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This chapter marks the importance of aesthetics in Michaelis’s recovery of a classical Israel. Building on the work of English critic Robert Lowth, Michaelis argued that the psalms and prophecies of the Old Testament could be fruitfully analyzed as “biblical poetry” or “ancient Israelite poetry,” apart from their theological or religious value. Lowth, the inventor of Hebrew parallelism, and Michaelis were important figures in the eighteenth-century turn toward a primitive yet sublime poetics of feeling. As this chapter shows, though, “biblical poetry” was not a discovery but an invention. This new concept allowed scholars to operate independently of scriptural frameworks for understanding the Bible, namely, the canons by which religious communities organize their Bibles. Those grouped as “prophets,” for example, could just as well be classed with “poets” found in all parts of the Bible, thus transforming them from foretellers of Christ into poets of personal passion.

The chapter focalizes the issue of the poetic line in biblical poetry. In particular, attention is dedicated, one, to issues of discernment—what are the kinds of evidences that positively show the existence and importance of the line in biblical Hebrew verse—and, two, to scrutiny of the nature and character of the line so revealed—in what does this line consist. Some initial observations are offered on how the line factors prosodically in a poem’s various structures of meaning, and the topic of line grouping also comes in for discussion, both as a means for triangulating on the line as a structural singularity and because biblical poetry is dominantly distichic, its lines come mostly grouped in pairs, as couplets, with the triplet (a gathering of three poetic lines) otherwise being the most common complementing alternative grouping scheme attested in the biblical corpus.

The last decade or so has seen a marked upsurge in biblical scholars’ interest in a host of questions about orality, literacy, and textuality in ancient Israel and Judea, though this discussion has paid relatively little specific attention to biblical poetry per se (i.e., its nature, style, inscription). This is somewhat surprising since cross-culturally and transhistorically “poetry” is the preeminent oral art form. Michael P. O’Connor has maintained that much biblical poetry appears “close to the oral poetic situation.” The chapter elaborates this idea, arguing that biblical poetic style owes much to an informing orality, which continues to figure significantly and to be “heard” in the written versions of biblical poems preserved in the received tradition. Indeed, biblical verse has only survived in writing, and thus by its very medium of inscription is indubitably marked by textuality and literacy. So the latter are also topics probed throughout the chapter.

Until quite recently the search for the meter presumed to underlie and inform the poetry of the Bible has been a constant preoccupation of scholars. However, the simple fact is that biblical verse is not metrical—at least not in any way that the term “meter” retains any recognizable sense—and in being nonmetrical its prosody consists, as the comparatist B. Hrushovski [Harshav] has seen best, of a kind of free verse, or what he calls free rhythm. The chapter elaborates an understanding of biblical poetry as a variety of free verse, building on Hrushovski’s seminal insights and expanding them in light of contemporary work on free verse prosody.

The oldest vernacular adaptation of the Vita Adae is that in the 10th-century Irish poem Saltair na Rann, which is based on a recently discovered version of the Latin text known from two manuscripts and which is close to the Greek Life of Adam. This text is unaffected by the Holy Rood story. The material is incorporated into a metrical narrative of the Old Testament, so that canonical and apocryphal materials are merged in a biblical poem. There are several prose reductions of the poem in Irish in later manuscripts like the Leabhar Breac.

Lyric poetry is a paradigmatic form of both oral and written verbal art, widely attested crossculturally and throughout history. The idea of lyric poetry in the Bible is not new, and yet sustained treatments of the topic in the field remain few. In the largest part of this chapter what is on offer is a phenomenological analysis of the lyric, a thick description of leading characteristics and practices associated with lyric verse generally (and generically), both for definitional purposes—to make available a robust and substantive working understanding of this kind of discourse—and as a means for transfixing (in an initial way) what of the biblical poetic corpus most felicitously may be described as lyric and how such poetry works (prosodically). The chapter concludes by examining the possibility of lyric discourse on an expanded scale (through consideration of the Song of Songs) and how the idea of lyric poetry may benefit a richer understanding of biblical poetry more broadly.

Because form and meaning are inseparable in poetry, interpreters of First Isaiah should attend to matters of poetic style in these texts. Commentaries on Isaiah by Robert Lowth (1778) and George Buchanan Gray (1912), who also wrote treatises on Biblical Hebrew poetry, were characterized by careful literary sensitivity, but more recent interpretations have been less consistent in this regard. Despite a growing body of literature discussing particular poetic features or texts in Isaiah—much of which emphasizes the final form of the biblical book—the need remains for a thorough treatment of the poetry of First Isaiah. Because the study of ancient poetry necessarily raises historical questions, this volume will consider the likely historical contexts of poems in Isaiah and their probable reception by their original audience.

A brief introduction to the volume as a whole that situates itself explicitly in terms of Robert Lowth’s field-founding Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews and makes a bid to reclaim the broader purview of the Lowthian pose, to conceive biblical poetry again beyond a defining parallelism. The principal dispositions that inform the study are articulated and suscinctly eleaborated—historical/philological, literary critical, comparative, and a hypersensitivity to the traditional and predominantly oral nature of the cultures out of which the biblical poetic corpus emerged. Each of the chapters that comprise the book are then introduced and their chief topics (the poetic line, free rhythm, lyric, orality and textuality, and close reading) summarily surveyed.