difficult to separate poetry from its tropes. Rhyme and meter are characteristic of most poetry in English; parallelism is even more characteristic of biblical Hebrew poetry. Although no one could seriously demand that all poetry contain any single device, one may be able to argue that all poetry is distinguished by devices which serve a single distinctly poetic purpose. What then is that purpose? Gerard Manley Hopkins provides the answer in a fascinating university essay called 'Poetic Diction'. He says, 'The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism'.54 Hopkins's 'principle' of parallelism, we must note, is distinct from the device of parallelism. Though he makes passing reference to the Hebrew poetic device, his own use of the term is much broader.

They will eat but they will not be satisfied; Fornicate but not give birth.

The end of v. 10, though, seems as unparallel as it is syntactically baffling: For the LORD they have forsaken to keep.

Elliger, the BHS editor, proposes first to do away with the offending final clause, then tries to force it typographically into (parallel) line by grafting part of v. 11 onto the end as the object of ~\®lfo. Some lines are born parallel, some achieve parallelism, and others have parallelism thrust upon them. 52. J.L. Kugel has demonstrated how often parallel forms occur in both narrative and in direct speech in the Hebrew Bible. He speaks of 'middle-ground' utterances, midway between poetry and prose, which are elevated by parallelism but which never presume to be poetry. The phrase appears in 'Poets and Prophets: An Overview', in J.L. Kugel (ed.), Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 4, but the argument is most clearly presented as the second chapter of his Idea of Biblical Poetry. 53. Mill, 'Thoughts on Poetry', p. 89. 54. G.M. Hopkins, 'Poetic Diction', in H. House (ed.), The Note-books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 92.


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For Hopkins, the parallelism which distinguishes poetry is an answering rhythm incorporated into the fabric of the poem. One element, a word or a phrase or even a sound, having been presented, demands an answering word or phrase or sound. All the devices of poetry serve this function: the meter of one poetic line, for instance, must be answered by an equivalent or a dissonant meter in another line. If it is not, then the meter is pointless and will not even be noticed. One need only consider the usual list of poetic devices—alliteration, assonance and rhyme among many others—to recognize that all of them depend on at least two parts, one beginning the relation and another concluding it. The relation between the parallel elements may be either one of similarity (rhyme, for instance, or metaphor) or one of contrast (antithesis, for example). Hopkins did not originate this line of thought. Lowth himself, whose poetic insight should never be underestimated, comments that Hebrew poetry (or perhaps all poetry?) may have begun with antiphonal chanting, and he notes the use of the Hebrew root ms, 'answer', to refer to poetry.55 Hopkins, nevertheless, gave the notion its clearest exposition, both in the essay cited and in his platonic dialogue 'On the Origin of Beauty', and the idea that the 'principle of parallelism' is the denning element of poetry surely begins with Hopkins. One writer whose thought often corresponds to Hopkins's is the Russian Formalist Yuri Tynianov. In his book The Problem of Verse Language, Tynianov also notes the answering pattern of most poetic devices. For him the distinguishing feature of poetry is 'rhythm', which he defines as broadly as Hopkins defines parallelism. Indeed Tynianov's rhythm and Hopkins's parallelism are not easily distinguishable. Tynianov names the basic parts of the answering pattern: the initial element is the 'progressive' factor because it forces the reader to look ahead for the response, and the answering element is 'regressive' because it refers back to the initial element.56 As a description of how a poet may guide a reader, this analysis is profound beyond its simple expression. By far the most influential exponent of Hopkins's suggestion is Roman Jakobson. After giving credit to Hopkins, Jakobson writes, 'In poetry one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence...Equivalence [is] the constitutive device

55. Lowth, Sacred Poetry, pp. 156-57 (Lecture XIX). 56. Y. Tynianov, The Problem of Verse Language (trans. M. Susa and B. Harvey; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981), pp. 53-54 and 120.

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of the sequence'.57 This equivalence, or similarity 'superimposed on contiguity', may be achieved by any individual poetic device the poet chooses.58 The device does not matter so much as the purpose to which it tends, an answering, parallelistic rhythm. Without question, this underlying macro-device helps to explain why such micro-devices as alliteration, assonance and rhyme have always been so frequent and effective in poetry and so relatively rare in other genres. Other genres, after all, follow very different rhythms from this twice-gaited answering rhythm of poetry. All narrative and most drama must be denned in terms of plot, and plot, however tortuous it may be, however disjointed its presentation, has at heart a progressive motion, based on chronological time. Rhetoric, leading toward the decisive proof of a thesis, follows a controlled and usually logical forward motion. Poetry is unique in its back-and-forth, antiphonal, general rhythm. Poetry Defined as the Meeting of Sound and Sense By far the most frequently proposed definition of poetry, and in many ways the most persuasive, is that poetry represents a middle ground between music (sound without verbal meaning) and discourse (meaning without attention to sound). In poetry, both the sound (the 'rhythmic aspect') and the sense (the 'semantic aspect') are important.59 At different historical periods, one aspect would be elevated above the other, but both elements are necessary, or the work is not poetry. On the one hand, this means that the semantic meaning of the poem is alone insufficient. The poem's meaning should be reflected by the rhythmic aspect as well. Alexander Pope writes: True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. 'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence, The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.

57. R. Jakobson, 'Linguistics and Poetics', in Pomorska and Rudy (eds.), Language in Literature, p. 71. 58. R. Jakobson, 'Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry', in Pomorska and Rudy (eds.), Language in Literature, p. 127. 59. The terms belong to O.M. Brik, 'Contributions to the Study of Verse Language', in L. Matejka and K. Pomorska (eds.), Readings in Russian Poetics; Formalist and Structuralist Views (trans. C.H. Severens; Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1971), p. 119.


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Then the virtuoso demonstrates at length. For instance: When Ajax strives, some Rock's vast Weight to throw, The Line too labours, and the Words move slow, Not so when swift Camilla scours the Plain, Flies o'er th'unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.60

This correlation of the 'rhythmic aspect' with the literal semantic meaning of the poem has been noted by many critics. Northrop Frye refers to it as 'imitative harmony' and describes its use in poetry from Homer to Milton.61 Wimsatt's book The Verbal Icon takes its title from a similar picture of poetry. An icon in semiotics, he writes, is used 'to refer to a verbal sign which somehow shares the properties of, or resembles, the objects which it denotes'.62 Poetry is the verbal icon: words which resemble in sound the external referent of their semantic meaning. A recent book, Joseph Graham's Onomatopoetics, restates this basic thesis, giving it a thorough grounding in current grammatical and linguistic theory. For Graham, the defining feature of all literature, but primarily of poetry, is 'exemplification'. The words of a poem somehow exemplify—indicate similarity in form to—their referents.63 This picture of the equivalence of sound and sense is perhaps true of most poetry, especially that of Pope, but in one sense it is only half correct. On some occasions, the rhythmic aspect does not coincide with the semantic meaning of the poem, but is rather in clear opposition to it. If this discord is accidental, it is a sign of poor poetry (as for instance when Longfellow tries to present a tragic moment in the dog-trot tetrameter of Hiawatha), but the dissonance is often intentional. When it is, the effect may be poetic irony: the semantic meaning is cast into doubt, and the reader must backtrack to revise earlier presuppositions. More frequently, the effect is simple ambiguity. Two diverse meanings are present, and the reader must simply read with both in mind. Thus, the 60. A. Pope, 'An Essay on Criticism', in Williams (ed.), Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, lines 362-65, 370-73; pp. 47-48. (All emphases are Pope's own.) 61. Frye, Anatomy, pp. 258-62. 62. Wimsatt, Verbal Icon, p. x. 63. J.F. Graham, Onomatopoetics: Theory of Language and Literature (Literature, Culture, Theory, 4; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 225-28. Graham's great contribution to the discussion is not his conclusion, which he admits himself has a familiar ring, but rather his theoretical grounding of that conclusion in generative grammar and his generalises gift of drawing all theories unto himself and fitting them into his own puzzle.

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truth is not that in poetry the sound must 'echo' the sense, but rather that poetry is built upon two different orders of meaning, which often coincide but may diverge as well. Thus in poetry, uniquely among verbal genres, simple grammatical and syntactic laws cannot be automatically accepted. They are complicated by rhythmic requirements. A simple example of such complication is the poetic enjambment. The basic unit of syntax is the sentence, and syntax requires a pause after each sentence. The basic unit of poetic rhythm is the line, and poetic custom demands a pause after each line. Often syntactic pauses occur at the ends of lines, but when they do not, the reader is forced to decide where to pause. Paradise Lost begins: Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe.. , 64

Syntax demands that there be no pause at the end of the first line, and the phrase be read 'and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree.' Poetic custom, however, demands a pause after 'Fruit.' Read so, the first line seems to speak of the first disobedience and its fruit, or results. The most adept reading of the lines is not one which rejects poetic custom in favor of syntax, but rather one which assimilates both meanings.65 Wimsatt, indeed, seems in one place to regard the enjambment as the essence of poetry.66 Jakobson writes that the reader of a poem is more or less aware of two rhythms running concurrently: the rhythm of the verse and the rhythm which the same sentences would have in conversational prose. In a recitation, the reader must choose one rhythm to adhere to in each case of dissonance, but in the written poem both rhythms remain suspended.67 The rhythm of verse 'deforms' normal syntax.68 In Hebrew verse, for instance, normally adjacent words in construct relationships may be divided up between two lines. Thus the phrase 'the spirit of counsel' (HSI? !Tl~l) in Isaiah 11.2 appears in two lines in 19.3:

64. J. Milton, Paradise Lost, in M.Y. Hughes (ed.), John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Macmillan, 1957), Book I, lines 1-3, p. 211. 65. Brik, 'Contributions', p. 122. 66. W.K. Wimsatt, Jr, 'Verbal Style, Logical and Counter-logical', Publications of the Modem Language Association 65 (1950), pp. 9-10. 67. Jakobson, 'Linguistics and Poetics', pp. 79-81,87. 68. The term comes from Tynianov, Verse Language, p. 40 and elsewhere.


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The spirit of Egypt will pour from his belly, And his counsel I will swallow up.

A skilled reader notes the broken construct phrase and thus reads two syntactical constructions: the literal sentence and also an implied sentence about 'Egypt's spirit of counsel'.69 Or one word or phrase may be marked by its poetic placement as playing two different syntactic roles, perhaps the object of one sentence and the subject of the next. Again, Hebrew poetry provides numerous examples. In Psalm 31.12, the psalmist says he is a reproach to his enemies: And terror to my acquaintances those who see me on the street They flee from me.

The central phrase, 'those who see me on the street', has two different syntactical functions. It stands in apposition to 'my acquaintances', and it provides the subject for 'they flee'. Ungrammatical and thereby unacceptable in other genres, this is unexceptionable in verse.70 The rhythm of verse also deforms normal emphasis. Any word, however syntactically insignificant, becomes a key word when placed at the end of a line or cesura or when highlighted by being rhymed. When this happens, the poem actually impedes the word, calls attention to it by its incongruous stress. By combining the rhythmic aspect with the 'syntactico-semantic' aspect, words are 'dynamatized' within the poem.71 "The semantic significance of the word in verse [is] defined by the significance of rhythm.'72 Finally, dynamatization may deform meaning. 'The severence of the intonational line, defined by verse, results in occasional distinctions of meanings of words in verse, as compared with their prosaic doubles.'73 In the example from Paradise Lost, for instance, 'Fruit' bears two different meanings: the literal meaning and the metaphorical. A poem sets up a word's field of meaning, consisting of all the meanings, 69. The example comes from M. Dahood, 'Hebrew Poetry', in K. Crim et al. (eds.), IDBSup (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1976), pp. 669-70. The bibliography on this device is considerable; M. O'Connor gives a suitable summary, including bibliography (Hebrew Verse Structure, pp. 112-15). 70. Dahood calls this device the 'double-duty modifier' or the 'two-way middle,' 'Hebrew Poetry', p. 670. 71. Tynianov, Verse Language, pp. 58-59. 72. Tynianov, Verse Language, p. 88. (Tynianov's emphasis.) 73. Tynianov, Verse Language, p. 79. (Tynianov's emphasis.)

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deformations and connotations (by means of rhyme, for instance, or wordplay) which it assumes during the course of the poem. A dynamatized word has what Tynianov calls 'oscillating signs', various shades of meaning through which the word flits.74 No wonder, then, that Empson feels that ambiguity is 'among the very roots of poetry'.75 Poetry defined as utterance which partakes of two orders of meaning, rhythmic and semantic, has several significant implications. The first, already discussed, is that poetry is not averse to obscurity of meaning. Any poem may be clear, but an unclear poem is not therefore less 'poetic'. Having two different 'rhythms' at work at the same time, poetry almost insists on a certain ambiguity. Secondly, a poem may contradict itself without diminishing itself as a poem. The so-called 'Law of NonContradiction' appears to a poet to be just the sort of thing a philosopher would come up with. The poet, by contrast, says that poetry is 'the one permissable way of saying one thing and meaning another' ;76 or more stridently declares, 'Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself. / (1 am large, I contain multitudes.)'77 Finally, having more than one order of meaning, a poem has a doubled weight of meaning. One word in a poem may bear the weight of both syntactic and rhythmic stress, may be elevated by alliteration, assonance or rhyme, and in a generic context in which all of this bears equal weight, may acquire a significance to which no word in another genre may attain. Poetry, says Graham, is not less verbal but more than usually verbal; it is hyper-verbal. Its words are charged with extra significance and extra relevance. They are heavy with meaning, and so they require more attention than usual for their 7R interpretation.

To pull all this together into one simple but comprehensive definition of poetry is perhaps futile and probably foolish. Poetry will inevitably exceed its definitions and confound its defmers. A few general points arise, though. From the perspective of the deviser of the poem, poetry is a 74. Tynianov, Verse Language, p. 97. 75. W. Empson, The Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 2nd edn, 1947), p. 3. 76. R. Frost, quoted in L. Untermeyer, Play in Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), p. 4. 77. W. Whitman, 'Song of Myself, in Leaves of Grass (repr.; New York: Mentor, 1954 [1855]), section 51, p. 96. 78. Graham, Onomatopoetics, p. 244.


