Poet Prophets of the Old Testament:

John Rogerson

Emeritus Professor John W. Rogerson (1935-2018) delivered the 2017 Beauchief Abbey Lectures on
“Poet Prophets of the Old Testament” in 2017.
https://biblicalstudiesonline.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/john-w-rogerson-poet-prophets-of-the-old-testament/

John Rogerson explains why far more attention should be paid to the poetic side of the Old
Testament prophets, and to the implications of their poetic language for understanding God and
for talking about God. Poets and poetry are needed, he says, not only in our everyday lives; we
need them in our worship, in our theology, in our services, because without poetry these will
become impoverished.

Lecture 1: The Rediscovery of Hebrew Poetry in the Eighteenth Century

8 March, 2017

The lectures owe their origin to a sermon preached as part of the Coleridge in Wales
project. I spoke about the 19th century theologians F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley and how
they were inspired by the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Out of that Richard
Parry devised, organised and accomplished an astonishing thing: the Coleridge in Wales Project.

In 1794 had spent some weeks in the summer walking in Wales. For the Coleridge in
Wales project Richard spent 80 days retracing the steps of that journey of Coleridge, staying at
the places where Coleridge stayed, organising meetings and talking to them about Coleridge –
the importance of his work and poetry in general for our understanding of ourselves as human
beings. And my sermon was just a tiny fragment of the Coleridge in Wales celebrations.

I took as my text some words from the beginning of chapter three of the first book of
Samuel: “The word of God was rare (or precious) in those days, there was no open vision of
prophecy.” ( ‫ )ּודְ בַר־י ְה ֗ ָוה ָה ָי֤ה י ָ ָק ֙ר ַּבי ִ ָּ֣מים ָה ֵ֔הם ֵא֥ין ח ָ֖ז ֹון נִפ ָ ְֽרץ׃‬I preached on the relationship between
prophecy and poetry, and why the vision that they afforded was so important. I was sufficiently
encouraged by the response after that sermon that for the Lent Lectures in 2017 that I could
work that theme at greater length. The overall title is The Poet-Prophets of the Old Testament
and the title of today’s lecture is “The Rediscovery of Hebrew Poetry in the Eighteenth Century.”

“Robert Lowth changed the way we read the Bible.” So wrote James L Kugel towards the
end of his book The Idea of Biblical Poetry.1 He could have added that Robert Lowth changed the
way that the Bible is printed. It is because of the work of Robert Lowth that modern translations
of the Bible accept that vast parts of the books of the prophets are in poetry and therefore prints
them in poetry. The translators of the Authorised Version who were before Lowth did not know
that and therefore the Authorised Version did not print out the prophetic books in poetic form.

Who was this man, Robert Lowth? How did he change our way of reading and printing
the Bible? He ws born in 1710 in the cathedral close in Winchester and was educated in Latin
and Greek and Hebrew and proceeded to Winchester’s twin foundation in Oxford, New College.
In 1735 he became vicar of Overton in Hampshire and in 1741 he was elected to the post of
Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford.

The Professor of Poetry is contracted to deliver a series of occasional lectures on

subjects to do with Poetry. This Lowth proceeded to do, beginning in 1741, for a number of
years. He delivered thirty-five lectures in Latin and these were published, in Latin, in 1753
under the title De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews), one of the
most important books ever written about the Bible. In 1778 Lowth published a new translation
of the book of Isaiah from the Hebrew, with a preliminary dissertation of over ninety pages in
which he repeated and refined the argument of his earlier lectures applying them essentially to
the book of Isaiah.

Why did Lowth need to change the way we read and print the bible? This can be
illustrated by ther story of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in Palm Sunday. In
particular it is the version of this story in Matthew 21 that I want to talk about. In the gospels of
Mark and Luke Jesus sends disciples to find a colt on which he will ride into Jerusalem. They do
so and he rides into Jerusalem on it. In John it is Jesus himself who finds a young ass and rides
upon it.

Matthew is different. Disciples are sent to Bethpage to procure two animals – an ass and
a colt. The disciples put garments on the two animals and Jesus sits upon them. Why does
Matthew have two animals? It is because he takes literally the prophecy in Zechariah 9:9.

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion;

1
James L Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and its History. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)
 shout, O daughter of Jerusalem:
behold, thy King cometh unto thee:
he is just, and having salvation,
lowly, and riding upon an ass,
and upon a colt the foal of an ass.

‫גִּי ִ֨לי מ ְ֜א ֹד בַּת־צ ִ֗י ֹּון‬

‫ה ִָר֙י ִע ֙י ַּ ֣בת י ְרּוש ִָׁ֔לַּ ִַם‬
‫ה ִֵּנ֤ה ַמ ְל ֵּכ ְ֙ך ָי֣ב ֹוא ָ֔לְך‬
‫ֹושע‬֖ ָׁ ‫צ ִַּד֥יק וְנ‬
‫֑הּוא ָענִ ֙י וְר ֵֹכ֣ב עַל־ח ֲ֔מ ֹור‬
‫ַל־עי ִר בֶּן־אֲת ֹנ ֹֽות׃‬ ֖ ַ ‫ְוע‬

The significant word is the and which comes before the words ‘a colt’. Matthew takes it
to convey additional information, to add something to what he has just said. