June 10
2010
Biblical
Hebrew Poetry and Word Play
Reconstructing
the Original Oral, Aural and Visual Experience
By David
Steinberg
David.Steinberg@houseofdavid.ca
Home page http://www.houseofdavid.ca/
Box 4 - The Three Orthographic
Elements in the Masoretic Text
1. Biblical Skeleton, Changing Script and Orthography, Medieval Vowel Signs, Modern Pronunciation
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“It’s not just a
question of what the theatre practices were like at the time… I feel that you
can, if you wanted to, reconstruct everything except the audience. And the
real exciting thing in the theatre is how you bridge the gap between what’s
happening on the stage and what’s happening in the audience - because we only do it for the audience.” William Christie in a talk
accompanying the DVD of the Rameau’s
opera - Les Boreades |
William Christie made this statement in regard to French Baroque opera, on which he is a leading expert, supporting the use of modern dance techniques to act as a cultural interpreter within his production of Les Boreades. The modern opera-goer has grown up in a society whose values, structures, cultural and linguistic associations and assumptions are totally different from that of the mid-eighteenth century courtiers who were Rameau’s audience. In addition their life experiences, how they are maintained, life expectancies, sanitation and a thousand other factors were very different from the modern audience. Indeed, the use of familiar words, apparently analogous events etc. may be faux amis leading the viewer even further astray. For Baroque Opera, we can compensate for this problem by learning relevant socio-cultural information that would have been in the bones of the original audience but must be studied, as one studies the values and literature of an extinct civilization, by the modern opera-goer. We can do this because scholars have examined and digested masses of official and unofficial documents, historical and philosophical writings, music, paintings, clothing, buildings etc. from the period and social context that produced French Baroque opera. Thus, properly prepped, we can understand, intellectually if not viscerally, cultural allusions, linguistic nuances etc. as they were understood by the original audience.
When lovely woman stoops to folly,And finds too late that men betray, What charm can sooth her melancholy,What art can wash her guilt away? The only art her guilt to cover,To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover,And wring his bosom--is to die.
Psalms 48
Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised in the
city of our God. His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all
the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King. Within its
citadels God has shown himself a sure defense. Then the kings assembled, they
came on together. As soon as they saw it, they were astounded; they were in
panic, they took to flight, trembling took hold of them there, pains as of a
woman in labor …. As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the
LORD of hosts, in the city of our God, which God establishes forever….
Psalms 2
Why do the nations conspire, and the peoples plot
in vain? The kings of the earth set
themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and his
anointed, saying, "Let us burst
their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us." He who sits in the heavens laughs; the LORD
has them in derision. Then he will speak
to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, "I have set my king on Zion, my holy
hill." I will tell of the decree of
the LORD: He said to me, "You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your
heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and
dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel." Now therefore, O kings, be
wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth….
To enable
advanced students of Biblical Hebrew to recover, as closely as possible, the pronunciation that a
scribe in Jerusalem 700-600 BCE would have used in reading poetry to upper class Judeans
or members of the king’s court with the aim of better appreciating Biblical
Hebrew poetry and wordplay[1].
Box 1
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Sense and Nonsense from Robert Alter |
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In his justly influential book The
Art of Biblical Poetry, Robert
Alter correctly writes - “…even
where there are doubts about the poem's meaning, it may exhibit perfectly
perceptible formal patterns that tell us something about the operations of
the underlying poetic system.”[2] Equally
the following is justified - "The actual sound of biblical poetry will remain at
least to some extent a matter of conjecture. Certain distinctions among
consonants have shifted or blurred over the centuries, and what is worse, we
cannot be entirely sure we know where accents originally fell, what the
original system of vowels and syllabification was, or whether there were audible changes in these phonetic
features during the several hundred years spanned by biblical poetry. (The
indications of stress and vocalization of the Masoretic text were codified
well over a millennium after the composition of most of the poems and
centuries after Hebrew had ceased to be the vernacular.) On the level of
meaning, although comparative Semitic philology in a remarkable age of
archaeological discovery has done heroic work in restoring the original sense
of poorly understood words, it would be foolhardy to imagine that we can
always recover the real nuances of biblical terms, or the relation between
poetic diction and colloquial diction (of which there is no record) or
between poetic diction and other specialized usages of the ancient
language." [3] However, he goes on from there to use a transcription system based on
the vowels and some of the consonants (eg. waw transcribed as v ) of current Israeli pronunciation which we have every reason to believe are
substantially different from the pronunciation of biblical Hebrew at the time
of writing ([EBHP] and [LBHP]). It
is as if we were to say: (1) we cannot know exactly how Geoffrey Chaucer would have pronounced his poetry;
therefore, (2) we will read it as if it were educated New York English of
today!