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form of writing which follows two different sets of rules and contains two different orders of meaning simultaneously. The first order of meaning is provided by simple grammar and syntax. Complicating the semantic meaning of the words of the poem, however, poetry also derives meaning from their sound, or rhythm. Many devices may contribute to the 'rhythmic aspect' of poetic meaning, but at heart all poetic devices operate to give the poem an 'answering rhythm'. A word rhymes with its rhyme-fellow, or alliterates with another word, or plays on it, or compares it to something else. When this comparatively static answering rhythm coincides with the linear, progressive rhythm of grammar, when (in Jakobson's words) similarity is 'superimposed on contiguity', then meaning is either heightened by correlation or obscured by self-contradiction. Poetry, therefore, is the ideal form for communicating the highlycharged but obscure world of emotions, particularly ambivalent emotions, and for expressing unfamiliar interpretations of familiar objects. The reader must also be aware of much of the above, such as the coincidence of the two separate orders of meaning, but the reader's perspective is slightly different. To the reader, poetry is more likely to evoke a deep response or to exorcise hidden emotions than any other verbal genre. Difficult subjects like love, trivialized by other forms of discourse, find suitable expression. Mundane matters appear in a startling new light, with new significance. At the same time, poetry is tremendously difficult, seems to dig itself further into hiding at each turn, and remains frastratingly unattainable even upon repeated readings. Incongruities must be dealt with and heightened emphasis must be weighed and evaluated. A poem, well read, is cathartic; catharsis, at all times, is exhausting. Not all of these defining features of poetry are unique to verse; only the convergence of all constitute the definition of poetry. Poetry is distinguished from drama primarily by its manner of presentation: drama is presented by actors, lyric by a teller. Poetry differs from narrative especially in terms of its larger rhythm: narrative by definition includes a plot, an underlying chronological ordering of events, whereas poetry uses the answering, parallelistic and far more static rhythm described above.79 79. This is true even of narratives in which the events are unfolded in nonchronological order. A novel like Tristram Shandy may skip back and forth in its order of presentation, but in theory at least a chronological order of events can be recovered at the end. See V, Shklovsky, 'Sterne's Tristram Shandy; Stylistic Commentary', in L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis (trans, and eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism, pp. 55-57. The best discussion I know of the issue of plot is M. Sternberg,

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T.H. Robinson captures the distinction between poetry and narrative with rare insight when he comments that the Hebrew Bible demonstrates the barest forms of both: the device of parallelism in Hebrew poetry exemplifies the parallelistic rhythm of verse in general, and the forwardpressing motion of Hebrew verb sequences using the 1-consecutive that characterizes biblical narrative equally represents the progressive action of narrative in general.80 More than anything else, though, poetry is distinct from rhetoric. Rhetoric and Poetry

Those who identify biblical prophecy as rhetoric and then add blithely that it is poetry, have not perhaps considered how very odd such a connection really is. In terms of purpose especially, the two types of communication stand utterly opposed to each other. Rhetoric is equipmental language: it exists for an external purpose. Rhetoric seeks to persuade an audience of a proposition or course of action. A poem does not seek to persuade, but to reveal. The poem tries to call attention to the unnoticed and to conceal or confound the obvious. Moreover, while the poem reveals the hidden nature of whatever external referent it may have, it also always reveals itself. The poem may call attention to a proposition or course of action, but it always first calls attention to itself as a poem, by complicating sense with sound, by using incongruous words or expressions, by deforming expected emphases or by deliberately obscuring or even contradicting itself. The respective audiences of rhetoric and poetry undergo equally opposite experiences. The ideal audience of rhetoric, which responds as the rhetorician intends, first understands then agrees with the purpose of the speaker or writer. If either understanding or agreement is lacking, then rhetoric has failed. The reader of a poem, however, need not understand the poem entirely or agree with it at all. Some understanding is necessary, of course, if anyone is to care enough to finish reading the poem after beginning, but beyond this basic level of comprehension, it is enough for the reader to be engaged by the poem—positively or negatively—in such a way as to lead to some revelation. A reader may Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). 80. T.H. Robinson, The Poetry of the Old Testament (London: Duckworth, 1947), p. 19.


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be persuaded of some external purpose by a poem, but the persuasion is of a different order from that of rhetoric. Rhetoric persuades by communicating a purpose and proving its validity; poetry, if it persuades at all, does so by showing its referent in an unsuspected light and leaving the reader to infer some purpose from that. This indirection is what lies behind Mill's famous dictum: 'Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling: but, if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard.'81 Rhetoric is understood; the meaning of poetry, inferred. To summarize, then, rhetoric and poetry are in many ways diametric opposites. Rhetoric exists for some external purpose; poetry for its own ends. Rhetoric seeks to persuade; poetry to reveal. Rhetoric offers proof; poetry, implication. Rhetoric follows either an empirical or a logical outline; poetry connects its units willy-nilly, here making a logical connection (If... then...), there grouping words according to sound ("The color is almost the color of comedy'82). Rhetoric demands clarity; poetry is at least indifferent to clarity and often delights in ambiguity. Rhetoric uses words which its audience should understand; poetry uses archaic words, foreign words and neologisms. Rhetoric tries to disappear into its message so that its words and devices remain hidden; poetry lays bare its words and devices, brazenly calling attention to them. Last of all, the two genres require very different critical and interpretative methodologies, particularly by those studying historical samples of the genres. Because rhetoric always has an external purpose, the first step for its interpreters is the recovery of its external context. In other words, to understand a historical oration, one must first understand the situation which prompted it, the audience to which it was addressed and the authority or role of the orator. Often this information may be gleaned from the text of the utterance. Frequently it cannot be, and study of the text must be supplemented by external investigation. Poetry, with its self-referential nature, requires much less historical study. Once an utterance is recognized as a poem, the next step is always the study of its words, not its historical context. Almost any poem may be read well and appropriately by a person unfamiliar with the circumstances of its composition. Historical study may add a useful dimension, but hardly 81. Mill, 'Thoughts on Poetry', p. 97. 82. Chosen at random from W. Stevens, 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven', in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (repr,; New York: Vintage Books, 1982 [1954]), p. 477.

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ever a necessary one. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Winston Churchill's great radio addresses mean little or nothing unless one knows their respective wartime contexts and their respective honoured speakers. Keats's icy verse 'This living hand, now warm and capable' may inspire any number of surmises as to its proper historical context, but its chilling power comes from the text itself, not its background or author.83 The proper study of rhetoric begins with context; of poetry, with the text. The description of proper interpretation of rhetoric should sound familiar. These, after all, are the techniques used by virtually all interpreters of the biblical prophetic books. The early historical critics like Kuenen demanded history first; the form critics of this century strive to establish the Sitz im Leben of each 'speech'; even more recent scholarship into the anthropological and sociological context of prophecy begins with historical research.84 Insofar as the prophetic books are collections of orations, this historical methodology, however inconclusive its results have proven, is appropriate. To the extent, however, that the books are poetry—whether anthologies of separate poems or carefully edited, booklength poems—then this emphasis on recovering their historical context is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading. To Hosea, then, and to the question of the genre of prophecy I turn next.

83. J. Keats, "This living hand, now warm and capable', in J. Barnard (ed.), John Keats: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 459. 84. See, for instance, R.R. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980). A more recent discussion, including sharp criticism of Wilson, is in Carroll, 'Prophecy and Society', pp. 215-21.

Chapter 3

REPETITION AND VARIATION There is sometimes force and in other cases charm in iteration of words, in slightly changing and altering a word, and in sometimes repeating the same word several times at the beginning of clauses and sometimes...at their end. —Cicero1

The foundational categories of rhetoric and poetry, the two genres most frequently assigned to the prophetic writings, are in many respects sharply distinct. The extent of that contradistinction, made evident in the foregoing analysis, might surprise some, but the basic fact that these genres are in tension is nothing new. Interpreters have frequently had difficulty treating the prophets as 'poetic rhetoric'. Some have felt that the two genres are mutually exclusive and so have identified the prophets as one or the other. Exegetes before Lowth generally treated the prophetic writings as rhetoric and nothing else; more recently, Robert Carroll, as noted above, has argued that the prophetic writings are poetry only. Carroll says, "The speakers of the anthologies we call 'prophetic' literature were clearly poets. That is indisputable. All other descriptions are highly debatable'.2 A better approach to the problem than this exclusivism, though, is that of Stephen Geller. Frankly noting the apparently irreconcilable tension between rhetoric (7tpo(pT]ci6riaav, instead of the MT "I31p, 'they bring near'. Such emendation is very dubious and I have resorted to it only because I cannot make sense of the MT. 75. The Syriac and Targums read DrjSN, 'their anger', instead of the MT DrjSVi, 'their baker'. 76. Elliger, the editor of Hosea for BHS, suggests this alternative reading as a textual emendation. Such suggestions, based as they are on perceived incongruities, are almost as useful as translation variants for identifying wordplays.

4. Wordplay and Hosea

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by the prefixed 2, which makes this clause sound like the verb "UJ2, which appears again in this verse. The result of all this repetition is to imply a word not even mentioned here: 'city' (Ti), plural Q"~1.U). The connection is supported by a similar but more specific pun in 8.14: 'Tin'PS&JK TH1Q. This literally is 'I will send fire on his cities', but the reader who does not catch the implied verb ~iiH, 'he burned', has not been paying attention.77 And so, noting all the puns in these verses, one can construct the subtext: the sin of the princes is anger, connoted by puns on the phoneme *]$, and the place of the sin is the city, connoted by puns on the word TI>. In this passage, the paronomastic sub-text only supplements and does not contradict, the literal meaning. In another case, the sub-text is more elaborate and complete and eventually takes on life of its own. Hosea 10.11 reads: And Ephraim is a trained heifer, Loving to thresh. And I, I have passed by her fair neck. I will harness Ephraim; he will plow, Judah will harrow Jacob for himself.

On the surface, this is an extended agricultural metaphor. Ephraim is a heifer pulling a plow, threshing under God's yoke (*?&, implied by and perhaps a better reading for *?J? in the third line). That some secondary meaning might be involved here is implied immediately by two thematically significant words in the first sentence. First, in a book as concerned with idolatry as Hosea, any reference to a calf (*?JJJ) might refer, however obliquely, to Israel's calves at Dan and Bethel. Secondly, the root 2i"JK, 'he loved', appears repeatedly in the rest of the book, usually referring metaphorically to Israel's idolatrous 'lovers',78 and in Ugaritic texts several times signifies Baal's love, in one case physical love with a heifer.79 This secondary thread concerning idolatry is resumed and 77. Hosea 8.4 is, one should note, a formulaic sentence which occurs elsewhere in the prophets, notably in the introductory oracles of Amos discussed in the preceding chapter. Still, while the basic pattern is easily identifiable, Amos has God sending fire on walls and houses and on proper names, but never on 'cities'. Even when he uses formulaic sentences, Hosea places his individual, paronomastic stamp on them. 78. See 3.1 (three times); 4.18; 8.9; 9.1, 10; 11.1; 12.8; 14.5. 79. Noted by A.D. Tushingham, *A Reconsideration of Hosea, Chapters 1-3',

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confirmed by the verb BVirP 'he will plow' later in the verse. The root tznn has a basic meaning of 'engrave, cut in' from which the meaning 'plow' may be easily extrapolated. Indeed, it seems likely that 'plow' was the most frequent meaning of this root in common speech. In prophetic speech, however, the root more frequently refers to the engravers and artisans who make idols. Hosea himself uses the root in this second sense in 8.6 and 13.2.80 Significantly, in 10.13 Hosea says, JJEhTinehn, 'they plow wickedness'. The wickedness behind the agricultural scene of 10.11 is idolatry. Still another subtext undergirds this verse. God says, 'I will harness (ZTDIH) Ephraim', using a verb that speaks most frequently of military might. A noun from this root, IDT, 'chariot', often appears alongside 'horses' (D'DIO) or 'horsemen' (D'GHS), in a metonymous evocation of all sorts of martial array.81 In any case, this is certainly how Hosea uses 'horses' and 'horsemen' in 1.7 and 'horse' and 'they shall ride' (IGT) in 14.4. Thus the harnessing in 10.11 almost certainly implies warfare.82 A few words farther in 10.11 occurs another wordplay: 'Judah will harrow (THD") Jacob for himself.' The choice of this rare word may perhaps be explained by its similarity to another violent verb, "HiS, 'ruin, destroy', which has appeared in Hosea as recently as 10.2.83 The effect of the two wordplays is to create a secondary scene behind the agricultural one, a scene of violence and desolation. This one verse bears the weight of two different subtexts. The heifer and the plowing imply idolatry, and the harnessing and harrowing imply war and destruction. Other prophets speak of swords beaten to plowshares; Hosea of the sin and destruction that lie behind plowshares. To do this, to force words and passages by wordplay to bear more than one meaning, is to release those words from their conventional JNES, 12 (1953), p. 151. The texts referred to are, in Cyrus Gordon's numbering system, '«MII.4and67.V.18. 80, See also Isa. 44.11,12,13; 45.16; Jer. 24.1; 29.2. 81, See, umong many otter passages, Exod. 14.9,17,18,23; 15.21; Dcut. 20.1; Jer. 17.25 and Ezek. 26.7. 82. This martial verb root seems to reappear, interestingly, in most texts of the LXX, where 10.13, 'You trust in your way (13113)', appears as 'You trust in your chariots (ev TOII; apjiaoi coi>, evidently reading "]DD13)'. See Neef, *Der Septuaginta-Text', p. 208. 83. The Syriac and LXX read Tltt? in v. 11. See A. Gelston, The Peshitta of the. Twelve Prophets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 123; Neef, 'Der SeptuagintaText', p. 206.


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moorings and to allow meaning itself to spin free. Meaning becomes unstable, and discourse breaks through the normal limits of discursive speech. A word that can mean anything is dangerously close to a word that means nothing, or rather to a situation in which a word (the signifier) is more dependable than its meaning (the signified). Wayne Booth speaks of 'stable' and 'unstable' irony, the former being irony 'which may be understood with some precision by other human beings' and the latter irony which only points toward endless and irretrievable alternate meanings.84 In some ways the two functions of wordplay parallel this distinction. Connective wordplay may complicate meaning (as does irony), but meaning is still wholly recoverable; ambiguous wordplay, however, permits meaning to play against meaning in such a way as to put all meanings in question. Is Ephraim a luxuriant vine or a vain and empty fruit (10.1)? Will Ephraim plow and reap its harvest, or will it reap war and desolation for its idolatry (10.11)? Is God the protection against or the source of death and Hell (13.14)? The answer to each of these questions remains suspended in paronomastic limbo. In Hosea, meaning is frequently ambivalent, and what could be more appropriate in a book where Israel's fate remains unresolved at the end (see 14.9) and where God's own thoughts and feelings are turned over within him (11.9)? Wordplay and Poetry Wordplay is characteristic of Hosea and particularly appropriate to a book with Hosea's themes and motifs. But how is all this connected with the original question concerning Hosea's genre? If, as proposed above, prophecy uses both rhetoric and poetry, and each book defines its own proportion of each, what does Hosea's punning indicate? In theory, wordplay is like every other verbal device in that it may appear in any genre. For instance, a wordplay can play a significant role in a narrative; witness the foreshadowing achieved in the early pages of The Red and the Black when Stendhal's young cleric Julien Sorel reads about the execution of a criminal named Louis Jenrel, whose name is a perfect anagram of his own. In the Hebrew Bible, wordplay is frequent enough in narrative that some studies of Hebrew wordplay focus entirely on wordplays in narrative (Bohl, Gevirtz, Guillaume). Still, although wordplay may appear in any genre, including both rhetoric and poetry, 84. W. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 5.

