Parallelism in Amos

Part I. Parallelism In Amos

BY

LOUIS I. NEWMAN

Part II. Parallelism In Isaiah, Chapters 1-10

BY WILLIAM POPPER

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1. The Supposed Hebraisms in the Grammar of Biblical Aramaic, by

2. Studies in Biblical Parallelism. Part I. Parallelism in Amos, by

Louis I. Newman. Pp. 57-265.

3. Studies in Biblical Parallelism. Part II. Parallelism in Isaiah,

Chapters 1-10, by Williara Popper. Pp. 267-444.

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STUDIES IN BIBLICAL PARALLELISM

PART I.

PARALLELISM IN AMOS

BY

LOUIS I. NEWMAN PART 11.

PARALLELISM IN ISAIAH, CHAPTERS 1-10

BY

WILLIAM POPPER

Foreword

The studies presented in these pages are in great measure the result of work done in the University of California in the year 1915-16. They were prompted in the first instance by a desire to arrange for class-room work a suitable text-book with which to introduce students of Hebrew to the prophetic literature. Surely students of no other language must work with texts as full of difficulties as is the most of that literature. Courses in the Prophets often consist mainly of lectures by the instructor offering explanations of linguistic and stylistic abnormalities; so loud is the creaking of the critical apparatus that the student is constantly distracted from any literary appreciation of the text itself. It seemed to me that in preparing a text for students the editor should not only remove those evident errors which even conservative critics admit and which are easily rectified, but he should also wherever there is a great difficulty and a fairly strong presumption of error boldly adopt some satisfactory emendation. It is generally possible to find another and clearer passage in the literature treating of the same subject as does the suspicious passage, expressing what is evidently its intended thought, and offering a basis for emendation in a spirit which the editor can feel sure does no violence to the ancient Hebrew.

After such a treatment of the text of Isaiah had been begun it became evident that whether that prophet regularly delivered his oracles in parallelism or not, the clear preponderance of parallelistic structure therein must preclude the acceptance of any emendation which does not retain or reestablish such a structure. It became clear also that the greatest difficulties in the present text are found just where the parallelism is defective. It seemed a worthy task, therefore, to go further into the subject ; reexamine some considerable portion of prophetic literature from this standpoint; consistently apply the test of parallelism to every passage therein, and along the lines suggested by that test seek

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some solution for every problem, however difficult. Accordingly while I was myself working at the text of Isaiah, Amos was chosen for a similar study by the Hebrew seminar. The text was analyzed, certain problems were formulated, and a method of possible solution was suggested.

Mr. Newman's article in its first form contained his answers to the questions raised; later it was expanded into a thesis presented for the degree of Master of Arts from this University, though for its final draft Mr, Newman gathered material while he was a student at Columbia University. After his study was almost completed several modifications were made on the basis of George Buchanan Gray's Forms of Hebrew Poetry; a reading of this book, however, did not affect Mr. Newman's results materially, except where indicated; its main influence was in the adoption of Gray's system of symbols for the schematization of the parallelism.

While in Mr. Newman's Amos studies the material has been classified by types, in my paper the first five chapters of Isaiah have been studied verse by verse, the Authorized English translation given at the head of each paragraph or stanza discussion, the nature of the parallelism pointed out, and one or several emendations suggested wherever the parallelism either is itself defective or indicates other stylistic defects. In chapters 6-10 only those passages have been treated which are apparently defective or otherwise call for special comment ; the parallelism of the remaining portions will be recognized upon reference to the translation of the reconstructed text.

In not a few eases in both the Amos and the Isaiah studies the proposed solution involves a transposition of words and phrases; and as in a recent article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, XXXVI (1917), p. 63, dealing with the Book of Hosea, objection is apparently raised to such transpositions in general, a word in justification of this principle of emendation should be said. The copyist of Oriental manuscripts, however careful he may be, sometimes omits not only letters and words, but also phrases and whole sentences; and a later copyist then inserts such marginal or interlinear passages, sometimes in the

