The Question Of Meter In Biblical Hebrew Poetry Donald R Vance by Donald R. Vance 9780773475748, 0773475745 instant download after payment.

Three important contributions to the study of biblical Hebrew poetry are provided in this work: first, it surveys scholars of non-biblical, metrical-poetry to ascertain how meter is defined in the field of literary criticism; second, it categorizes and critiques all significant proposals regarding meter in biblical Hebrew poetry from the time of Philo to the present; finally, it tests the most viable of the proposals against a large sample of poetic texts from the Hebrew Bible. The author generates statistical profiles for the texts and compares them with similar profiles from two categories of control data: metrical poetic texts from outside the biblical Hebrew tradition (Shakespearean sonnets, "Beowulf", and four Japanese haiku) and prose texts from within the Hebrew Bible. The study not only demonstrates that meter properly understood does not exist in biblical Hebrew poetry, but also provides scholars with a valuable introduction to the study of meter.