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it seems much better suited to the latter type of discourse. When wordplay acts according to its first (connective) function, it might serve some rhetorical purpose—to mark the beginnings of sections, for instance, or to connect two related units.85 Even used thus, wordplay is of dubious value for rhetoric. The connections made by means of wordplay are not intrinsically persuasive; they are, in Wimsatt's terminology, 'counterlogical'. They are 'not irrational—but at least extra-rational'.86 And when wordplay functions primarily to complicate a passage, the ambiguating function discussed above, it is anathema to rhetoric. Aristotle refuses to admit equivocation and ambiguity to rhetoric; these are the devices of sophists and poets, not of orators.87 Rhetoric demands clarity for the sake of convincing arguments; wordplay usually offers neither. On the other hand, wordplay fits the definition of poetry perfectly. First, exactly like poetry in general, wordplay builds on two orders of meaning, a literal meaning and a meaning implied by sound. The result, for both poetry in general and wordplay in particular is ambiguity. Wordplay rebels against simple, unequivocal meaning, and this 'insubordination revealed by the pun is, of course a feature of all poetic language'.88 Tynianov describes how poetry sets up 'oscillating signs' of meaning: he could easily have been speaking specifically of wordplay.89 Second, like all typically poetic devices, wordplay follows a parallelistic pattern, in which the first word looks ahead ('the progressive element') to an expected counterpart, which looks back at the first word ('the regressive element').90 Indeed, wordplay is very like and is frequently associated with rhyme, which also exemplifies this parallel movement of verse: 'Rhyme and pun are twins.'91 Thirdly, the tendency of poetry to 85. Aristotle grudgingly admits these functions of wordplay. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, IH.ix.9 and HI.xi.7. 86. Wimsatt, 'Verbal Style', p. 11. 87. Aristotle, Rhetoric, MI.ii.7 and UI.v.3-4. 88. Attridge, 'Unpacking the Portmanteau', p. 192. 89. Tynianov, Verse Language, p. 97. 90. The terms come from Tynianov, Verse Language, pp. 53-54. See the more detailed treatment in Chapter 2, above p. 42. 91. D. Fried, 'Rhyme Puns,' in Culler (ed.), On Puns, p. 83. See also W.K. Wimsatt, Jr; 'Rhetoric and Poems: Alexander Pope,' in Wimsatt, Jr (ed.), The Verbal Icon, p. 182 'Poetry is both sense and sound, and not by parallel or addition, but by a kind of union—which may be heard in onomatapoeia and expressive rhythm and in various modes of suggestion, extension, and secret verbal functioning. Of these the pun and its cousin the rhyme are but the most extravagant instances.'


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'lay bare' its devices and present itself also fits the pun. Wordplay, too, presents not only the words and their referents, but also the action of playing, not just an ambiguity, but ambiguity itself.92 While wordplay might be possible in any genre, it appears most intrinsically appropriate to poetry. Indeed, even when puns appear in other genres, they bear more affinity to poetry than to the genre which surrounds them. Wordplay in biblical narrative appears as a rale in two contexts: in name-origins and in incantational passages, such as blessings or curses.93 Both contexts bear close affinity with poetry. In everyday speech, only names bear the sort of semantic weight that words tend to have in verse. A street where I once lived was Lyndon Lane—not Lyndon Road or Street—evidently because of the poetic functioning of language in names.94 In fact, the poetic nature of names is even more pronounced in Hebrew. After his unsurpassed presentation of the basic constriction of Hebrew verse, O'Connor comments, almost as an aside, that Western Semitic proper names 'are shaped in the same ways that lines of verse are'.95 As for the use of wordplay in blessings and curses, many would say that such incantational speech is the origin of poetry. 'The radical of [lyric] is charm: the hypnotic incantation that, through its pulsing dance rhythm, appeals to involuntary physical response, and is hence not far from the sense of magic, or physically compelling power.'96 It is no accident that the extended blessings in biblical narrative, such as Genesis 49, are universally acknowledged to be poetic in form. Again, wordplay can hardly be divorced from poetry. In terms of the larger category of verbal repetition, Hosea better fits the definition and requirements of poetry than it fits the genre of rhetoric. Now the same conclusion appears from an examination of the smaller category of wordplay: this device, so frequent and so prominently displayed in Hosea, is at heart a poetic device. No conscientious rhetori92. Peelers, 'Pour une interpretation du jeu de mots', p. 127. 93. This includes all of the the examples cited by B6hl, Gevirtz and Guillaume. 'Most cases [of paronomasia] in prose involve false etymologies of proper names', M. O'Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure, p. 143. On wordplay in narrative incantations, see Peeters, 'Pour une interpretation du jeu de mots', p. 140. 94. On the 'poetic functioning' of language outside poetry proper, see R. Jakobson, 'Linguistics and Poetics', in Pomorska and Rudy (eds.), Language in Literature, pp. 72 and 89. 95. O'Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure, p. 161. 96. Frye, Anatomy, p. 278 (Frye's emphasis).

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cian, concerned first with clarity and logical proof, would have used wordplay with such abandon; no book which so displays wordplay ought to be understood primarily as rhetoric. And so, understanding the book of Hosea first and foremost as a poem, different details take precedence, different criteria define its structure and movement, and a fuller understanding of the book's shape emerges. It remains only to make a preliminary foray toward mis fuller, poetic understanding of Hosea.

Chapter 5

HOSEA AND THE LYRICAL PLOT

Don't destroy the idols in anger, break them up in play. —Marquis de Sade1

In its appropriation and distinctive use of repetition and wordplay, the book of Hosea clearly fits the definition of poetry better than that of rhetoric. The reader who has been seeking the interpretative value of this generic designation, however, may be understandably impatient. To this point, most of the analysis has tried to classify the book, without drawing any interpretative conclusions. What interpretation has been essayed has dealt with relatively small portions of the text and not, as promised in Chapter 1, with the book as a whole. Thus this genre study is incomplete. It is not enough simply to categorize a work. If it were so, genre designation would indeed be a pointless exercise, as is clear from the example of those who have so assumed. For instance, the biblical critic W. Lee Humphreys, writing on the Joseph narrative of Genesis 37-50, argues that 'The essential issue is... the presence...of material that essentially fits the descriptive criteria that define a specific genre designation'.2 This belief permits Humphreys to conclude that the best description of the Joseph narrative is the nineteenthcentury Jamesian title 'novella', thus giving this most complex and, by biblical standards, quite lengthy narrative a label that implies relative simplicity and brevity. Genre designation undertaken for its own sake thus appears at least irrelevant and perhaps misleading; taxonomy is not

1. This remark of de Sade's is translated by W. Redfern and quoted in his Puns, p. 14. 2. W.L. Humphreys, Joseph and His Family: A Literary Study (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1988), p. 18.

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the goal of genre study.3 The point instead is for the reader to ask, while reading, what if this text is read according to this set of generic expectations?4 Precisely here lies the interpretative value of generic competence, for a text read as one genre differs widely from the same text read as a different one. E.D. Hirsch writes, 'Without helpful orientations like titles and attributions, readers are likely to gain widely different generic conceptions of a text, and these conceptions will be constitutive of their subsequent understandings.'5 Devices, techniques and details have different uses and values in different genres. For instance, the detail that a character in a novel is ambidextrous bears a different significance depending on the kind of novel. In many novels of the more serious and less frequently read types, where symbolism might be expected, it might represent some inherent moral conflict or ambiguity. In a detective novel, the detail may be essential in determining if the character could have accurately fired the silenced revolver while jotting down scores at Lady Whitmore's bridge party. In a work of nineteenth-century French realism, a la Balzac, the detail may serve no purpose at all except to be one of the thousand carefully transcribed details that characterize this sub-genre. The determination of the genre determines whether the detail contributes to the symbolic texture, the plot or the tone of the book, and whether the detail is of vital or minimal significance. Hirsch provides a similar illustration. John Donne's 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning' may be read either as a temporary farewell from lover to lover or as a final statement from one near death. Read one way, specific words and images become essential; read the other way, peripheral.6 In this way the interpretative value of my generic analysis to Hosea becomes apparent. The devices and techniques examined here—verbal repetition and wordplay—in a rhetorical text would be merely (and probably distractingly) ornamental. Proper reading of such a text might recognize the existence of a wordplay, but it would almost certainly do so only in passing. Such elaboration could hardly be an essential part of the book as a whole. Almost without exception, this is precisely the 3. See A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 255. 4. A. Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 46-47. 5. Hirsch, Validity, p. 75 (my emphasis). 6. Hirsch, Validity, pp. 73-74.

5. Hosea and the Lyrical Plot

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attitude of Hosea's interpreters. On the other hand, if the text is read as a poem, these details are foregrounded and rhetorical devices (e.g. formulas, clear logical transitions) recede to the background. 'One should guard against reasoning about poetry as one does about prose. What is true of one very often has no meaning when it is sought in the other.'7 Read poetically, the book takes on a very different shape, and patterns and structures hitherto unnoticed or ignored become keys to understanding the book. Before examining this poetic shape of Hosea, it is worth noting that the method used here is evidently and demonstrably circular. Certain techniques used in a certain way (repetition and wordplay) were cited as evidence that Hosea was primarily poetic; now that genre designation is being used as justification for giving particular emphasis to these same techniques. This circle, in fact, is nothing less than the so-called 'hermeneutic circle', which describes the interplay of the part and the whole.8 If interpretation were a deductive process, the circularity of this method would make it invalid; however, interpretation, perhaps particularly as it relates to making generic hypotheses, is at heart an inductive trial-and-error procedure, to which circularity is perhaps inevitable, and if so, irrelevant.9 In the end, the identification of Hosea as a poem and not as a book of rhetoric stands not upon syllogistic proof but on whether the interpretation of the book as if it is poetry ultimately works, ultimately proves meaningful, ultimately answers more questions than it raises. The Structure of Hosea Perhaps the most puzzling and least adequately answered question concerning the book of Hosea has to do with its disjunctive arrangement. Jerome's famous and frequently cited summary of the book—'Osee commaticus est et quasi per sententias loquens' (and Hosea is halting, as if speaking in maxims)10—summarizes most interpreters' frustration with Hosea's sudden turns and gaps. T.K. Cheyne wrote in the last century that 'systematic order [is] more alien to Hosea than perhaps to any other 7. P. Valery, 'Poetry and Abstract Thought', in The Art of Poetry (The Collected Works of Paul Valery, 7; New York: Viking Press, 1958), p. 71. 8. Hirsch, Validity, pp. 76-77. 9. Rosmarin, Power of Genre, pp. 29-33. 10. Jerome, 'Praefatio S. Hieronymi in Duodecim Prophetas', in J.-P. Migne (ed.), Hieronymi, Opera Omnia (PL, 28; Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1846), col. 1015.

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prophet'.11 This disorder is particularly apparent in chs. 4-14 of the book. In 1966, Rudolph wrote of these chapters, 'Ein Ordnungsprinzip ist schwer zu erkennen,'12 and one recent commentary remarks, 'The major literary problemencountered in chs. 4-14 is its apparent incoherence'. 13 If the book—or even this one section of it—is incoherent, it is a significant literary problem indeed. Interpreters have dealt with Hosea's 'apparent incoherence' in various ways. Many have simply concluded that no conscious structure exists, that the book is simply a random collection of disparate parts. Cheyne, cited above, takes this view. Some suggest that an original organizing principle has somehow been lost. Martin Buber writes that Hosea seems to include 'only a few remnants of the original corpus, saved from the destruction of Samaria and bound up together'.14 Without this 'original corpus', one gathers, the true order cannot be recovered. Assuming this level of disarray in the book, scholars have agreed on only one organizing principle: a sharp division exists between chs. 1-3 and 4-14. The first three chapters present Hosea's marital and family situation, including the long but relatively coherent poem of ch. 2. In ch. 4, however, narrative discourse and all explicit reference to Hosea's family disappear. This 'contrast between the connected discourse and smooth flowing style of ch. 2 and the isolated paragraphs and exclamatory sentences of 4—14' represents the only clear sign of structure that many critics can discover in the book.15 Others are slightly less pessimistic, finding a few signs of intelligent life behind the book in its current form. Without exactly calling the book tightly and clearly organized, some discover at least some loose, artificial, probably externally applied, structure. These critics picture someone— either the prophet himself or perhaps a group of his disciples—editing a collection of short, individual sayings and oracles.16 Some then add 11. T.K. Cheyne, The Book of Hosea (repr.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905 [1884]), p. 22. 12. W. Rudolph, Hosea (KAT, 13.1; Gutersloh: Mohn, 1966), p. 26. 13. F.I. Andersen and D.N. Freedman, Hosea: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB, 24; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), p. 69. 14. M. Buber, The Prophetic Faith (trans. C. Witton-Davies; New York: Harper & Row, repr. edn, 1960 [1949]), p. 111. 15. C.H. Toy, 'Note on Hosea 1-3', JBL 32 (1913), p. 75. 16. Andersen and Freedman suggest that the prophet was responsible for most of the book, a disciple for chs. 1-3 (Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, pp. 57-58). H.S. Nyberg argues that the source of the book in its present form is a school of Hosea's


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various redactional layers to this. R.E. Wolfe discerns no less than thirteen different redactions of Hosea, beginning with a 'Judahistic editor', whose fell hand Wolfe identifies in every passage which strikes Wolfe as more applicable to Judah than to Israel.17 Wolfe's thirteen redactions might seem excessive to most, but the notion is nevertheless widely held that any structure which the book might contain was applied after the fact.18 That being so, by what principles are the disparate sayings thought to have been ordered? Lindblom's summary of these principles of arrangement in the prophetic books is representative. Oracles and sayings were connected in the prophets, Lindblom says, because of (1) similarity of subject matter, (2) antithetical ideas (e.g. a woe connected to a salvation oracle), (3) similarity of form (e.g. a concatenation of woe speeches), (4) catchwords, (5) history or chronology, (6) desire for emphasis (e.g. a more emphatic oracle at either the beginning or the end) and (7) logic.19 Considering the mutual exclusivity of many of these principles (antithesis of form versus similarity of form; emphasis versus chronology), this general list does not seem especially useful; it appears that one can discover any principle that one can imagine. Lindblom's analysis of Hosea, however, is more restrained. Lindblom finds three principles in particular working there: (1) cognate content, (2) catchwords and (3) similarity of form (e.g. the speeches in ch. 5 beginning with 'Hear O...').20 Although some of these principles might appear to involve internal connections— catchwords, for instance—Lindblom's practice is to assume that they are all externally applied. Two oracles are juxtaposed simply because they both seem to be about priests, or they both include the key word 'adultery', or, most superficially of all, they begin with similar-sounding calls to attention. Two more recent commentaries ascribe rather more internal coherence to the book. H.W. Wolff astutely points out that the thematic pattern of chs. 1-3 (specifically of the poem in ch. 2), from divine condemnation to divine nostalgia to proffered restoration, recurs twice more in the book, followers (Studien zum Hoseabuche [Uppsala: Universitets Arsskrift, 1935], pp. 6-7). 17. R.E. Wolfe, 'The Editing of the Book of the Twelve', ZAW 53 (1935), pp. 91-92,126. 18. See, for instance, the discussion in G.A. Yee, Composition and Tradition in the Book of Hosea: A Redaction Critical Investigation (SBLDS, 102; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), pp. 5-6. Yee's summary in her first chapter of critical inquiry into Hosea's structure is exemplary, and I have relied on it more than I could footnote. 19. Lindblom, Prophecy, p. 278. 20. Lindblom, Prophecy, pp. 143-44.

