{"id":36,"date":"2022-03-14T16:38:04","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T16:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/elementsofbiblicalpoetry\/?post_type=chapter&p=36"},"modified":"2022-08-16T15:15:07","modified_gmt":"2022-08-16T15:15:07","slug":"word-pairs","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/elementsofbiblicalpoetry\/chapter\/word-pairs\/","title":{"raw":"4. Word Pairs: The Building Blocks of Parallelism","rendered":"4. Word Pairs: The Building Blocks of Parallelism"},"content":{"raw":"The great find of cuneiform tablets at Ugarit in 1929 gave new impetus to the study of ancient poetry and its craft. Those texts, written before the Bible about 1400 to 1100, use a language close to Hebrew. Unlike other discoveries filled with economic texts, the Ugaritic texts tell stories about the Canaanite deity, Baal, and other heroes. Moreover, they tell these stories in poetry that uses word pairs as the building blocks of its parallelism, and examples of the \". As Adele Berlin states:\r\n
there existed a stock of fixed word pairs which belonged to the literary tradition of Israel and Canaan, and that poets, specially trained in their craft, seemingly drew on this tradition to aid in the oral composition of parallel lines\u201d (65-66).<\/blockquote>\r\nAs noted above, oral composition is challenging to explore since we have only written documents. Still, the Canaanite and biblical poetry shows that word pairs were a common feature of that literature.\r\n\r\nPsalm 19\u2019s opening verses provide an easy example of word pairs and their variety.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The heavens<\/td>\r\nare telling<\/td>\r\nthe glory of God<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
and the firmament<\/td>\r\nproclaims<\/td>\r\nhis handiwork.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
<\/td>\r\n<\/td>\r\n<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
Day to day<\/td>\r\npours forth<\/td>\r\nspeech<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
and night to night<\/td>\r\ndeclares<\/td>\r\nknowledge.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>\r\nThe first example pairs the whole with a part: heaven and firmament. In the Hebrew world, the \u201cfirmament\u201d was a dome separating the waters above from the earth and the waters below. (The sky is blue because of the water above the dome or firmament.) So, the firmament becomes a part for the whole heavens.\r\n\r\nThe second example is a similar pair: \u201ctell and proclaim.\u201d Communication stands at the heart of both words. Still, they are not the same in English. \u201cProclaim\u201d has a more formal and emphatic sense than \u201ctell.\u201d They are also parallel to the verbs of the next two lines: \u201cpours forth speech\u201d and \u201cdeclares.\u201d The four verbs make clear the main point of the stanza: Creation speaks.\r\n\r\n\u201cDay\u201d and \u201cnight\u201d give us half and half. Taken together, they embrace all time, which is the point.\r\n\r\nThe last two elements of the first couplet equate the glory of God\u201d to \u201chis handiwork.\u201d Though they are somewhat different ideas, the impetus of parallelism to form word pairs invites the reader to look for connections between them. It is not difficult to see that the line suggests that God\u2019s handiwork is also God\u2019s glory. Creation then becomes something like a word that communicates God\u2019s power, and this \u201cspeech\u201d conveys real \u201cknowledge.\u201d While word pairs are often synonyms, they can also invite us to find similarities between seemingly different elements.\r\n

<\/a>4.1. Word Pairs: Natural, Cultural, and Personal<\/h1>\r\nWe generate word pairs first of all through association. Berlin notes that the time available to generate a pair plays a role. If the time is short, a person reaches for an easy connection. She uses the example of \u201cman,\u201d which generates the connection of \u201cwoman.\u201d However, if a person has time to think, they may find a less common association, such as \u201cboy.\u201d If there is even more time, or if the person is particularly imaginative, other possibilities appear depending on the context: groom, farmer, king (68-69). A close study of biblical and Canaanite poetry reveals that some pairs occur frequently while others are rare. Familiarity with the tradition would have given a biblical poet both an understanding of the poetry\u2019s parallelism and a treasure chest of traditional word pairs. Still, poets have an uncanny ability to find connections even where none seem to exist. <\/span>We should not dismiss unconventional pairs that do not fit our expectations. The yoking of the unexpected may well be the point.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPairs may be natural, cultural, or personal. Natural pairs reveal themselves to anyone alive in this world. \u201cNight\u201d and \u201cday\u201d would be a natural pair, and they appear together in a number of psalms, including Ps 1:2. Even so, the two come with many connections. The night can be a time of rest, but also of blindness, danger, and mystery. The day is the time of the known, of clarity, scrutiny, reality, and more. In the ancient Near East, both the sun and moon were deities for many. Some of these connections are natural, but some are cultural. There is no sharp line between the two. We encounter them in so many ways, and they offer us many possibilities. By personal, I mean pairs unique to the poet and the poem. If repeated in a poem or a prophet's book, they gather meaning.\r\n\r\n\u201cHeaven\u201d and \u201cfirmament,\u201d seemed a natural pair to the psalmist, but they represent that culture\u2019s understanding of the universe. Sometimes their understanding fits easily with ours, but sometimes it does not. The psalmist lived in a three-story universe with heaven up, the underworld down, and earth in the middle. For us, the world is more complicated, with \u201cup\u201d continually changing directions as our world turns.\r\n\r\nWhile much study has gone into identifying and categorizing traditional word pairs in Hebrew and Ugaritic, poets are forever generating new connections in their pursuit of defamiliarization. As a result, a complete list would be impossible and unnecessary. Still, some basic categories are helpful if only to provide us with a reference point.\r\n

<\/a>4.2. Similar Pairs<\/h1>\r\n

<\/a>a. pairs with the same word<\/h2>\r\nIn addition to anaphora, discussed above, the word may repeat and link two lines together, as in Ps 27:8, where both \u201cseek\u201d and \u201cface\u201d repeat with new grammar that creates a difference between the two lines.\r\n

\u201cCome,\u201d my heart says, \u201cSeek his face!\u201d\r\nYour face, LORD<\/span>, do I seek.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

<\/a>b. pairs of similar words<\/h2>\r\nSimilar pairs join words with much the same meaning, and they can, more or less, substitute for each other, such as \u201cguard\u201d and \u201cprotect\u201d in Ps 12:7.\r\n

You, O LORD<\/span>, will protect us;\r\nyou will guard us from this generation forever.<\/p>\r\nThese pairs form the basis for Lowth\u2019s understanding of parallelism.\r\n

<\/a>c. pairs of contrasting words<\/h2>\r\nContrasting pairs depend upon a common foundation but name its positive and negative aspects, its fullness and void (Berlin, 11). Of the many possibilities, here are five contrasting pairs:\r\n