An example of the result is found at the
foot of p. 5 (Gen. 4:23-24)
Robert Alter's
transcription (adapted to my notational system)
caˈdah vetziˈlah šeˈmacan qoˈli
neˈšei ˈlemekh haʾˈzena ʾimraˈti
ki ˈʾiš haˈragti lefiˈtzi
veˈyeled leḥaburaˈti
ki šivcaˈtayim yuˈqam ˈqayin
veˈlemekh šivˈcim vešiˈbcah
The following
would be my attempt to approach much closer to the original pronunciation[4]
You will note that Alter's transcription eliminates vowel and consonant length - a very prominent feature of Ancient Hebrew. |
The underlying assumption is that a clear understanding of
the probable approximate pronunciation of the Hebrew of the Bible, at time
of its writing[7],
is vital to appreciating the meter of biblical poetry[8]
and to detecting word play[9]
etc.
Box 2
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Wordplay in the Hebrew Bible |
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“…the biblical authors consistently opted
for word play, especially the alliterative type, whenever the opportunity
arose. When a choice of synonyms was available, the writers typically chose
the word that produced the greater alliterative effect. This can be seen
especially in the case of rare words, even hapax legomena.”[10] As stated by the Encyclopedia Judaica “Within this framework of rhythmical
parallelism there is a whole gamut of sound repetition and sound patterns,
freely distributed, but clearly embellishing the text.” All of these can be
vitally effected by changes in pronunciation. (1)
Alliteration based on sounds that were heard as
similar by the author not necessarily by the modern reader. E.g. the
biblical writer could play off חן
חסד
and חבה
against each other because, in each case, he would have pronounced the ח
as ḥ [ħ]. He could similarly play off החביא
and נוח
against each other because, in each case he would have pronounced the ח
as /ḫ/ = kh [x]. However, to his ear /ḫ/ [x] may have more closely resembled /k/ [k] = כּ
than it would have resembled /ḥ/ [ħ]. Likewise, to the biblical writer /ḥ/
[ħ] may have more closely resembled /h/ [h] = ה
than it would have resembled /ḫ/ [x]. (2) Puns on similar sounding words requires
and understanding of what did, and what did not sound the same. שׂ
= /ś/ [ɬ] clearly sounded similar to both צ=
/ṣ/ [sˁ] and ס
= /s/ [s] and eventually merged into the latter. E.g.
שׂחק
= צחק
and סתם
= שׂתם
but never שׂחק
= שׁחק. Thus we should watch out for these
similarities in looking for word play. (3) General resemblances of
words. Due to
the distortion of modern pronunciation one might think that there is a play
on words between word וְאֵיבָה
“hostility”
(Gen. 3:15) and חַוָּה
“Eve”.
However, that this is not the case is shown by the fact that in EBHP, ואיבה
would probably have been pronounced something like /waʾayˈbâ/ [wɐʔɐyˈbɐː] or [wɐʔɛyˈbɐː] with only the final vowel in common with /ḥawˈwâ/ [ħɐwˈwɐː] “Eve”. The development of the pronunciation
of ואיבה
would have been something like /waʾayˈbâ/ (EBHP) > /waʾệˈbâ/, which might have been completed as
early as the 6th century BCE, which developed into TH /wәʾẹˈba/ [wәʾẹːˈvɐː] by the ninth century CE. The development of
the pronunciation of חוה
from [ħɐwˈwɔː] [TH] to [xɐˈvɔ], and ואיבה
from (4) Assumption for common root meaning. a) There were two roots, both spelled
עלם
but pronounced distinctively differently in the First Temple period. עלם (see) √ġlm – root meaning = to be agitated, strong. This is probably the root of the nouns עלם/עלמה |