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in chs. 4-11 and 12-14.21 This insight not only adds a second major division, between chs. 11 and 12, but also assumes a great deal of care given to the arrangement of the smaller oracles. Woe oracles are juxtaposed not just because they happen to be woe oracles, as Lindblom's principles might imply, but because it is crucial to the thematic movement of the book that the woe oracles appear here and not elsewhere. To this general outline I shall return in more detail. Douglas Stuart suggests another large structure for the book. He says that the oracles of Hosea constitute a series of covenant blessings and curses. This suggestion, like Wolffs, seems to imply an intrinsic organization, but Stuart somewhat spoils the effect with his ambivalent comment that the series is arranged either extremely skillfully or very nonchalantly.22 The two most interesting and certainly most useful proposals among those who feel that Hosea's structure is externally applied and not intrinsic to the text are those of Edwin Good and Martin Buss. Good separates chs. 1-3 and 4-14, and then divides the latter section into five complexes. He divides primarily by theme (e.g. 4.4-5.7 is a complex on 'Knowledge and Harlotry'; 9.1-10.15 a complex on 'Food and Farming' and so on), but he gives considerable attention to catchwords as indicators of those themes.23 Each complex is linked to those before and after, again usually by verbal repetition, and some repetitions may be traced though the entire book.24 His specific arguments may be debated—he hopes they will—and his stress on demonstrating that Hosea was transmitted orally detracts somewhat from his structural insights, but his reading shows great sensitivity to the book's interrelatedness. As Good puts it, "The entire poem is a masterly construction of interwoven motifs and metaphors'.25 Buss accepts most of the general proposals of both Lindblom and Wolff, but applies them in a distinctively rigorous fashion. First, he acknowledges the three-part division (chs. 1-3, 4-11, 12-14).26 Within these three sections, however, he distinguishes several 'cycles', by means

21. Wolff, Hosea, p. xxxi. 22. D. Stuart, Hosea-Jonah (WBC; Waco: Word Books, 1987), p. 8. 23. E.M. Good, 'The Composition of Hosea', SEA 31 (1966), p. 33. 24. Good, 'Composition', pp. 54-55. 25. Good, 'Composition', p. 38. 26. Buss, Prophetic Word, p. 33. Good, it should be noted, dislikes Wolff's division, 'Composition', pp. 48-49.


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of content, like Good.27 Buss further describes how these cycles cohere by means of verbal repetition, each section having some characteristic vocabulary. Buss suggests these 'tight or rich connections' within cycles are authorial.28 Moreover, the cycles tend to be connected one to another by means of some 'non-stylistic, secondary' repetitions, with some key word concluding one cycle and then appearing early in the next cycle.29 These connections, appearing to be more artificial, Buss assumes to be editorial. Both authorial and editorial repetitions, however, Buss regards as intentional, giving the book a distinct and purposeful verbal texture. This is some distance from Lindblom's discussion of 'catchwords' as a superficial structural feature. Good and Buss venture as far toward a belief in an intrinsic, coherent order as may be possible among scholars who regard the book as a collection of original sayings upon which a secondary, wholly extrinsic, order has been imposed. Not every scholar accepts this presupposition, however. An interesting and by no means out-dated early response to such critical assumptions appears in a comparatively obscure essay by Thomas Howes in 1783, a response to Robert Lowth's edition of Isaiah.30 Howes freely admits that the individual oracles do not always appear in the prophetic books in the order which most seem to expect, according to the chronology of their deliverance to the prophet, but he nevertheless denies that this indicates disorder (pp. 128-29). Instead, he argues that the exegete should seek out the 'still better order' (p. 139), which attends more to the internal connections and echoes of the text than to such external matters as chronology. Of Isaiah, for instance, he writes, 'This presumption [of unified composition]...will be found so confirmed by the connexion throughout the body of the work, that we shall be able to discover no good reason for supposing...that this was collected at random by others' (p. 132, my emphasis). In this at least, 27. Buss, Prophetic Word, p. 31. 28. Buss, Prophetic Word, p. 29. 29. Buss, Prophetic Word, p. 31. Buss's most impressive evidence of this type of verbal transition appears not in these pages (pp. 29-31) describing the theory but rather in his own translation of the book (pp. 6-27), in which he italicizes significant repetitions. 30. T. Howes, 'Doubts Concerning the Translation and Notes of the Bishop of London to Isaiah, Vindicating Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Other Jewish Prophets from Disorder in Arrangement', in Critical Observations on Books, Antient and Modern (repr.; New York: Garland, 1972 [1783]), II, pp. 109-449. Subsequent references will be in the text itself.

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Prophecy, Poetry and Ho sea

Howes shows great discernment: just because a prophetic book does not appear to be arranged as one might expect does not mean that it has no arrangement at all. Recent Old Testament theory has returned to some of the principles espoused by Howes two centuries ago. Canonical criticism as practiced by Brevard Childs, has surrendered the assumption of disorder and begun searching for a 'still better order', working on at least a provisional premise that even the sharpest disjunction in a book should be treated as intentional and theologically motivated.31 As regards Hosea, the best expression of this tendency is the book by Gale Yee, Composition and Tradition in the Book of Hosea. Yee discovers in previous scholarship on the structure of Hosea several untenable presuppositions, perhaps the most significant being the idea that the 'original' is the most valuable. While Yee by no means rejects the study of the literary history and redaction of Hosea, she makes that investigation secondary. The proper first object of study should be the text in its current form; only after this should the critic inquire as to previous forms the book or its parts may have had.32 This current form has come from an editor, Yee agrees, but the editor is little short of an author. By the conscious selection and placement of the traditions preserved in the book, the editor has crafted the book at least as much as the writer of the individual parts. 'In the end, the redactor creates a new tradition out of the old.'33 If Yee's practice does not always live up to theory, if her study tends to get bogged down in questions regarding the mechanics of the redaction process, this statement of purpose alone is groundbreaking, preparing the critic for the possibility that the book of Hosea is as carefully arranged as any prophetic book, structured according to some subtle but perhaps 'still better' order. As Andersen and Freedman tentatively write, 'We have sometimes wondered if the whole of chs. 4-14 is really a single sustained discourse...the deliberate result of an artistry far more sophisticated than anything previously suspected'.34 Where could this previously unsuspected artistry be sought? One need only return (at last) to the question of genre. Those critics who have found Hosea to be structurally incoherent are invariably applying to this poetic text the structural standards of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in order to persuade 31. 32. 33. 34.

See Childs, 'The Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature', pp. 46-55. Yee, Composition and Tradition, pp. 31,41 and throughout. Yee, Composition and Tradition, p. 44. Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 70.


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with clarity, requires coherence and logical transitions, standards which these same interpreters would not dream of imposing on a long lyric poem such as Whitman's 'Song of Myself or the Bible's Song of Songs. As Thomas Howes astutely noted in 1783, if a book is read as poetry, then sharp disjunctions and gaps become insignificant—such abruptness is only to be expected in lyric (p. 153). Indeed, Howes refers to his 'still better order' as 'poetic arrangement' (p. 293). These stumbling blocks then become pebbles, and other features, previously ignored as rhetorically irrelevent, become the new milestones and directional markers. The Lyrical Plot How are poems ordered, if not by logic and the demands of clarity? By what principles? The question is not as easy as it might appear. Long poems are frequently organized by the principles of other genres (epics by narrative conventions, satires by rhetorical); sustained lyrics are rare. This perhaps explains why the investigation of all poetry, and particularly of Hebrew poetry, focuses on smaller units. Other than easily identifiable acrostics, 'there is no commonly accepted understanding of poetic units larger than the line in Canaanite [and by extension Hebrew] poetry'.35 A few general observations can be made. First, given that poetry presents two orders of meaning, sound alongside sense, one should expect the ordering elements of poems to depend to some extent on sound. This, in essence, is what Yuri Tynianov says in The Problem of Verse Language. There Tynianov describes povtory (sound repetitions), which serve to link the poem's parts, even widely disparate parts.36 These repetends, being connected by sound, tie the poem together more loosely than do the structural features of other genres, and more significantly, in a less linear fashion. Rhetorical structures tend to follow a line of logic; narrative structures follow chronology. Poetry, as discussed above in Chapter 2, follows a different pattern. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, 'Verse is distinguished from prose as employing a continuous structural parallelism'.37 In practice, this means that every repeated phoneme either points forward to an implied answering phoneme or responds to a previous sound; Tynianov calls these elements 'progressive' and 35. O'Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure, pp. 141-42. 36. Tynianov, Verse Language, pp. 113. 37. G.M. Hopkins, 'On the Origin of Beauty', in House (ed.), The Note-books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 83.

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'regressive' ,38 When the sound is repeated more than once, or is scattered widely throughout the poem, the effect is to create a distinct pool of meaning.39 'The scattering of sound repetitions at a considerable distance may be considered as a preparatory factor, establishing a particular phonetic base, or as a factor of "dynamic preparation.'"40 The structure of an extended lyric, then, is most likely to be provided by sound repetitions, each of which calls attention to the antecedent sound and adds to the pool of meaning surrounding that sound. Such repetitions may take the form of a repeated end-rhyme, for instance, but in Hebrew verse, particularly in Hosea, it is more likely to appear as extended wordplay or simply as verbal repetition. By tracing significant words and puns through the book as a whole, one uncovers what Tynianov calls 'the lyrical plot'.41 Patterning by Repetition The structural bases of poetry being concerned with sounds and, at the outside, with single words, it may seem odd to describe them with the word 'plot', which usually refers to actions. Nevertheless, some correspondences exist. First, every extended verbal arrangement—whether lyrical, oratorical, dramatic or narrative—seems to require an introduction and a conclusion. In a narrative or drama, one finds the exposition (the presentation of those events or relationships which precede and shed light on the actual temporal sequence) and the conclusion in which loose ends are gathered together (e.g. the detective's long speech at the end in which is explained how the silenced gun was fired at the bridge party and concealed in the Ming vase). In an extended lyric, the exposition is simpler. It consists of the first presentation of the significant words and phonemes which will be repeated, perhaps marking that importance by some rhythmic device. These first appearances need not occur at the beginning of the poem—any more than narrative exposition must appear at the beginning of a novel—but such an arrangement is certainly one of the most straightforward and is perhaps the most frequent.42 In any case, it is what one finds in Hosea. 38. Tynianov, Verse Language, pp. 53-54, 120. 39. See above, Chapter 4, on the working of ambiguous wordplay. 40. Tynianov, Verse Language, pp. 113-14. 41. Tynianov, Verse Language, p. 111. 42. See the impressive discussion of exposition distributed variously in different narratives in Sternberg, Expositional Modes.


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As noted above, scholars have universally recognized a division between chs. 1-3 and the rest of the book. The most frequent scholarly conclusion drawn from this division is that chs. 1-3 represent a separate source, perhaps written by a disciple of Hosea's, added to an original corpus after the fact.43 Though widely accepted, this view is not without problems. For instance, Hosea 3 hardly follows neatly upon chs. 1-2, being told in the first person instead of in the third. Moreover, the vocabulary of Hosea 2 actually corresponds more closely to that of Hosea 4-14 than to that of either ch. 1 or ch. 3.44 These incongruities, along with the recent understanding by Childs and others of redaction as an art and not simply a necessary evil, have led many to bypass the source critical question of where these chapters came from and ask instead why they are here. The usual answer is that chs. 1-3 serve as an introduction to the book. Lindblom writes, There is nothing to suggest that the man who collected the revelations of Hosea contained in iv-xiv was not also the collector of the various units in i-iii, who placed them as an introduction at the head of the whole collection.45

Childs calls Hosea 1-3 'the exegetical key in the framework from which the entire book is to be read' ,46 And without question the most significant way that these chapters serve as an introduction is to present the key words that will be repeated and reinterpreted in what follows. One characteristic manner of presenting these Leitworter, already noted in the discussion of repetition and variation in Hosea, is in a list. These early chapters abound in lists. For instance, as described in some detail earlier, 1.7 includes a list of human means of salvation [root U2T, used twice in this verse]: bow, sword, war, horses and riders. The first three items on this list reappear in 2.20 and then separately several times in the main body of the book. The last two items, a formulaic word pair, disappear until 14.4, where 'horse' reappears, again in conjunction with the verb root DtD\ What is important here is that in chs. 1-3 the list changes significantly. The usage in 1.7 describes doomed human efforts, but that in 2.20 foretells God's ultimate victory, at which time these things will be abolished. This turn recurs exactly in 4-14, where the elements 43. See Wolfe, 'Editing', p. 92. 44. Yee, Composition and Tradition, p. 3. 45. Lindblom, Prophecy, p. 242. 46. B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), p. 381. See also Childs, 'Canonical Shape', pp. 49-50.

