The Song of the Sea and Hebrew Poetry
Poetry has many important aspects, not the least of which being that it emulates and "captures" the rhythms of life. Everything in life has rhythmic patterns: our heartbeats, brainwaves, body chemistry; or nature, with the change of seasons, the effects of the moon on tides, the cyclic life patterns of insects, migrations; or the movement (as seen from earth) of planetary rotation, sun and moon and stars in their rhythms of time. Something exists in poetry that captures the essence of what it means to be human. Poetry has always been the means for remembering stories or for their telling. In ancient times, scops (storytellers) would recite after dinner, when listeners were full of food, wine, and staring into fires, rhythmically telling their stories of heroes, of epic battles, of the past, the desires, the wants of life that never change from age to age, so that a good storyteller managed to put his listener into a sort of hypnotic trance, which would then cause the rhythm of the poem to become one with the rhythm of the listener so that no beginning and no end could be found.
The same qualities of listening made it possible for the teller, the poet to remember long "tellings" by means of the rhetorical devices, or the associations of the "ups and downs," so to speak, of the poetry. Anything of importance was put into poetry, the noble language. On Shakespeare's stage, for instance, prose was used for common folk, for madness, or for less than noble speech; words of love, of great deeds, of terrible conflict were always reserved for poetry. In this same era as Shakespeare's plays, King James gathered a committee of scholars to render a new translation of the Holy Scriptures. At that time, English speaking peoples had the Geneva Bible or the Bishops Bible to read from (those who could, at least). But both had theological problems above those that might be considered textual: the Geneva Bible represented the Reform movement in exile, as most extreme European reformers gravitated to Geneva because of its religious freedoms (or, at the least, lack of overt hostility). During the reform movement that we have come to call the Reformation, Northern Europe was slow to follow the South, where the distinctions between the Church of Rome and the reform sought were not so great as to cause a schism. Not so the North, which took its claim to the people, going so far as to state that humanity needed no go-between in the God to Mankind relationship. The Church had long believed that the Bible was a dangerous thing in the hands of the mostly-illiterate, and certainly unschooled individual. But the Northern reformers emphasized the direct relationship, to be interpreted by the person and his God, between the Creator and the created.
In point of fact, the Northern reformers broke with Rome, but their cause was less noble than history has, for the most part, glided over in what their feeling were. They too isolated and condemned those with whom they differed, but they did so in the name of reformation and direct relationship with God. Thus, translation of scripture represented for them the highest achievement of that relationship: everyone a reader, everyone with a direct contact to God, everyone with access to a Bible. It was in this atmosphere that James drew together his scholars to translate God's word in a form less divisive than the Geneva exiles, and more to the liking of believers than the committee of Bishops who had, for the most part, followed the lead of the Geneva Bible.
Translating the Bible was serious enough to cause poor printing, no matter what the error and what one truly believed, to become a matter of prison. Errors with God's Holy Writ were not easily forgiven (and not easily corrected in the early years of moveable type). But King James committee had another function and purpose: to render the harsh, if at times unpleasant directness of the Geneva and Bishops Bible into more elegant language. While many today believe, as in the old joke that still has relevance ("if it was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it's good enough for me!") that Biblical characters spoke King James English, in truth they did not. The committee deliberately rendered the language into something more noble, higher in sound and thus reflecting purpose--in other words, what poetry had always meant to do. The King James Version of the Bible is that of Shakespearean plays, of the eloquent poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and others. And, in some places, where the eloquence wouldn't quite fit or "hold," the lines were changed ever so slightly to render the beauty over the literal.
King James understood, as we have temporarily, perhaps, lost the feeling for, that poetry is the language of beauty, holiness, epic events, and nobleness of spirit. All most of us know of such things today, with regard to Biblical material at any rate, is that some books of the Bible are called or grouped together as Books of Poetry. But poetry abounds. And even in translation, when Yahweh wants to demarcate something special, something for the future, something of rhythmic beauty and importance, it becomes rendered in poetry: much like the condemnation of the Serpent, judgment against Adam, Eve, and humanity. This is special--what Martin Luther believed to be the first prophecy of Christ to be found in Scripture--rendered in poetry.
Much work was done on Hebrew poetry in the 1970s and 1980s. Hebrew verse consists of terse utterances (called "cola") generally grouped in pairs (bicola) or triplets (tricola). These in turn can form larger constellations: the strophe and the stanza. A colon may but need not contain an internal pause, the caesura. factors determing the points of caesura and colon end are generally syntactical and somewhat subjective. If the caesura is sufficiently strong, we must consider whether a supposed colon is in fact a short bicolon. In the Song of the Sea, for example, it would be equally reasonable to analyze 15:6 as four short cola or two long cola with strong internal caesurae. For this reason, scholars disagree over the number of cola in 15:1b-18. Jewish tradition distinguishes forty-two lines.
Biblical poetry lacks metrical feet like those of English and classical verse. But there is usually a rough equality of length between cola in a bi- or tri-colon, whether we count stresses, syllables or morae (hypothetical units of length). How the Israelites themselves measured length is unknown; sometimes one method works better than another. Israelite Hebrew was not pronounced like Modern Israeli Hebrew, not even like the Hebrew of the medieval Massoretes. We can to a degree reconstruct or approximate ancient pronunciation, but this is naturally a speculative procedure.
