A Return to Biblical Poetry Through a Reexamination of the Mashal

Jacqueline Vayntrub begins her monograph discussing some fundamental questions to biblical poetry and orality to challenge the status quo. She identifies the "Great Divide" (in which the literary texts that were originally oral, poetic, and emotional are seen to have evolved into textualized, prosaic, and logical) as critical for understanding theories for the evolution of poetry and orality. She notes the nebulous character of what most biblical scholars conceptualize as a text's "oral character" – an earlier stage, before textualization. She points specifically to the hazy nature of the conclusions for these diachronic endeavors, which often have nothing or little to show in terms of evidence. These uncertainties prompt Vayntrub to pose a tantalizing question: What if we were to abandon this diachronic treasure-hunting and considered instead how the text presents its own orality, specifically how the text represents its poetic speech? Her discussion at large for poetry and orality focuses upon the mashal form (conventionally taken as "proverb," but not by Vayntrub) and how the oral elements of a mashal are represented textually.

In chapter one ("From Proverbs and Poetry to Prose," pp. 19–35), Vayntrub provides background for the impetus of her monograph. She questions the notion of biblical poetry by noting how the designation of "biblical poetry" is not a term native to the Hebrew Bible. In fact, there is no equivalent term in Hebrew for "poetry." Instead, the bible presents what is commonly perceived as poetry as shir ("song"), mashal, qinah ("lament"), etc. Vayntrub therefore proposes that to truly understand poetry, one must consider how poetry presents itself: how the poetry was presented as voiced (to whom, by whom, where, when, how, etc.).

This chapter also explores how biblical scholarship throughout the ages and presently has struggled to overcome the "Great Divide." By comparing and contrasting studies on poetry by rabbinic and early modern Christian thinkers, Vayntrub demonstrates how two different approaches arrive at similar conclusions. For the rabbis, because Solomon began his literary career composing poetry in Proverbs and Song but matured into the logical prose of Ecclesiastes, his personal development was taken as an exemplar for literary evolution. Similarly, early modernists held the common belief that language and literature develop from the oral to the written, simple to complex, poetry to prose, emotional to logical, figurative to literal, and so on. As a result, the mashal takes center-stage in studying biblical literature's development: the mashal was originally conceived of as a form of oral, short, witty snippet of poetry that explained life. Yet, a key question emerged concerning how the crude language of poetry could serve as a vehicle for divine wisdom. Vico explained this apparent vulgarity of the mashal away: though the vehicle may be poor, he argued, the message is sublime. Vayntrub concludes that these early modernists assumed their views in order to justify their own contemporary modes for scholarship, i.e., intellectual prose. For modern biblical scholarship, she exposes how this troubling thinking assuming the Great Divide still occurs in various forms.¹ She contends that scholarship through the ages has unnecessarily taken reductionistic views on poetry, especially its development. As a result, Vayntrub proposes stepping back from these positions and returning to the text to gain a better understanding of what exactly poetry – and specifically the mashal – is, by analyzing the representation of its orality.

Chapter 2 ("The Idea of Mashal," pp. 36–69) surveys how scholars from different ages have focused on the mashal as bearing the essence of poetry and/or as a precursor to fully formed poetry. Reviewing scholarship from Medieval Jewish Spain, Romanticism, and Structuralism, Vayntrub concludes how in each age scholars (mis)identified the mashal through their era's dominant view of poetry. For Medieval Jewish scholars, the mashal was integral to poetry's essence because of its figurative nature, which allows for effective teaching and for it to be a "building block" for more complex poetry...