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of the list describe human violence and doom (7.16; 10.14; 11.6; 14.1), only to be reversed in the repentance speech of 14.4, 'Assyria will not save us; on horses let us not ride'. Chapters 1-3 introduce the list, indicating not only that these words are important but also how they will be reinterpreted. The introduction here serves as a microcosm of the whole. The introductory chapters act similarly with the lists of God's gifts given there. Again, these lists were noted earlier, but a more complete discussion will be useful. Four times in ch. 2, God lists the good gifts he has given Israel and which Israel has used in its idolatry. In 2.7 the gifts are bread (OH1?), water (D'D), wool (103), flax (ntOS), oil (]QO) and drink ClptD). Verse 10 lists grain QH), new wine (SZJTVn), new oil ("HIT), silver (^DD) and gold (3HT); then the next verse combines the two catalogues, listing ]rr, tirrn, irrcr and riEJS. In 2.7 and 10, God mentions these gifts as being abused, and in v. 11 he vows to take them back in retribution for this abuse. In v. 24, the judgment is reversed. When God betroths his people to himself again (2.21-22), he will answer the heavens, who will answer the earth, who will answer the grain (]n) and the new wine (ffllTH) and the new oil (TTCr). Again the introduction, this time restricted to ch. 2, is a microcosm of ens. 4—14. Chapter 2 having drawn repeated attention to these gifts of God, the reader naturally takes note when they reappear, particularly when they appear in pairs. This happens in 7.14 (pi and CtfVTn), 8.4 (^DD and 2HT, very similar in both form and content to 2.10) and 9.1-2 Qrt and EJrrn). All of these passages, along with 13.2 (rpD), refer to Israel's sin of idolatry. Again, God reverses the accusation, promising new gifts in 14.8 in the form of revived grain Cp~i). Again, the introductory section of the book has not only provided the significant words but also their forthcoming pattern in the lyrical plot. In both of these cases, a single word from the antecedent list recurs in the final chapter, serving as a representative of the whole list and of its ultimate reversal. Other lists follow a similar pattern, but the single items of those lists which remain in ch. 14 function as more than just metonymic reminders. The betrothal speech of 2.21-22 lists several marks of God's faithfulness: 'I will betroth you to me forever, and I will betroth you to me with righteousness (p~Ei) and with justice (CDS2JQ) and with love (ion) and with pity (D'nm), and I will betroth you to me with faithfulness (rmDK), and you will know (root 1TP) the LORD.' Each of these words, or some cognate form, reappears in chs. 4-14. Once again, the most striking cases are when several elements of the list occur together, as in


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4.1: 'There is no truth (DON, related to ilTIQN) and there is no love (ion) and there is no knowledge (Pin, from the root irr) of God in the land.' The covenant is not being followed. The same point is made in 6,4-5: 'Your love (IDPt) is like the morning mist, and like the dew that goes away early. Therefore I have hewn by the prophets; I have killed by the words of my mouth, and my judgment (QS27Q) goes out like light.'47 Here Israel's rejection of covenant faithfulness results in a variant repetition, QSEra meaning 'judgment' instead of 'justice' (cf. also 5.1,11; 10.4). The covenant words never appear in a truly positive sense, but not every repetition is a condemnation either. Three times elements of this list occur in exhortations addressed to Israel: in 6.6 ("ion and nin), 10.12 (np-llS, p~re and ion) and 12.7 (BSSJai ion).48 God has not given up all hope of that renewed covenant described in ch. 2. In the final exhortation, only one word from the original list appears, a last resort for Israel. The verse ('In you the orphan finds pity [root Dm, as in D*Qm]' [14.4]) no longer offers righteousness, justice, love or faithfulness. Only pity, as to an orphan, remains. The same thing happens with the cycle of words connected with harlotry. Though these words do not actually appear in an introductory list, there can be no question of their importance in the book, if only because of their frequent, 'hammering' repetition in these early chapters.49 In 1.2, for instance, the root H3V appears no less than four times in some form or another. The root occurs three times in 2.4-7, where it is linked to the other two major words in this cycle: ^KJ, 'commit adultery', (2.4) and 3n«, 'love' (2.7). These latter two roots appear together again in 3.1, where 3HK occurs four times. The three words are clustered thickly together in ch. 4, especially in vv. 10-18,50 but then begin to decrease in frequency. Most remarkably, the words which express unambiguous condemnation soon disappear entirely: ^ appears last in 7.4 and rut in 9.1, where it parallels HHK. This latter word, remains, becoming almost as characteristic of the late chapters as the other two were of the early. Most of its appearances refer to Israel's 47. Reading rcr "11*9 '03$?} for the MT KIT ~I1K 'f'gs^tol, 'And your judgments, light goes out'. 48. The fact that these words occur together frequently enough to be called formulaic word pairs does not change the fact that their introduction in the early chapters has drawn particular attention to them and given them particular significance. 49. Buber speaks of 'the hammering style' of Hosea, Prophetic Faith, p. 112. 50. rtJT, ten times; ^ twice; 2HK twice.

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tendency to give its love to unworthy objects (8.9; 9.1,10; 10.11; 12.8), which parallels the early emphasis on harlotry and adultery, but 3riK is not so restrictive in its definition. The first hint that this word will be transformed and rediscovered comes in 11.1: 'When Israel was a child, I loved him.' The word no longer refers to Israel's promiscuous love, rather to God's true, but ignored, love for Israel. The theme reappears powerfully in ch. 14. God offers Israel another chance to repent and, with that repentance, the promise that 'I will love them unconditionally' (14.5). As the book begins, Israel's relationship with God is characterized as harlotry, adultery and unworthy love; by the end, harlotry and adultery have been forgotten, and the love that remains is not Israel's diverse infatuations but God's enduring and forgiving love. Not every motif presented in the introduction appears in the conclusion, of course. Just as harlotry and adultery, the unambiguously negative descriptions of Israel's love, disappear by ch. 10, other patterns also fade away. For example, 2.13 lists the celebrations defiled by

idolatry: m:na ^ nrozfi ntznn run nioi&a'^D tntim, 'I will put an end to all her rejoicing, her festivals, her new moons and her Sabbaths, and all her appointed times'. This list draws attention to itself by the pun, already noted, of 'I will put an end to' (root mtZ?) and Sabbath (nap). Festivals, new moons and appointed times all reappear in chs. 4-14, notably in 9.5 where 30 and 1JJ1Q appear together, and the root mfi shows up again in 7.4, but none appears after 12.10 (IITO).51 Similarly, the counter-decalogue of 4.2—'Swearing and lying and murdering and stealing and committing adultery'—introduces another extended pattern: every element returns in the later chapters.52 Nevertheless, the pattern disappears after 12.1. These two lists, unrepresented by even one word in the conclusion, seem to counter the larger pattern, but this is not necessarily so. These defilements and sins are not only missing from God's final appeal, they are conspicuously so. Like harlotry and adultery, these sins are forgotten in God's appeal. These patterns of verbal repetition resoundingly confirm the idea that chs. 1-3 act as an introduction to the book. Pattern after pattern is introduced in these chapters, sometimes even temporarily resolved, fore51. Unless the line in 14.6, iTJtZflBH ITS)', 'he shall bloom like the lily', contains a pun on nirop, 'her rejoicing' in the list in 2.13. This is doubtful but always possible, for Hosea. 52. if?!* 4.2; 10.4; ETO 4.2; 7.3; 10.13; 12.1; nin 4.2; 6.9; 3J3 4.2; 7.1; and -|ta 2.4; 3.1; 4.2,13,14; 7.4.


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shadowing the pattern that the word or words will take in the remaining chapters. To this identification of chs. 1-3 as introduction one must add the identification of ch. 14 as resolution. Again and again the final speech of 14.2-9 reinterprets, reverses and resolves the lists and motifs begun in the early chapters. Thus the first three chapters and the last are in a sense companion pieces, bound together by shared vocabulary. Still more connections between introduction and conclusion appear. The prophet's name—and it is always worthwhile to pay attention to names in Hosea— is explored only in these two sections. ^EJIH is from the root U2T, 'he saves or delivers'. The name occurs twice in the first two verses and never reappears, but the verb root appears twice in 1.7 and then disappears until 13.10 and 14.4, in almost identical contexts. Or again, in Hosea the root K2?3, 'lift up', twice has the secondary meaning 'forgive'. The two instances are 1.6 and 14.3. Fisch notes that the curious phrase 'I answer him and look out for him' (!"!]!?, 'answer') in 14.9 recalls the five-fold use of mu in 2.21-22.53 Moreover, chs. 2 and 14 appear to allude to Israelite wedding songs, as exemplified by the Song of Songs. Hosea 2.7-8 recalls Song 3.1-4, and the lush imagery and many of the specific terms of Hosea 14 are characteristic of the metaphors of that book.54 The passages are thus correlated and the book is enclosed not only by verbal repetition but by allusions to marriage festivities. In the larger poetic parallelism of the book, chs. 1-3 form the progressive element, looking ahead at seemingly inevitable doom, and ch. 14 the regressive element, responding to the earlier assertions by gathering those strands, reversing them and reinventing the covenant. Hosea's patterns of verbal repetition confirm not only the basic outline of introduction-body-conclusion, long recognized by scholars, but also the three-part structure described most effectively by Wolff. Indeed, Wolffs identification of the three sections relies on verbal cues as well as on the general thematic arrangement. Each of the three sections (chs. 1-3, 53. Fisch, 'Poetics of Violence', pp. 156-57. The root occurs only two other times in the book, in identical clauses in 5.5 and 7.10. 54. See F. van Dijk-Hemmes, 'The Imagination of Power: An Intertextual Analysis of Two Biblical Love Songs: The Song of Songs and Hosea 2', JSOT44 (1989), pp. 75-88; L. Alonso-Schokel and J.L. Sicre Diaz, Profetas: Commentario, vol. 2 (Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad, 2nd edn, 1987), II, p. 920, quoted and translated by G. Light, 'Theory-Constitutive Metaphor and Its Use in the Book of Hosea' (PhD dissertation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1991); Wolff, Hosea, pp. 36, 234; Yee, Composition and Tradition, pp. 138-40.

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4-11 and 12-14) follows the same pattern: Israel is judged by a wrathful God who suddenly relents and offers his apostate people a renewed relationship with him. All three sections include a lawsuit marked by the term T1 (2.3; 4.1; 12.3), which begins either the section as a whole or a significant part of that section.55 Each section concludes with a harsh announcement of doom (in the second and third sections by the promise that the helpless will be 'dashed in pieces' pDDI; 10.14,14.1]) just before God has a change of heart. Thus the larger progression from judgment to possible redemption that the patterns of verbal repetition have made clear in the book as a whole appears on a smaller scale in these three sections. Moreover, the judgment passages which begin each section pointedly draw much of their vocabulary from those preceding. The key word of ch. 4, beginning the judgments of the second section, is i~l]?, 'commit harlotry', which also introduced the judgments of the introductory section. In the same way, ch. 12, the beginning of the final section, includes several direct correspondences to ch. 4. As noted earlier, 4.9 appears with only slight modifications in 12.3.56 Furthermore, ch. 12 is second only to the cumulative ch. 14 as a gatherer of loose ends. List after list makes its appearance in ch. 12, in many cases a final appearance. In 12.1, for instance, appears the last representative of the sin catalogue of 4.2 (2JPD), and in 12.10 the last direct connection to the festival list of 2.13 OU1Q). In 12.7, IDSDD1 "TOPI, 'covenant love and justice', marks the last time any element from the covenant faithfulness list of 2.21-22 will appear until pity (Dm) in 14.4. So, not only do the three sections follow the same thematic pattern, they are interconnected verbally. The characteristic vocabulary of part one appears in ch. 4, the start of the second part. Chapter 12, the start of the third part, refers both to the lists of part one

55. The literature on this lawsuit form is extensive. A good survey may be found in K. Nielsen, Yahweh as Prosecutor and Judge: An Investigation of the Prophetic Lawsuit (Rib-Pattern) (trans. F. Cryer; JSOTSup; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1978). It should be noted that some scholars deny the existence of the lawsuit as a distinct prophetic form, see D.R. Daniels, 'Is There a "Prophetic Lawsuit" Genre?' ZAW 99 (1987), p. 339-60—but this does not affect the direct verbal connection between chs. 2, 4; and 12 of Hosea. 56. ft TDK V'ftyai VD-n lft<J ^rnpsi, 'I will visit his ways on him, and his deeds I will turn back on him' (4.9); ft 3'ET lft"?l>03 TDTTJ apirfty IpaVl, 'To visit on Jacob according to his ways, and according to his deeds he will turn back on him' (12.3).


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and to the language of Hosea 4. Each introduction echoes all the preceding introductions. Another pattern that supports this threefold division is a case where the word introduced as significant in the early chapters is echoed not at the end of the book, in the tightly packed ch. 14, but rather in the forgiveness passage which concludes the second part of the book, in ch. 11. Three times in Hosea 2 the root ]ro, 'give', refers to the gifts that God had given Israel and that Israel had thought were the gifts of her lovers the Baals: 'For she has said, I will go after my lovers, who gave C3P3) my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink' (2.7); 'For she does not know that I, I gave to her the grain and the new wine and the new oil, and I increased her silver, and gold they made into the Baal' (2.10); 'I will destroy her vine and her fig-tree, for she said, "They are my hire (rnnN), which my lovers gave (']ra) to me'" (2.14). In 2.17, God's forgiveness is signalled by his willingness to give again: 'I will give (Tiro) her vineyard to her.' These are all the occurrences of the root in the introduction. The next significant concatenation of the word comes in 9.14, in the prophet's bitter call, 'Give them (Dil^'in), Lord— what shall you give CfPin)? Give them (Dn*7"|n) a miscarrying womb and dry breasts'. Again the word signifies punishment and disgrace, but two chapters later, hi the great salvation oracle of ch. 11, God asks, 'How can I give you up ("[]DK), Ephraim? How can I surrender you, Israel? How can I make you CpnR) like Admah? How can I set you like Zeboiim?' (vv. 8-9). God is reluctant, after all, to give Israel what Israel deserves. ]ro does not appear in the final chapter, but the pattern is clear.57 To argue that verbal repetition in Hosea presents both an introductionconclusion structure and a three-part judgment to salvation structure may seem contradictory, or at least confusing. A spatial representation of these various verbal connections may be useful. Using only the examples already mentioned, by no means all the examples in Hosea, the patterns can be charted along three overlapping lines, read from left to right.

57. This pattern is noted by D. Krause, 'A Blessing Cursed: The Prophet's Prayer for Barren Womb and Dry Breasts in Hosea 9', in D.N. Fewell (ed.), Reading Between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), pp. 195-96.

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Judgment (Chs. 1-3) (Verbal connections:

SPIN OT' RiCJ Dm 010 mi?

