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Raymond P. Scheindlin, Wine, Women and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life

#raymond scheindlin #yehuda alharizi #the tahkemoni #alcohol #poetry

Apparently Scheindlin and Alter both imitate alliteration in the Hebrew with "raging and roiling" and "clamor and clatter" respectively which is neat.

#raymond scheindlin #robert alter #the book of job

"All of this poetry was not written merely to decorate the book. Its energy and exuberance, palpable from the very beginning and hardly ever fading during the work's long course, keep present before us the fact that we are reading the work of a writer who is fascinated with this life, troubled as it is, a man who never wearies of the variety and vividness of the multitude of things that life offers for our observation. In this, he is the temperamental opposite of the world-weary Ecclesiastes, who suffers from surfeit as Job suffers from deprivation. Ecclesiastes finds all things wearying, repeating themselves in an endless round of life and death in which nothing really new ever happens; he finds life’s abundance, which is so invigorating to the author of Job, to be as insubstantial as a vapor. To the author of Job the world pulsates with life. He expresses everything with vehemence; he is passionate about injustice, and about everyday life in its glorious detail. Even while raging at God’s tyranny, he cannot help but hymn, in a passage of melting beauty, the mystery of his own conception and birth. He may rage at injustice, and he is at least as conscious of death as Ecclesiastes, but never in his forty-two chapters does he ever come close to saying, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

Job’s poetry achieves the book's purpose of consolation partly by providing its own vigor as an antidote to its pessimism, by changing the level of the discussion from a meditation on life’s injustice to a parade of life’s sheer multitudinousness. The poetry is in part a vehicle for steering us away from the suffering with which life burdens us toward the delight at what life has to offer. This is not a quantitative argument. The author does not make the simplistic claim that life’s delights are commensurable with or compensation for life’s sorrows. He does not make any argument at all. All arguments have been rendered nil by the book’s premise. Since the narrative presents Job’s complaint as rational and correct, there is no room left for a rational solution. Rather, poetry is used to shift the ground from reason, where life must lose, to emotion, where it at least has a chance.

The other way in which the poetry functions is to give full expression to Job’s, and therefore our own, grief and anger. Expressions of grief abound in the Bible: We think of David's lament for Absalom; of Jacob’s for the presumed-dead Benjamin; of the psalmist for various kinds of suffering and loss; of the poet of Lamentations for the destroyed Jerusalem. But Job is the one biblical character who voices the anger associated with suffering and bereavement. His anger arises from his own demand for meaning, from a refusal to yield emotionally to the terrible pointlessness of our suffering. Job is never reconciled; his heart demands meaning, even though intellectually he intuits (and we know) that he cannot have it. He is constitutionally incapable of falling into Ecclesiastes’ sybaritic languor, which to him would be a kind of effete submission. Job knows and hates the truth, hates it precisely because he remains engaged in life. The paradoxical meeting of the book’s pessimistic assumptions and this vigorous engagement in life is what produces its anger and its poetry. That is why it is a more profound literary creation than Ecclesiastes, whose tone and message are more simply interrelated.

Job's anger helps tame ours and bring it into manageable compass; this itself is a kind of consolation. We read Job not because it provides answers to our questions, consolation for our grief, or redress for our anger, but because it expresses our questions, grief, and anger with such force."

- From Raymond P. Scheindlin's introduction to The Book of Job

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‘Poetic Form’, From Raymond P. Scheindlin's introduction to The Book of Job

Biblical Hebrew poetry is not grounded in a strict meter like traditional English syllabic-accentual verse or Latin quantitative meter. Its rhythm derives more from the balancing of images and ideas than from the strict patterning of words or accents. It has a loose meter in which certain patterns of word stress are used to reinforce the dominant poetic device, which is syntactic-semantic parallelism. Its basic unit is a verse that is subdivided syntactically, usually into two clear parts (the technical term is "hemistichs,” but here I use the term "lines”).

These verses, the units that are traditionally numbered for easy reference, may contain one or two sentences, or they may consist of incomplete clauses or phrases linked with the preceding or following verses. The two lines that constitute the verse normally consist of statements of approximately equal length that are semantically or syntactically balanced against each other and that sometimes are nearly identical in meaning. An extreme example is:

one breath from God and they perish;

one snort from Him and they’re gone. (4:9)

These two lines have the same grammatical structure, the same length (three Hebrew words each), and the same number of stresses (three each); they employ similar images to make the same point, and they are virtually synonymous.

Very few lines of biblical verse are as strictly correlated as this pair. The ways in which two lines can complement each other are myriad, though some degree of synonymity is usually present. The reader’s pleasure comes from experiencing the ever-shifting semantic relationships between the pairs of lines as they succeed each other, and from the concision of expression enforced by the parallelism.

Hebrew verse may also be written in three-line groups, but only rarely do all three lines share the parallelism; in such cases, the first line may be a kind of heading, followed by a parallel couplet that amplifies, contrasts with, or responds to it:

Black take that night!

May it not count in the days of the year, may it not come in the round of the months.

(3:6)

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