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wrong place. Moreover, authors themselves sometimes make such corrections and insertions in their own manuscripts, as well as in the manuscripts of other authors (so the Arabic chronicler Ibn Taghri Birdi narrates) ; I have worked with an Arabic autographic manuscript in which considerable study was sometimes necessary to determine where such insertions were intended to be placed ; and different manuscripts of the same Arabic poem show a variation in the order of lines (for example, see the University of California Publications in Semitic Philology, II, 20). In the several hundred years that elapsed between the delivery of the prophecies of Amos and Isaiah and the date at which the written word came to be venerated and the text fixed — centuries which saw a change not only in the form of the alphabet used by the Hebrews but also in the language of their daily speech — it is hard to believe that the manuscripts of those prophecies did not suffer the same vicissitudes which other manuscripts suffered at a much later epoch and in a much shorter space of time. The reader's attention is called particularly to Isaiah 7.8 ; if he does not believe that this verse has been edited into the text, and at the wrong place — that even if it be retained, it must be transposed — he will have little sympathy for many passages in these studies; but if he accepts the transposition, he must admit the probability of a similar solution in places where form and sense of the text are even more obscure and can be improved thereby. As for the transposition of whole sections from their present sequence, this much is certain: Isaiah did not write his prophecies in the order in which they have been handed down ; for if he had done so, the sixth chapter would stand first in the book. Quite probably the prophecies were first written on different pieces of whatever writing material was used and were arranged later, as was the case with the Koran ; and there can at least be no objection to transposing chapters into chronological sequence, or any other sequence which helps in an appreciation of the contents. Furthermore, since chapter divisions are known to be late, we may disregard them also in the transposition of sections where internal evidence warrants the change.

The question of successive editions of prophetic literature has been raised several times in the paper on Amos. In studying Isaiah I have touched upon this question but rarely, since in most cases it does not affect the question of parallelism. After an even larger portion of Isaiah has been examined, it will be of interest to determine whether supposed differences of authorship coincide with variations in the nature of the parallelism. Mr. Newman's conclusion that Amos almost invariably uses the couplet structure in piarallelism, and my own conclusion that it is possible to find many variations from this simple structure in Isaiah, suggest that there may have been individual preferences in this matter on the part of the Hebrew writers.

My purpose of letting the laws of parallelism suggest emendations has induced me to neglect as far as possible emendations suggested by others; this was not possible, however, in the case of those suggestions recorded in the frequently consulted Brown- Driver-Briggs lexicon ; no doubt others of my emendations, also, were in reality due to my previous readings on the subject, and I beg to be pardoned for not tracing them to their sources and for not giving credit where credit may possibly be due.

Typographical difficulties have led to the use of transliteration^ in place of Hebrew characters in these studies ; as this necessitates the insertion of vowels into a text written originally with consonants only, it has the disadvantage that emendations sometimes seem to involve more radical changes than they in reality do. Moreover, for typographical reasons the printing of extensive portions of the reconstructed text has not been attempted, except in the case of the Amos Doom Song ; in general the transliteration has been confined to the emended words. In the case of Isaiah I have offered instead a translation of the whole of the reconstructed text. In this translation my purpose was again to emphasize the parallelism. Accordingly absolute

1 It was not found possible even to follow the system of transliteration generally accepted in the United States to-day; but the student of Hebrew will easily recognize that q represents the Hebrew gadhe (dotted s) ; q the Hebrew qoph (dotted fc) ; % the Hebrew x^th (dotted h) ; while simple s represents the Hebrew samelch and sin, and in a few cases Arabic sad (i.e., gad). Proper names, however, have in general been left without diacritical marks or accents of any kind; e.g., Hariri instead of Xariri.

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literalness has not always been insisted upon ; active and passive constructions have sometimes been interchanged; single words expressing the spirit of the original have been used where literalness would have demanded some longer paraphrase ; and unimportant particles have sometimes been omitted (e.g., the connective "and") where the meaning was not thereby altered. The attempt has been made also to represent something of the assonance, rhythm, and other stylistic characteristics of the Hebrew, all of which devices have been used in the translation in about the same proportion, though not always at the same point of the couplet, as in the original.