Hope (Ch. 14) Wedding Songs)

Chapters 1-2 (3) Verbal connections:

*]M rm fro Links from 1-3 to 12: T~l -U?TD (2.13; 12.10) ton CaaaJD (2.21; 12.7)

Chapters 4-11 Verbal connections: Sin list (4.2; 12.1) 4.9 = 12.3 ttfcn (10.14; 14.1) Chapters 12-14

Figure 1. The Structure of Repetition in Hosea

Two clear conclusions arise from the foregoing. First, it is not enough to suggest that these three sections are merely different 'transmission units', originally separate and then pasted together willy-nilly.58 There is too much verbal interweaving here for that assumption to be satisfying. Secondly, and this should not even be necessary to specify, one must read the units in sequence. It is no accident that the book contains three different offers of repentance, any more than it is an accident that every offer of repentence until the final chapter is immediately followed by a renewed description of Israel's sin. God has a change of heart and offers repentance, only to see Israel return not only to sin but to the same sins: in ch. 4 Israel continues the harlotry inveighed against in chs. 1 and 2, and in 12.1, Israel continues the falsehood (ttirD) listed in 4.2, receiving the same condemnation (4.9; 12.3). The effect is to create a cycle of repeated sin, analogous to the narrative cycle followed in the book of Judges (see Judges 2.11-23). So, when God offers repentance one more time, in ch. 14, it is with more urgency and lower expectations than in ch. 11, which had itself demanded less of Israel than did the appeal in ch. 2. Chapter 14, offering pity only and no longer even asking covenant love or justice, is in a way a last resort for Israel. In Hosea, this final appeal remains unanswered, but in the larger context, the Book of the Twelve, it receives its response. In the very next chapter, Joel 1.10-12, appears this summary: 58. Wolff, Hosea, p. xxx.


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The field is destroyed, The land mourns. For the grain is destroyed, The new wine withered, The new o/7 wastes away. Be ashamed, farmers; wail, vinedressers; For the wheat and the barley, For the harvest of the field has perished. The vme withers, And the/ig-rree wastes away. Pomegranate, also palm and apple, All the trees of the field wither. Indeed, joy withers, From the sons of men.

The words emphasized are all characteristic of Hosea, and connect directly with Hosea 14. The list in Joel 1.10, 'grain, new wine and new oil', appears twice in Hosea 2 and is recalled by the recurrence of 'grain' in 14.8. The word pair 'vine' and 'fig-tree' (Joel 1.12) appears in Hosea 2.14, then 'vine' alone in 14.8. To this should be added the hammering wordplay in these verses of Joel, the interplay between 'wither' (ETIlin, v. 10; nETIlin, ran;, and IZTIirT, v. 12) and 'be ashamed' Ccran, v. 11), which recalls not only Hosea's typical language but a specific Hoseanic pun (cf. 13.15). The same care and verbal artistry which distinguishes the arrangement of the individual poems of Hosea has been equally applied to the arrangement of the books within the Twelve, and Joel answers the question left open in Hosea. The people of Ephraim did not repent and accept God's renewed covenant, and their prophesied fate ultimately came to them.59 Patterning by Wordplay The lyrical plot of Hosea thus proceeds largely by means of verbal repetition, especially of words used frequently or highlighted by their appearance in a list. By tracing how these significant words are applied in Hosea, one finds a comparatively complex arrangement: sin is followed 59. A more complete examination of the connections between Hosea and Joel in the context of the Twelve may be found in J. Nogalski, Literary Precursors to the Book of the Twelve (BZAW, 217; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 69-73; Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve (BZAW, 218; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 1322.

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by surprising forgiveness, which is followed by sin again (and so on), all framed by the larger correspondence between Hosea 1-3 and 14. The divisions which appear from this examination (1-3 and 14 serving to introduce and conclude the whole; 1-3, 4-11 and 12-14 forming discrete sections) are nothing new. They have all been noticed before. Nevertheless, the closely interrelated verbal patterns give these standard divisions much more depth and significance than previously suspected. And by turning to wordplay we find depths yet unexplored. Some of the patterns set out by wordplay correspond to and reinforce those based on simple repetition. For instance, as described above, the book begins with the three symbolic names of Hosea's children: ^Ninr, 'Jezreel'; itnm $b, 'Not Pitied'; and -ay $b, 'Not My People'. All of these names indicate God's judgment on Israel, Jezreel being a metonym for the sin committed there, and the other two names describing God's response to sin. The negative focus of these names is reversed as early as 2.1-3, especially at the end of the passage, 'For great will be the day of Jezreel. Say to your brothers, "My People" OD#), and to your sisters, "Pitied" (nom)' (2.2b-3). A second, more sweeping reversal, concludes Hosea 2: 'And I shall sow her (rpnmtl, using the verbal root of the name ^yir) for myself in the land, and I shall pity (Tiarrn) Not Pitied, and I shall say to Not My People, "You are my people" ('QJJ), and he shall say "My God"' (2.25). Hosea resumes castigating 'my people' in ch. 3 (vv. 6, 8, 12). The word occurs elsewhere in the book only to note the people's refusal to return to God (6.11; 11.7, both in conjunction with the root TltD, 'return'). The name 'Jezreel' appears nowhere after 2.25, and the root of 'pity' makes only one appearance, in the prophet's angry call for God to 'Give them a miscarrying womb (DO"))' (9.14), until the pattern is resolved in 14.4, 'In you the orphan finds pity (Dn"!1!)'. This word, already noted as the resolution of the list of covenant attributes in 2.21-22, serves also as a final reversal of the names of judgment in the first chapter. As so frequently happens, the pattern in the first chapters acts as a microcosm of the pattern in the whole book. These names will bear more paronomastic fruit soon, but this superficial examination is adequate to demonstrate the strategy, and the fact that these three names are dealt with so prominently in chs. 1 and 2 may indicate their function as a paradigm. The reader is expected to make these simple connections and to conclude that in the chapters to follow, proper names will be significant and the patterns in which they appear should be taken seriously.


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Although most patterns of name-puns do not follow the introductionconclusion or the three-part structures of the book as closely as do the patterns described above, they are no less structurally significant and, if anything, shed more light on the sort of care given to the arrangement of Hosea. Hosea appears almost incapable of using a name without playing on it. Place names are frequent subjects. In a list in 4.15, Israel is told, 'Do not enter Gilgal, do not go up to Beth-Aven, do not swear "As the LORD lives'". The word 'swear' (linen), recalls the city Beer-Sheba, which appears in a similar three-item list in Amos 8.14, where the pun on the verb form is explicit.60 A few verses later, another three-item list appears: 'For you have been a snare at Mizpah, a net spread out on Tabor, and rebels have gone deep in slaughter' (5.1-2). Again, the third item seems out of place, but the unusual word 'rebels' (D'tpto) here is virtually identical to the place name Shittim (D'CSD), and understanding the line as a wordplay connects it to the same pattern in 4.15 (two place names followed by an indirect reference to a third).61 The town of Gibeah (mo;) is mentioned four times in Hosea (5.8; 9.9; 10.9,9); the last time clearly in a wordplay with 10.8, 'They will say to the mountains, "Cover us!" and to the hills (rmn;i'7), "Fall on us!'". 'Hill' only appears in Hosea in 10.8 and 4.13, where it refers to pagan altars. Gibeah is condemned by association. These examples are simple and can hardly be called extended wordplays. More complex is the name Beth-Aven (]}£ PPS), literally 'house of wickedness', here evidently referring to Bethel as implied by Amos 5.5. The name appears three times in Hosea (4.15; 5.8; 10.5). The Septuagint, one should note, transliterates the name OIKOC; i2v, evidently reading the word jiK instead of |]K, a curiosity which may be significant. In 10.15, though, the circumlocution stops, and Bethel is named instead of BethAven.52 While the reader is still wondering what to make of this shift, Bethel is again named in 12.5, where the reference is not to the Bethel of Israel's idolatry but the Bethel of Jacob's encounter with God. The Septuagint, however, still has oiKCp Qv, which is especially curious in 60. Noted by J. Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten (Berlin: de Gruyter, 3rd edn, 1963), p. 112. 61. See 9.9 and the discussion above, pp. 73-74, of its punning interplay with 5.2. See also Y. Mazor, 'Hosea 5.1-3: Between Compositional Rhetoric and Rhetorical Composition', JSOT45 (1989), p. 120. Mazor also reads 'Shittim' here, but along with most commentators, emends the text rather than reading a wordplay. 62. The Septuagint has neither one. It reads 'house of Israel.'

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light of the word ]iK 'vigor,' in 12.4. Somehow, ]]K has become ]i«; Israel's wickedness has become the strength of Jacob's manhood in his struggle with the angel. It is not surprising, then, to encounter ]i« again just a few verses later: 'Ephraim said, "Surely I am rich; I have found wealth for myself (^ fl« TlKiJD)'" (12.9). But a more startling development follows: 'None of my gains will find my iniquity Cpl? ^"INIiD''), which is sin.' Wickedness, by punning, became strength; now strength becomes iniquity; Bethel, by association, is judged. Neither Bethel nor Beth-Aven is named again. More complicated patterns await. More frequent than any place name are the names Israel and Ephraim. As early as 1.4 Israel is associated by assonance with Jezreel, a sign of judgment, and so Israel appears from the start in an unpleasant light. Two chapters later, Israel figures in another wordplay, equally indicative of judgment: 'For many days, the sons of Israel (bwiCT) will abide without king or prince ("lit?)...' (3.4). The pun on ")&? is significant and will appear again, but first the reader encounters a multiple wordplay in 4.16-18: 'For like a stubborn (rn~10) cow, Israel (*?tnfc7') is stubborn (110)...their drinking turns (them) aside ("10, from the root "110).'63 The tribes of Israel are judged alongside the princes C~12?) of Judah in 5.9-10, and in 6.10 God proclaims, 'Pfcncr TOH IT'H'niJO TPR"I ('In the house of Israel I have seen an abomination') a line which is too perfectly shaped to be anything but a calculated wordplay. Israel not only contains an abomination: the pun implies that Israel is an abomination. Israel, like bloody Jezreel, will be made destitute because of its stubbornness and abominable actions. The next direct pun on the name comes in ch. 8, but in the meantime a new element is introduced. God laments in 7.14-16: They do not cry to me in their hearts; they do not wail on their beds. Over grain and new wine they sojourn. They have turned aside plio1, root TO] against me. And I was the one who instructed ['FlIO', root TO'], I strengthened their arms, and they devise evil against me...Their princes [DIT"lto] will fall by the sword.

Turning aside from God and judgment to the princes have already been associated with the name Israel, but God's memory of having instructed them himself adds a pathetic new touch. The Israel/prince wordplay returns in 8.3-4, where Israel is associated 63. Rudolph, 'Eigentiimlichkeiten', p. 316, notes this extended wordplay, even adding "HS (he binds) from v. 19 to the list, but he does not connect it all to the name Israel.


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with the verb "HD, 'to rule as prince', which is of course a cognate of the noun "ID. The passage is a curious reversal of the same pun in 3.4. There Israel would be left without king or prince; here God recalls how Israel established kings and princes but did so without God. Then, in 8.6, arrives what may be the most startling wordplay of all. The verse is almost incoherent as it stands. 'For from Israel (^NH^'D '?) and he, an artisan made him, and he is No-God. / For he shall be splinters, the calf of Samaria.' The first phrase is the problem, and most solutions involve considerable emendation of the text. The text becomes perfectly intelligible, however, if one simply spaces the offending phrase differently, to read *?« "ID" 'D "?, 'For who is the bull 'El?' The Canaanite God 3El, often associated with the figure of a bull (Ugaritic tr, Hebrew "ID), has frequently been identified as the inspiration for Jeroboam's calves, worshiped in the Northern Kingdom, so the ensuing lines fit perfectly (cf. also 8.5). Even more significant here is the realization that if this suggestion is valid, then the line is a brilliant wordplay on the name Israel, using the same consonants both to deride the false god and to link it with Israel.64 After such a paronomastic triumph, the next few wordplays seem fairly tame. God moans that 'all their princes (niT'lfe) are stubborn (D'~nb)' (9.15) and threatens 'When I come, then I will rebuke them (CHO^, root HO11), and peoples will be gathered against them / By their binding [being bound?] (cnOKZl, root ION) for their double iniquity' (10.10). Neither of these puns explicitly involves the name Israel, but by this time the members of the playing-field are familiar, and one registers the plays almost automatically. The larger picture has become clear. Israel and its princes have been thoroughly entwined (bound?) with stubbornness, abomination, idolatry and turning aside from God. Before, God instructed ("ID11) and strengthened them (7.15), but now he will rebuke (also "ID"1) and bind them. The pattern concludes with a bewildering flurry of wordplays in ch. 12. In v. 3 the prophet declares a lawsuit with Judah (Israel?) and with the patriarch Jacob for his ways and deeds.65 The prophet then illustrates 64. This reading of the line is noted and admired by M. Pope in ' "Pleonastic" Waw before Nouns in Ugaritic and Hebrew', JAOS 73 (1953), pp. 96-97 and in 'El in the Ugaritic Texts (VTSup, 2; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1955), p. 35. Pope ultimately finds this re-division of the text too clever and thus unlikely. His own explanation, however, based on the premise that one may simply ignore the conjunction after these words, is hardly more convincing. 65. The name Judah here is one of the most widely accepted instances of a

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those ways and deeds with a brief survey of Jacob's career. That wordplay is significant in the passage is signalled early by the juxtaposition of the name Jacob and its apparent etymology Dpi?', v, 3; Dpi!, v. 4; see Gen. 27.36). This is followed immediately in v. 4 by: DTfttriTK rnfo 1]1«D, 'in his vigor he struggled with God'. The verb rno, 'he struggled', is the etymology given in Genesis 32.28 for Jacob's new name, Israel—he struggles with God. The text continues in 12.5, And he ruled as prince to the angel, and he prevailed; He wept and sought favor for himself. At Bethel he found him, And there he spoke with him.