What separated cola in acoustic reality is unknown. There could have been an actual pause, a change of intonation or merely a sense of grammatical closure. It appears that Israelite poetry was sung or chanted, not spoken, but the musical dimension is no longer accessible. Beyond approximate equality of length, the device binding single cola into bi- and tricola is conventionally, but misleadingly, called "parallelism." Parallelism covers many analogies among lines of poetry: shared subject, similar grammatical structure, synonymous sentiment, opposite sentiment and so forth. Often there is more than one type of parallelism at work, and sometimes there appears to be none. Parallelism, moreover, i not an infallible guide to colonic division, since we must acknowledge "internal parallelism" with cola.
Art lies in balancing the expected and the unexpected. Synonymous parallelism, verse after verse, would be trite, lack of parallelism for more than a few lines would no longer be poetic. In fact, prose is often parallelistic. As scholars disagree on the delineation of cola within the Song of the Sea, so they differ on the larger units. much study ahs been devoted to the structure of 15:1b-18, at the ascending levels of strophe and stanza. Since no such divisions are indicated in the text, these analyses are inevitably subjective, and in fact no two agree. All recognize, however, the important function of vv6, 11, 16b.
Some scholars put form first. However, if we look at content we find that the poem falls into three stanzas of unequal length: vv 1b-7, vv 8-12, and vv 13-18. The first stanza gives the gist of events the Song will celebrate: Yahweh cast the Egyptians into the Sea, where his anger consumed them. There is no clear substructure of strophe, although we find a cluster in vv 4-5, describing the drowning of Egypt.
The second stanza explains what happened in reality: Yahweh did not literally hurl the enemy, but made a path in the Sea to entice them; then he brought the Sea back upon them so that they died. One might say that the first two stanzas of the Song are related in the manner of parallel cola within a bicolon: the first says in general what the second says in particular. In stanza II, the only apparent cluster of tricola (i.e., a strophe) is in v 9, revealing the enemy's thoughts.
This reveals a pattern of sorts for stanzas I and II. Each ends with a mineral comparison ("like stone" [v 5], "like lead" [v 10]), followed by the enemy being metaphorically "eaten" (v 6 [consumed by anger], v 12 [swallowed by the underworld]). Both stanzas also climax in extolling the might of Yahweh and his right arm--but here the parallel is imprecise. In stanza I, Yahweh's right are appears in the "staircase" bicolon (v 6), while stanza II mentions his arm in the concluding bicolon (v12).
The third stanza (vv 13-18) proceeds to new business: crossing the desert and reaching Yahweh's holy mountain. "Your holiness's pasture/camp/tent" and God's "sanctum" (vv 13, 17) constitute a frame more or less surrounding this section. A cluster of cola describes the fright of Israel's neighbors (vv 14-15), flanked by versed with ..."the people which you...."
There is at least one structure/thematic link between stanza III and the previous stanzas. Once more, a mineral comparison (v 16 ["like stone"]) is followed by a "staircase" bicolon. But, in contrast to stanzas I and II, stanza III continues with several lines in which Yahweh does not strike down an enemy with his right hand, but builds up a shrine with both ands. Exodus 15:17 thus creates a frame by antithesis with the beginning of the Son (15:1, 4), where Yahweh "casts down" the enemy--in terms that can also connote the laying of foundations.
Hebrew poetry delights in assonance, i.e., the clustering of identical or similar sounds. As well, the Hebrew enjoys polysemy, i.e., the many meanings associated with a set of sounds. In addition to structures, Hebrew poetry has its own peculiar grammar. Terseness, a hallmark of poetry in general, is achieved by under-use of "prose particles": the definite article ha-, the definite accusative preposition 'ēt and the relative pronoun ’ăšer. A further peculiarity of the Son of the Sea is a paucity of adjectives, especially attributive adjectives.
Biblical poetry also differs from prose in the use of verbs. Hebrew prose knows to tenses/aspects, conventionally (but misleadingly) called "perfect" and "imperfect." In prose, the former generally describes past action, the latter future or durative/habitual action. In Hebrew poetry, however, it often seems that tenses are used indiscriminately; it is upon the reader to supply the interpretation according to the context. For prophetic poetry, the unfortunate result is that we sometimes cannot tell whether the writer is recalling the past, describing the present or predicting the future. For the Song of the Sea in particular, scholars are divided on whether v 17 originally described a future or a past event. Within the book of Exodus, at least, only the former option exists.
An Israelite poetic form approaching narrative is the victory hymn, of which Exodus 15:1b-18 and Judges 5 are our most extensive specimens. Still, the genre is lyric, not epic. It is impossible to extract from either work a clear or complete understanding of the events celebrated. Doings and happening are alluded to, not recounted--as is appropriate, since the fictive, "implied" audience is supposed recently to have experienced them, while the poems expect of the "actual" audience (i.e., readers) prior familiarity with the tradition. Out of context, these hymns would be as enigmatic as paintings of forgotten historical incidents.
What makes reading the Song of the Sea so challenging is that, just as stanzas interpenetrate, so time blurs; events become metaphors for one another. In 15:16, what do the people cross: the Sea, the desert, a river, Canaan? All are possible, and all may be intended. And the goal of Israel's journey is equally unclear. Throughout the Song, mixed metaphors and ambivalent language provoke multiple interpretations. In such a case, under-reading may be more dangerous than over-reading.
The date of the Song of the Sea is highly controversial. Modern estimates range from the thirteenth century to the fifth century B.C.E. Most American scholars consider the Song extremely early, i.e., pre-monarchic, while many Europeans date it to the later monarchic, exile, exilic or post-exilic eras. As well, based on particular theories about meter and parallelism, or yearning for structural symmetry, or presuppositions about the development of Israelite thought, or a vision of What Really Happened, many commentators "fix" the text or reconstruct it "original," shorter form. But no shorter form may exist.