The Title caught my eye, “Poetic Diction and Parallel Word Pairs in The Book of Mormon.” Not unusual, my eye was scanning the table of contents to catch something of interest, and I’m open to any poetic diction that would make my poetry less paltry. (Praise be to the Orem library for stocking its sales shelves with interesting titles like Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 4:2 (1995)) I read enough of the article to get the general concept and learn that word pairs are a common feature in Hebrew poetry. A few weeks later we were visiting my wife’s sister in northern Idaho and I noticed a framed psalm on the wall in her son’s furniture store. There’s a word pair, there’s one, there’s one.
I’d seen and heard word pairs before, particularly in the Psalms and Isaiah, but didn’t have a name for them, as I did for situations where the first and fourth lines rhyme and so do the second and third. It’s so common that we’ve schematized it as ABBA. Once I had a schema for parallel word pairs I could see how common they are and notice how they often appear in sets of two or three.
Consider the beginning of Psalm 106
1 Praise ye the Lord. O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.
Praise and give thanks are word pairs, as are he is good and his mercy endureth
2 Who can utter the mighty acts of the Lord? who can shew forth all his praise?
Utter and shew forth, mighty acts and all his praise
Look for parallel pairs in the next three verses.
3 Blessed are they that keep judgment, and he that doeth righteousness at all times.
4 Remember me, O Lord, with the favour that thou bearest unto thy people: O visit me with thy salvation;
5 That I may see the good of thy chosen, that I may rejoice in the gladness of thy nation, that I may glory with thine inheritance.
The same is true of the covenant curse / covenant blessing formula. Once you’re aware of it you can see it throughout the Prophets, including Joseph Smith’s letter from Liberty Jail
Reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost;[curse] and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, [blessing] lest he esteem thee to be his enemy;
Consider Psalm 106 further. If verses 1-5 represent the covenant blessing verses 6-7 show the opposite, what happens when we forsake the covenant.
6 We have sinned with our fathers, we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly.
7 Our fathers understood not thy wonders in Egypt; they remembered not the multitude of thy mercies; but provoked him at the sea, even at the Red sea.
Verse 8 starts the blessing again. Note how much longer it is than the curse:
8 Nevertheless he saved them for his name’s sake, that he might make his mighty power to be known.
9 He rebuked the Red sea also, and it was dried up: so he led them through the depths, as through the wilderness.
10 And he saved them from the hand of him that hated them, and redeemed them from the hand of the enemy.
11 And the waters covered their enemies: there was not one of them left.
12 Then believed they his words; they sang his praise.
Now a transition to the curse as the poem launches into a history of what Psalm 95:8, Hebrews 3:8 ,
Jacob 1:7, and others call the provocation. Note the two sets of word pairs in each verse:
13 They soon forgat his works; they waited not for his counsel:
14 But lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tempted God in the desert.
15 And he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their soul.
The curse continues for many verses, briefly interrupted by a note about Moses’ intercession in verse 23.
This repeated pattern curse / blessing / curse / blessing would have been the rhetorical pattern Jesus learned from Isaiah, the Psalms, John the Baptist and other sources. He taught the pattern to his disciples, and you can trace it throughout Matthew.
(Thanks to Avraham Gileadi for pointing to the covenant curse / blessing formula as an overarching structure in Isaiah, with 1-36 representing the curse and 37-66 the blessing. Thinking about it I started wondering if you could find it as a governing structure in the Gospels.)
After the genealogy, which Robert Alter says marks the beginning of new epochs throughout Genesis, we have the birth of Jesus, attended by prophets and angels–the covenant blessing. Herod’s reaction to the prophets’ question about where to find the new king is the opposite of blessing, but Joseph’s escape to Egypt with his family, and their safe return, show the return of the blessing. Jesus’s baptism and fasting in the wilderness show us the blessing again, followed by the curse of abandonment to Satan, followed by the covenant blessings expounded on the Mount, which transforms to the Mount of Transfiguration. So we can see Chapters 1-16 as the covenant blessing, and 18-27 as the covenant curse, the destruction of the rebellious slave.
The transition from blessing to curse begins in chapter 16, where Jesus blesses Peter for his declaration “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God,” then says a few verses later, “Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me.” (Consider chapter 23 as a parallel, an extended version of the rebuke to a loved one.)
The intense irony is that the destruction and humbling of Jesus, the curse, is also the covenant blessing. The curse of taking upon himself all sorrow, all grief, all pain and shame and sin, of descending below all leads to the ascent above all, and the ascent of all from the grave.
I hope to wrap this up next month and talk more about the birth of Jesus in December.
In the meantime I’d love to hear your thoughts about word pairs, other parallel structures, or poetic techniques generally.