Perhaps the most important wordplay of all appears here, in 'he ruled as prince to the angel'. The verb is from "TIE?, the verbal form of the noun "ICO, 'prince', which has already been closely tied to the name Israel; here the connection is inescapable. As in 8.6, the same consonants spell different words: 'rule to', (^ ~2T), is Israel (biOST). But this is gibberish. The pun cannot be avoided, but what does it mean? Part of the difficulty comes from the ambiguous pronouns of the passage. Jacob evidently 'ruled as prince to the angel', but which of the two prevailed? Which of the two wept? Which sought favor? Genesis 32 has Jacob prevailing (or at least holding his own) and seeking favor, but it says nothing about anyone weeping, so one may not rely completely on that account. Here the field of meaning established by the Israel wordplays may help: 'to rule as prince' in Hosea is almost certainly a rebuke. Princes in Hosea are hardly admirable: notice their drunken fever in 7.3-7. What if here it is the angel who prevailed?66 Then Jacob's ruling as prince is comparable to the nation Israel's ignorant setting up of princes in 8.4, the only other place in Hosea where this verb is used. In both verses, Israel's princedom is without God. And in ch. 12 God will eventually prevail and meet Israel again. This interpretation is dubious for the same reason that it is possible: the text is ambiguous. And, since the name Israel is never again the subject 'Judahistic' redaction, the text being assumed originally to have read Israel. See, among many others, Wolfe, 'Editing', p. 91. No extant text has anything but Judah, however, and the wordplay works either way. 66. Suggested to me by Dr T. Smothers, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in an interview. In Dr Smothers's view, this passage is Hosea's radical revision of the Genesis tradition.


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of a wordplay, the issue is never resolved. Israel's association with sin and princely pride has been affirmed, but what God will do with Israel remains unspoken. The meaning of the wordplay has not so much been discovered as exhausted. But a corresponding thread of wordplays presents a much less bleak, or at any rate less ambivalent, message. Israel's companion name in passage after passage is Ephraim (cf. 5.3,5,9; 6.10; 10.6; 11.8; 12.1; 13.1). Indeed the name Ephraim first appears tied up in a network of puns on Israel. Significantly, the two names overlap in the center of the book but not at the ends. Israel begins its paronomastic career in ch. 1 and ends in ch. 12; Ephraim begins in ch. 4 and does not disappear until the final oracle. If there is a resolution of the pattern begun by Israel, it may be in Ephraim. For decades, as already noted in passing, interpreters have observed the many puns on the name Ephraim (n'"]?K), but no one has examined the arrangement of the wordplays.67 The first appearance of the name in the book, in 4.17, has already been prepared by a wordplay: 'For like a stubborn cow (rns), Israel is stubborn' (4.16).68 In the next chapter, the pun is a reversal of consonants. Wounded Ephraim (D'HSN) will go to Assyria, which will be unable to heal (BE"!*?) him (5.13; cf. 6.1,4). The complex cycle of puns on anger (*]£) in ch. 7, described in the last chapter, drags Ephraim along with it. Verses 3-7 pun wildly on this phoneme: drawing together D'DR]!? ('adulterers', v. 4), HSR ('baker', v. 4), and *]K ('anger', implied in v. 6, read by the Syriac and Targums). Verse 8 then concludes, 'Ephraim (CH?**) among the peoples, he is mixed together. Ephraim is an unturned cake'. Thus concludes the image of the baker who left his dough half-kneaded (7.4) and his cake half-baked. In terms of metaphor and wordplay, Ephraim is inextricably linked to all the impotent drunken anger and licentiousness described in these verses. In 8.9, DH?$ is a wild ass (iOB) and in 9.11 may be connected with other members of the animal kingdom. Wellhausen suggests that the image of the flying birds in this verse is used because of the similarity of the word DH3$, 'wings or pinions', to the name D^SK.69 Since the word QH3K does not actually appear in the passage—or the book—this seems a bit far-fetched, but it is difficult to settle on a kind of wordplay that would be impossible for this prophet. In 9.16 CH?$ will not produce 67. See Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten, p. 133; Rudolph, Hosea, p. 315; Buss, Prophetic Word, p. 39; Fisch, 'Poetics of Violence', pp. 145-46, 68. Rudolph, Hosea, p. 315. 69. Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten, p. 124.

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fruit (HE). Several of these wordplays are used again in chs. 11 and 13. Ephraim did not know that God healed them (11.3), but God says, 'I will not execute the fierceness of my anger 038); I will not return to destroy Ephraim' (11.9). Nevertheless, God mentions his anger again in 13.11 (Ephraim is named in 13.12) and reminds him that only with God's help can he be fruitful (using the verb root tos, spelled uniquely with a final K, perhaps to accentuate the wordplay).70 In the final oracle of the book (14.2-9) all the strands are brought together. In this oracle, already so packed with significant vocabulary, the prophet resumes and reinterprets every pun except the wild ass of 8.9. The people promise to present to God the bulls (D'HS) of their lips (v. 3),71 and God will heal their apostasy, for 'my anger CSK) has turned away' (v. 5), the name Ephraim appears in an explosive vocative in v. 8, in which verse he is promised fruit CHS) from God.' The arrangement of the Ephraim puns, as charted below, is striking. In chs. 4-9, all the associations made by the wordplays are negative. The puns are reorganized and though still largely condemnatory seem less forceful in chs. 11 and 13. By ch. 14, the puns have been redeemed: every negative connotation has been wiped away, and Ephraim, the chameleonic name, yields a blessing after all. The nation may only be redeemed when it ceases to be the one who struggles with God (Israel, the etymology of Gen. 32.28) and begins to bear fruit (Ephraim, the etymology of Gen. 42.52). A. Ephraim is a stubborn cow (!"I~ID) 4.16-17 B. Ephraim seeks vain healing (KSH) 5.13 C. Like an oven, Ephraim burns with anger (*}$) 7.4-8 D. Ephraim is a wild ass (N~IS) 8.9 E. Ephraim bears no fruit (*~ID) 9.16 B. Ephraim does not understand its healing (KS~1) 11.3 C. God recants his anger (fjK) with Ephraim 11.9 C. God recalls his anger (*]») with Ephraim 13.11-12 E. Ephraim cannot bear fruit CHS) 13.15 A. Ephraim should render the bulls (D'"1S) of their lips 14.3 B. God will heal them (ten) 14.5 C. God's anger (*•)«) has turned 14.5 E. Ephraim will bear fruit ("IS) 14.9 Figure 2. Wordplay on DHSl* in Hosea 70. So Buss, Prophetic Word, p. 39. 71. The Septuagint has Kcxpnov, evidently reading '"IS instead of CHS.


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Geographical and ethnic names are thus arranged into progressive patterns of paronomasia. A third category yields, if anything, even more impressive results: divine names. Earlier, the pattern involving the names of Hosea's children was referred to as 'simple', and on one level it certainly is. The negative force of the second and third names, for instance, is removed in ch. 2 by the simple expedient of dropping the negative particle. But 'simple' is not Hosea's forte, and closer analysis seems warranted. H.G. May, in an insightful essay, notes a connection between the first name and the latter two: ^RJTir, literally 'God (*7K) sows', ends with the same consonants with which the next two names begin: yfr, 'not'. The connected portions imply t?tTN''?, 'Not-God'.72 This phrase, significantly, appears in Deuteronomy 32, a chapter with which Hosea frequently corresponds, in the sentence, 'They have incited me to wrath by Not-God'.73 Who this 'Not-God' may be is implied by a further connection between the three names: all contain the name of a Canaanite deity. ^NiTir, of course, contains 'El, which may be either a general term for God or the proper name of the Canaanite chief god (see 'the bull 'El' in 8.6, discussed above, p. 125). 'DJ? vh recalls the name of the Canaanite god Amm (as in the name Jeroboam, the king in Hosea's day), and Horn $b is related to the Ugaritic goddess Racham.74 The indigenous pantheon is the Not-God with which Israel has sinned, and God's response at the end of ch. 1 is to say, 'And I (am) "I will not be" (rrriN N1?) to you.' Here rpnR recalls the theophany on Sinai, when God first revealed his own name to Moses, saying irriK ~)dN rrnK (Exod. 3.14).75 Because Israel has called on the name of Not-God, the true God withdraws his sacred name from them. At the end of ch. 2, in the redemption passage that closes the first section of the book, God tries to return his name to its true place in Israel. Verses 18-19, pivotal verses by anyone's estimation, read:

72. H.G. May, 'An Interpretation of the Names of Hosea's Children', JBL 55 (1936), pp. 289-90. 73. For more detail on these many correspondences, see Buss, Prophetic Word, pp. 75, 82, 85-86. 74. E. Jacob, 'L'Heritage cananeen dans le livre du prophete Osee', RHPR 43 (1963), p. 253. On 'El in Hosea, see Pope, 'El in the Ugaritic Texts, pp. 12-13, 35. 75. Buber, Prophetic Faith, p. 117-18; see also Fisch, 'Poetics of Violence', p. 144.

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Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea And it shall be in that day, Oracle of the LORD, You shall call out 'My husband', And you shall no longer call me 'My Baal'. And I shall remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, And they shall be remembered no more by their name.

God who has sworn to remove his special name from his special people relents and offers instead to remove the names of the Baals. In the process, he reminds them once more of the great moment when he gave them his name. After giving the name !TnR "IBJR ITnR in Exodus 3.14, he concludes, "11 "ll4? "HDT HD rbxh 'Qfirnr, 'This is my name forever, and this my remembrance generation to generation' (Exod. 3.15). The final line of Hosea 2.19 offers to give the Baals 'No-remembrance by name': No-Name for Not-God. The offer concluding the pattern in the introduction does not appear to be accepted, because the motif of Not-God continues. It may appear in 7.16, where the difficult text seems to read, '[Ephraim] will return not upon (?V flfr); they are like a treacherous bow.' Nyberg argues that "71? here is neither a preposition nor a textual error but rather a reference to a Canaanite god named 'Al, perhaps a short form of jV^l?, 'Most High'.76 The text is still difficult, but if Nyberg's idea is valid, then the appearance of another divine name with the negative particle parallels the implied ^K'N1? of ch. 1. In any case, the theme is certainly continued in the reconstructed 8.6: 'For who is the bull 'El? / For an artisan made him, and he is Not-God (DT^tTK^).' In ch. 11 the theme swells to a climax. A hint of a positive resolution conies in v. 4, where God says, 'I will be (iTTTK) to Israel like one who lifts a yoke'. Has God restored his name to the people? Perhaps, but two verses later, God moans, 'My people ('131?) is hung up for apostasy / And they call to 'Al (*7irl7N)' (11.7).77 At last, God gives in and in v. 9 turns 76. Nyberg, Studien zum Hoseabuche, pp. 60-61. 77. Again tentatively reading the divine name 'Al with Nyberg, Studien zum Hoseabuche, pp. 60-61, largely to make sense of what otherwise has none ('to upon'). It is interesting that in this verse Ibn Ezra also understood a divine name, a short form of 'Most High', although he assumed that the referent is the God of Israel. See A. Lipshitz, The Commentary of Abraham Ibn Ezra on Hosea (New York: SepherHerman, 1988), p. 104.


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the "^Tfa motif inside out, along the way reversing the connection made in 2.18 between 'My Husband' pETtf) and 'My Baal'. God says that he cannot give up Ephraim and Israel, 'For I am God, and not man' (^K "D aftr^ 'ZCK). While 11.9 is certainly a climax, it does not end the story. In ch. 13, TIN, a short form of iTTlN, appears four times: '/ will be like a lion to them' (13.7), 7 will be your king' (13.7), 'Death, / will be your pestilence' and 'Sheol, I will be your sting' (both 13.14). As described earlier, this short form puns on both V1» ('Alas!') and on the interrogative iTK ('Where?').78 The divine name 'I will be who I will be' has been restored, but exactly what 'I will be' is still in doubt. Here, God promises that he will be punishment. In ch. 14, however, God promises 'I will be (iTnN) like the dew to Israel'. The true divine name, taken away in 1.9, has been restored, and it is once again a name of blessing. And what has become of the pagan names? The people are urged to say, 'We will no longer say "Our God" to the work of our hands' (14.4), but God no longer promises to remove the names of the Baals. Instead, the names of the Baals remain and are incorporated into God's blessing. Verse 8 says, 'They will cause grain (|H) to revive'. But ]T\ is not just the word for grain; it is Dagan, the Semitic god. God appears to be assuming the responsibilities usually allocated to Canaanite fertility figures. Indeed, the word most frequently linked with ]T\ in Hosea, EhTn ('new wine') is another indigenous divine name. Verse 8 continues, 'His remembrance (1~DT, often used of God's name; cf. Exod. 3.15; Hos. 2.19, 12.6) like wine (]") of Lebanon'. Or is the word 'wine' another divine name: Yayin of Lebanon? The form does appear twice in the Ugaritic texts as a proper name, where interestingly enough it is spelled yyn, like the Hebrew word but distinct from the Ugaritic yn, 'wine'.79 Then comes the coup de grace. In v. 9, God says, 'Ephraim! What more have I to do with idols? I myself will answer and will watch out for him'. This last line falls rather flat until one reads Wellhausen's ingenious suggestion: For irffitf^l Tni? ••]», 'I myself will answer and I will watch out for him', Wellhausen emends the text to read irnfiftjfl in]!) "•]$, 'I am his Anat and his Asherah'.80 As an emendation, it requires some imagination; as an 78. Cf. the Septuagint reading,TO>T>.The wordplay is explored in more detail by Fisch, 'Poetics of Violence', pp. 152-53. 79. C.H. Gordon, Ugaritic Handbook (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, rev. edn, 1947), p. 234. (The text references are 16.10 and 309.25). 80. Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten, p. 134.

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intentional wordplay, it is no more than one should expect from Hosea. Wolffs judgment that Wellhausen's proposal is too 'audacious' may be correct if Wolff means that it is too audacious for Wolff, but what criteria can be imagined to determine what is too audacious for Hosea?81 What is too audacious for the God which this amazing prophet proclaims? Israel would not let God remove the Not-Gods from their mouth. They returned to sin even after God negated the Not-Gods by declaring himself God and Not-Man. So God gives Israel a final chance. If Israel must worship the gods of Canaan, then 'I Will Be' will become the gods of Canaan. The interpreters who for generations have considered the book of Hosea to be a collection of rhetoric must be forgiven for finding no structure in the book. Indeed, little or no rhetorical structure exists. Logic and chronology are impossible to discern, and transitions between passages are sharp, choppy and bewildering. Jerome is right: 'Osee commaticus est' (Hosea is halting). The structure that appears in Hosea can hardly be called a structure at all. The different passages of the book are not so much constructed as they are interwoven by verbal and phonetic echoes. It is worth noting, too, that such verbal patterning in no way precludes the book's being put together by an editor. The traditional wisdom about the book's being an edition of original oracles and poems, perhaps having undergone several different redactions, still answers many questions. Ch. 3, with its first person presentation and largely unique vocabulary, still stands out starkly and, to me at least, inexplicably. Certain incongruous mentions of Judah may still indicate a 'Judahistic' redaction (e.g. 1.7; 5.5; 6.11; 8.14). The chapters of the book's envelope structure (1-2, 14) may indeed have been added late to the book. The verbal patterns of Hosea do not contradict any of these redactional hypotheses; they do, however, emphatically deny that any such redaction was done carelessly. Words, even wordplays, have been selected and arranged with such meticulous care in this book that it no longer appears reasonable to assume that anything is haphazard in Hosea. Moreover, the care that has been given to Hosea is not the care of the rhetorician, but the care of a poet. Though the book contains some vestiges of the rhetoric that appears in the other prophets, Hosea is not primarily a book of rhetoric. It is above all a poem, a sustained lyric devoted less to persuasion than to the revelation of a startling and unfamiliar (defamiliarized?) God. Some words and wordplays connect 81. Wolff, Hosea, p. 233.