Being convinced, however, that the affinities of Hebrew parallelism are with the prototype of the Arabic saf and not with the classical system of meters, I have not attempted to show exact regularity in the rhythm. Little is known concerning the prophet's method of delivering his oracles. It has been pointed out that saj' in Arabic means "the cooing of the dove," and that Isaiah speaks of ' ' wizards that peep and mutter " ; it might be added that n^'um (applied to the utterance of the prophets in the ecstatic state, and translated "saith") comes from a root meaning in Arabic "to groan or sigh"; that ndhhi' ("prophet") itself comes from a root meaning ' ' to utter a low sound, " or "to bark faintly ' ' : hence perhaps a very striking instance of paranomasia in Is. 56.10, referring to false prophets, who are "dumb dogs; they cannot bark" {linbd<^x ^or linbo', just as hozim, "ravers," in the same sentence is used instead of x^^s^w, "seers"). But whether Isaiah's ridicule of the "chirping" of wizards implies that the true prophet had some other special vocal method of delivering his oracles, or that he spoke in the method of ordinary speech, is not clear. If the prophets chanted, perhaps, the number of syllables or even of words in a sentence would not be of much importance, for a single syllable might have been held for the length of time normally given to two or more syllables, or two or more syllables or words be spoken in the time, and even with the number of "beats," normally given to one ; or a pause or rest might compensate for the absence of a word — this particularly in the case of lines in which some part

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of a sentence must be supplied in thought from a preceding line ; while the words in a particularly short line, e.g., at the end of certain prophecies, might have been held for special emphasis.

Mr. Newman wishes to express his appreciation for several suggestions (particularly with reference to the relation between primitive parallelism and magical incantations) made by Rabbi Martin A. Meyer of San Francisco, Lecturer in Semitic History in the University of California ; for active aid and criticism by Professor Richard Gottheil of the Department of Semitic Languages, Columbia University, New York ; and for information furnished by Professor Max Margolis of Dropsie College, Philadelphia, Professor Israel Frielander of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, and Dr. Nahum Slouschz of the Rabbinical College of America.

My thanks are due to several of my colleagues, particularly Professor F. J, Teggart and Professor C. I. Lewis, for suggesting changes in the wording of my translation; likewise to Professor M. Jastrow, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania, who was in California while these studies were in progress and first suggested to me that they might be worth publishing.

William Popper.

Berkeley, California, June 27, 1917.

[These papers will appear also as a volume of the Semicentennial Publications of . the University of California, f olioed independently, but in addition bearing in brackets the corresponding folios of the present series.]

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Contents

PAKT I.— PAEALLELISM IN AMOS Chapter I. — Introduction. page

Origin of parallelism 57

Evolution of parallelism 58

Chapter II. — Paeallelism in Amos. Introduction 136

Prose 137

Parallelistic poetry:

Complete parallelism 137

Double structure 140

Incomplete parallelism 141

Without compensation 142

With compensation:

Double structure 145

Fresh term structure 147

Four term variations 151

Keduplication 155

Alternate parallelism:

Clear parallelism 158

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Near-prose : page

Synonymous saj' 163

Non-synonymous saj' 165

Qind parallelism 165

Synthetic couplets 166

Clear synthetic 167

Doubtful synthetic 170

"That say," or quotational couplets 171

"In order that," or conjunctival couplets 173

Eelative couplets 174

Ka'csher, or simile couplets 176

Triplets and monostichs 178

Conventional historical prophetic phrases 185

Prelude and postlude prophetic phrases 188

Strophic formations:

Grief song 189

Series of Visions:

First pair _ 193

Second pair 195

Prose-poetic narrative, 7.10-17 198

Chapter III. — The Doom Song, Amos 1.3-2.8. Verse and stanza parallelism Reconstruction of Doom Song 202

Variations in the eight stanzas 206

Analysis of the eight stanzas 209

Stanza 1. Damascus 209

Stanza 2. Philistia :..- 216

Stanza 3. Tyre 224

Stanza 4. Edom 228

Stanza 5. Ammonites 233

Stanza 6. Moab 242

Stanza 7. Judah 248

Stanza 8. Israel 253

Date of the Prophecy 254

Conclusions on the Doom Song 256

Classification and Tables — - 258

Conclusions - 262

Index of verses _ 265

PART II.— PARALLELISM IN ISAIAH, Chapters 1-10

Index of Translations : 266

Translation of the reconstructed text 268

Notes 293

Tables and Summary 435

Synonymous and complementary parallelism 436

Synthetic and incomplete parallelism _ 438

Suspensive parallelism 439

Subordinate clauses in parallelism 440

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS SEMITIC PHILOLOGY

PARALLELISM IN AMOS

BY

LOUIS I. NEWMAN