Biblical Hebrew Poetry

Call For Papers: Biblical Hebrew Poetry will be holding four sessions. Two sessions invite papers on various aspects of Biblical Hebrew poetry. The first session welcomes papers with an emphasis on metaphor, metonymy and other figurative language in Biblical Hebrew poetry. The second open session will address the current state of the discussion of Hebrew parallelism. It is commonly held that prosodic, semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological parallelisms recurrent across the "members" of ancient Hebrew verse - cola, lines, and strophes according to one set of terms - are the chief hallmark of ancient Hebrew verse. This session invites papers on elements and structures in parallelism in ancient Hebrew poetry, with a synthetic description of all examples occurring across a defined corpus of 200 lines or more. Papers presented in this session will be considered for inclusion in a planned volume on "Parallelism in Ancient Hebrew Verse: The State of the Question." The third session will address “The Poetics of Violence.” This session welcomes papers that focus on the “face of violence,” i.e., violence as related to gender, power, culture, ethnicity, the natural world, the Divine, conflict, etc. as it appears in the biblical Hebrew poetry. The session is also interested in how the “face of violence” found in biblical Hebrew poetry interfaces with contemporary and global world experiences. The fourth session is a joint venture with the Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew group. This session will examine the question of whether poetry and prose in the Hebrew Bible have different linguistic features, what those features are and how they should be described. At one end of the spectrum are scholars who believe that prose and poetry are distinct linguistic systems; at the other end are scholars who believe that prose and poetry comprise one linguistic system. Analyses that can explain how the linguistic variation and/or differences arise between prose and poetry are welcome.

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