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the introductory section to the last chapter, so that these parts become companion salvation songs. Other verbal patterns indicate how God has repeatedly sought to redeem his people, only to be spurned—'I would redeem them, but they speak lies against me!' (7.13). In three extended passages God gathers together the terms that have described the people's sin and judgment, then reverses them to offer restoration (2.16-25; 11.111; 14.2-9). After each offer, the people resume their sin, taking up the same practices, described by the same words (in chs. 4 and 12). Other patterns—constructed from puns on Israel, Ephraim and the names of foreign gods—reveal God's wrath, remorse and willingness to overturn his own judgments, as his own heart is overthrown by love. This progressive revelation of God's heart, much more than any listing of 'structures' (as if it were enough to identify a structure without ever discussing the effect of that structure on the development of meaning) is the point of the poetic reading of Hosea.

Chapter 6

CONCLUSION: GENRE AND THE PROPHETS

The prophet is a fool; the inspired man, a lunatic. —Hosea 9.7

Beginning with an examination of the foundational genres that are usually attributed to the book of Hosea, I have uncovered new meaning there. Puzzling words and phrases have been rediscovered as parts of intricate patterns, each connection contributing to the book's meaning, not haphazardly scattered editorial leavings. Getting to this point has been a long process. I began by noting that few, if any, interpreters of the prophetic books have demonstrated any clear understanding of the prophetic genre. Most have assumed that prophecy is a species of rhetoric, but at the same time have recognized the prevalence of poetry in prophetic books. My examination of these two foundational genres revealed them to be sharply distinct, almost mutually exclusive. So I asked: Can these two incompatible genres coexist in the prophetic books? And if so, how? To answer this would have required a complete examination of every distinctive feature of every prophetic book, clearly a task beyond the scope of this investigation, or perhaps of a life's work. So I limited myself in two significant ways. First, I chose to examine only one verbal trope, verbal repetition, stressing one significant subset of that device, wordplay. Next, I chose to concentrate on only one prophetic book, Hosea, although some attention has been given to Amos as a contemporary foil. The results did much to clarify the question of genre in the prophets. Verbal repetition takes a distinctive form in rhetoric, generally being the repetition of sentences or propositions and usually serving the rhetorical goal of clarity. Such repetition I found often in the book of Amos, but seldom in Hosea. In poetry, repetition is less coherent, the repetend usually being a single word or syllable, not a complete thought,

6. Conclusion: Genre and the Prophets

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and the goal more often being to complicate than to clarify. The poem typically achieves this complication by varying a repetition in some way. Such variant repetition is remarkably characteristic of Hosea. Most notably, Hosea extensively uses wordplay, the clearest example of variant repetition. Given the choice between rhetoric and poetry, Hosea is primarily poetic. Assuming then that Hosea's distinctive use of verbal repetition and wordplay indicates poetry, I next tried to read through the book with a poetic consciousness. Such matters as logic and chronology, both frequently the despair of Hosea's interpreters, I deemed irrelevant, preferring to concentrate on poetic structures such as variant repetition and echoic sounds. It was this shift of focus that led to my new understanding of the book. I found clear verbal arrangements, authorial or editorial or both, offering new depths of meaning, often in startling ways. By utilitarian standards, my experiment has been a success. My brief poetic reading uncovered much meaning in the book, meaning that generations of rhetorical analysis have missed or ignored. Still, why go through all this to arrive here? Why, for instance, was it necessary to spend an entire chapter defining rhetoric and poetry? Could I not have demonstrated the verbal patterns mentioned in Chapter 5 without spending so long in the preliminaries of Chapter 2? At one level, of course, this was certainly possible, and various close readers throughout the history of interpretation have noted such interwoven meanings in the prophetic books.1 Nevertheless, these interpreters have been the exception instead of the rule, and I had to examine the genre presuppositions of most prophetic criticism to understand why such insights have been so rare. The echoic sounds of carefully arranged wordplays have been overlooked quite simply because most interpreters have assumed that Hosea is a book of rhetoric, and rhetoric does not behave like that. Seeking the marks of classical rhetoric, critics have found only disorganization and incoherence; indifferent to the 'rhythmic aspect' of poetry, they have entirely missed the striking and meticulous orchestration of Hosea's language. There is another reason for going so carefully through the whole process: once the method is established, the analysis done here may work also with other tropes and other prophets. Since the best conclusion to a 1. Such instinctive sensitivity to the distinctive nature of this text has always characterized the best commentaries on Hosea, from J. Wellhausen's short notes in Die kleinen Propheten to H.W. Wolffs insightful analysis in Hosea.

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study like this is not a final, undeniable proof, but a map for further work, let me sketch some of these extended applications. Other Verbal Devices In theory, an analysis of almost any verbal device would have served my purpose and demonstrated the distinctively poetic nature of Hosea. I chose to examine verbal repetition and wordplay, and they have proven very productive, but other devices could have served as well. For instance, the book of Hosea is noted for its powerful use of metaphors. Again, although many might associate metaphorical language with poetry, metaphors and similes may appear in any genre. The presence of metaphors does not itself indicate the genre of the book; instead, the way that each type of literature uses metaphors must be stressed. Each genre uses them somewhat differently. Aristotle devotes an entire section of the Rhetoric to the appropriate rhetorical use of metaphors. He says that in rhetoric, metaphors should always be appropriate (not contrary to the intended sense), should be from the suitable class (an elevated subject should be compared to something from an equal or higher class), should not be far-fetched and should be euphonic and beautiful in either sound or meaning.2 In effect, rhetorical metaphors should clarify the text. Failing that, they should at least not distract, for instance by being from an inappropriate class or by being unlikely. In poetry, metaphors may at any time intrude into the sense by being elaborate or strikingly inappropriate, and such striking metaphors are more likely to be praised than scorned. In Hosea, two simple examples among many indicate in which direction this prophet's metaphors tend. The baking metaphor of Hosea 7.3-9 is long and impossibly involved, rich in meaning but terribly difficult to use to illustrate any single point. In short, it is more a metaphysical conceit than a rhetorical metaphor, more like John Donne's sonnets than his sermons. An even better example comes in 5.12, where in two short metaphors God succeeds in breaking every one of Aristotle's instructions: 'But as for me, I am as pus to Ephraim, and as a worm grub to the house of Judah.'3 Rhetorical canons find little place in Hosea. The book appears to be poetry. 2. Aristotle, Rhetoric IH.ii.9-13. 3. This translation, so particularly illustrative of the point, is taken from G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology. II. The Theology of Israel's Prophetic Traditions (trans. D.M.G. Stalker; New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 144.


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More important than these Aristotelian strictures on metaphors is the fact that metaphors in rhetoric tend to be of limited scope. By contrast, many poems are dominated by their metaphors, which may extend from the beginning of the poem to the end. Thus metaphors may dictate a poem's arrangement as much as repetition and wordplay. Indeed, this may be true of the whole of the book of Hosea. Gary Light argues that Hosea should be studied in terms of what Paul Ricoeur calls the 'theoryconstitutive' metaphor, a single metaphor around which a whole text revolves. Light suggests that the marriage metaphor, most simply expressed in 2.18 ('You will call [me] "My husband", and shall no longer say to me 'My Baal"'.) informs the book as a whole, and he tries to draw all of the book's similes under this umbrella.4 Not everything fits, but the result is revealing enough to support the view that the poetic reading of Hosea holds out more promise than the rhetorical.5 Another possible course of study would be Hosea's use of words, phrases and traditions from other books. The study of intertextuality, one text's use of another, has been a hot topic of late, both in secular and in biblical interpretation.6 One facet of the study which has been only indirectly addressed is the question of genre. How do different genres use other texts? Rhetoric uses citation and allusion primarily for the sake of evidence and authority. Thus Paul and the author of Hebrews use the Old Testament. Poetry, however, never concerned with any authority beyond its own inspiration, uses allusion very differently. A poetic allusion evokes the imagery and tone of the text referred to, often to revise or reverse that tone. The first line of Eliot's 'The Waste Land', 'April is the cruellest month', is both an allusion to and a denial of Chaucer's merry beginning of The Canterbury Tales, 'Whan that April 4. G. Light, 'Theory-Constitutive Metaphor and Its Development in the Book of Hosea' (PhD Dissertation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1992), pp. 63-65. 5. In addition to Light's work, a few beginning references on metaphor in Hosea are: C.F. Fensham, The Marriage Metaphor in Hosea for the Covenant Relationship between the Lord and His People (Hos. 1.2-9)', JNSL 12 (1984), pp. 71-78; J.G. Janzen, 'Metaphor and Reality in Hosea 11', Semeia 24 (1982), pp. 7-44; P.A. Kruger, 'Prophetic Imagery: On Metaphors and Similes in the Book of Hosea', JNSL 14 (1988), pp. 143-51; J.J. Schmitt, 'The Wife of God in Hosea 2', BR 34 (1989), pp. 5-18. 6. The best study of intertextuality in the Hebrew Bible is M. Fishbane's Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). One collection of essays on the subject is Fewell (ed.), Reading between Texts.

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with his showres soote...' Poetic allusion, like poetic repetition, tends to complicate rather than confirm meaning. Many allusions have been noted and explored in Hosea. One of Buss's most interesting chapters, for instance, details Hosea's connections to other texts, especially to Deuteronomy 32.7 The most evocative connection to this chapter in Deuteronomy is that noted by H.G. May in the article discussed above: Hosea's use of the ^N'tf1?, Not-God, motif.8 This four-letter theme, going through all of its gyrations and reversals in Hosea, could be a paradigm example of poetic, as opposed to rhetorical, intertextuality. Or again, God says in Hosea 11.8, 'How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I surrender you, Israel? How can I make you like Adman, or set you like Zeboiim?' This reference to the cities overthrown (root ~[Dn) along with Sodom and Gomorrah (cf. Deut. 29.22), is promptly reversed in the next verse. God adds, 'My heart is overthrown ("[SH]) against me!'9 The allusion is not made in order to illustrate or lend authority to the present text, as a rhetorical discourse might have done. Instead, the allusion is summoned in order to twist it apart: this time God, not the cities, is overthrown. This is poetry. Other examples must be considered, but at a surface reading, Hosea's other allusions appear to be similarly complicating.10 Again, Hosea appears to be poetic rather than rhetorical, and a fascinating study would be to read through the book examining the texture of Hosea's intertextuality, as we have read it through with repetition and wordplay in mind. This is a task for another study, but the method is same as that proposed here. Other Prophetic Books By far the greatest value that this investigation could have would be to contribute to the study of biblical prophecy as a whole. How might the procedure applied here to Hosea work when applied to other prophetic books? To answer that, I return to the idea that prophecy represents a 7. Buss, Prophetic Word, pp. 81-115. 8. May, 'Names of Hosea's Children', pp. 289-90. 9. Noted by Fisch, 'Poetics of Violence', p. 142. 10. See P.R. Ackroyd, 'Hosea and Jacob', VT 13 (1963), pp. 245-59; M. DeRoche, 'The Reversal of Creation in Hosea', VT31 (1981), pp. 400-409; van Dijk-Hemmes, 'Imagination of Power', pp. 75-88; L.M. Eslinger, 'Hosea 12.5a and Genesis 32.29: A Study in Inner Biblical Exegesis,' JSOT 18 (1980), pp. 91-99; Krause, 'A Blessing Cursed', pp. 191-202.


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mixture of genres. It is neither rhetoric nor poetry alone; it is both.11 Trying to read any prophetic book as wholly one or the other genre can only cause confusion, whereas recognizing the mixture resolves a world of difficulties and allows the books to appear less muddled than often thought. As Thomas Howes wrote in 1783, The union then in these prophetic works of admonitions and exhortations, concerning moral, religious, civil, and historical subjects, all delivered in poetic diction, and in a regular and harmonious arrangement of the words...which the more subtilizing Greeks, in later ages, separated into several different species of composition... according as it was of a poetic, or of an oratorical, or historic kind; this aboriginal union, I say, here of what was not separated until later ages... [exhibits] no other marks of disorder, than what become at the same time marks of the originality, authenticity, and antiquity of these works.12

The model of a spectrum, proposed at the beginning of Chapter 3, is still a useful way to understand the combination of genres in prophecy. There, I suggested that each prophetic book partook of a different proportion of each genre, and that as a book's portion of the one genre increased so its portion of the other decreased. Hosea partook liberally of poetry but only sparingly of rhetoric, at least as compared to Amos. Other books, however, might represent different mixtures of these foundational genres. The task is provisionally to determine where each book fits on this spectrum. Poetry in Amos In the chapter on verbal repetition, I used Amos as a foil, an example of how rhetorical repetition should appear but does not in Hosea. The best examples of Amos's rhetorical repetition remain his use of oratorical 11. Indeed, some prophets add also the temporal consciousness that characterizes narrative. Ezekiel's prophecies are arranged at least partly in terms of chronology, as is clear from the temporal designations with which most of the sections begin. Jeremiah, too, seems interested in a narrative structure, especially in chs. 26-45, but in neither of these books is a narrative scheme actually carried through. Ezekiel departs from chronology when it suits the thematic needs of the book (e.g. 29.17), and Jeremiah's sequencing of material is even more incomplete. (See R.E. Clements, 'Jeremiah 1-25 and theDeuteronomistic History', in A.G. Auld (ed.), Understanding Poets and Prophets [Festschrift G.W. Anderson; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993], p. 93.) In the end, these books too are most productively interpreted in terms of rhetoric and poetry. 12. T. Howes, 'Doubts concerning the Translation and Notes', pp. 446-47.

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formulas and the sentence-repetitions in the introductory oracles against foreign nations, but I noted other examples as well. The analysis remains accurate, but it is incomplete. Though Amos's rhetorical repetition is so clear as to serve as a paradigm, the book is by no means devoid of poetic consciousness. The largest part of the book appears to be arranged in a chiastic pattern marked by the repetition of single words, not of clauses such as appear in Amos's rhetorical repetitions. This pattern may be schematized thus.13 1.1 Earthquake 1.2 ^rron m~\ (the head of Carmel), ^3« (mourn) 2.14 013 (flee),

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