It’s interesting how reading about such things makes us suddenly more aware of them, and we start seeing them everywhere. And then they become a part of how we understand the scriptures.
On the other hand, the thing I find I have to ask is: have we identified here a pattern that is so all-encompassing that basically anything could fit into it, using the relevant interpretive lens? (And how does an interpretive lens differ from a Urim and Thummim?) A critical solvent so potent that everything dissolves into it winds up being nearly as useless as one that dissolves nothing.
Thanks for your comments, Jonathan, and the pictures. (I tried to put one in once but got an error message that made me think the pictures have to be hosted on AML’s server.)
You can find covenant language all over in the scriptures if you know what to look for, and it can be a useful tool if you know it’s uses, but the early Christian church lost the knowledge of what to look for and how to use it. That has consequences for the way we read. As the church turned Greek and Roman, Christians lost the knowledge that the covenant curse and blessing always go together. They didn’t know when they saw a malediction to look for a corresponding benediction, which surely contributed to the feeling that the gospels portrayed the Jews as enemies to the Lord.
Not understanding the rhetorical structures in the scriptures has other consequences. Reynolds Price says in Three Gospels that he chose to translate Mark and John because he felt Matthew and Luke were derivative. That’s a pretty common view among scholars–and pretty ancient. I read somewhere that Matthew is first in the canon list because the canon listers thought he wrote first and Mark abridged him.
Thinking of the gospels as seeing through the same lens lets us work out a fuller chronology than with any of them singly, but also fractures the gospels. We don’t think of each gospel as a discrete work with its own rhetorical aims and commitments, but as a collection of interchangeable parables and sayings.
Fracturing the gospels allows someone like Thomas Jefferson to cut and paste what he considers the authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus. (I think the Bibles he cut and pasted from are in the Library of Congress.) Jefferson and the Jesus Seminar were Stephen Mitchell’s inspiration in choosing the authentic sayings and deeds for The Gospel According to Jesus, but his lens is Zen Buddhist. He says Jesus knew what all great spiritual teachers know, “The kingdom of God is within you.”
So his principle of selection is, Is this a saying or event worthy of an enlightened person, or something the church overlaid onto the story? That leads him to exclude the beautiful words in Matthew 25 about how things done to the least of us are done to the Lord because he can’t extricate the sheep of the parable from the goats who are sent off to everlasting punishment. He doesn’t have a rhetorical structure that can make sense of it. I’ll talk more about this in November.
Actually, it’s Andrew Hall who you have to thank for the images. He’s been putting them into random AML blog posts for the last several months, to our visual improvement!
I don’t have anything to contribute here, but keep it up, Harlow, what you are doing is important.
Thanks Colin, I appreciate your encouragement, since my training is in rhetorical analysis, literary theory and criticism, and creative writing, not biblical languages and culture. I keep waiting for someone to come along who has more than small Hebrew and less Greek and tell me I’m full of nonsense.
This is the parallelism Robert Alter discusses at length in *The art of Biblical poetry.* My father had learned to call this “incremental repetition,” as the pairs are not equal, especially not as translated into English, but seem to be rather like two lenses looking at one thing, with the second amplifying the first.
And, in answer to Jonathan Langford, no, this is not a pattern that is so all-encompassing that we find it everywhere. You will find it in formal writing, like the speeches of Barack Obama. You will not find it in legal writing. There the dual phrases, like “legally and lawfully wedded,” are the result of our hybrid language needing to be understood by French and Latin speakers, on the one hand, and Anglo-Saxon speakers, on the other.
Thanks, Dennis. I’ve wanted to read *The Art of Biblical Poetry* for a while now (especially after my brother gave me a copy of *The World of Biblical Literature*). Part of my interest in word pairs is the energy they generate–which might be useful for my own poetry: “These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him.” The rhythm pulls you along into the list of the six and seven things. I’ve found though, that when I hear a memorable expression and search for the source of its rhetorical energy it’s often polyptoton, the repetition of a word as a different part of speech. It’s probably my favorite figure of speech, and I use it a lot.
(Who am I kidding? It’s paronomasia that pervades my life. A couple of weeks ago a high school friend (he was Scott Luebke’s bishop and conducted Scott’s funeral) greeted me on the bus with, “It’s Witzelsucht Wednesday.” Jared’s brother’s wife, a nurse, came across it in her studies. A neurological disorder that involves obsessive punning, even in situations where punning may not be appropriate.)
Avraham Gileadi points out something in *The Book of Isaiah: A New Translation with Interpretive Keys from The Book of Mormon* that should have been obvious to me, but I hadn’t named. As parallel structures word pairs are also synonyms (or antonyms), and thus serve to define each other. So listening to Proverbs the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the definitions I’m hearing.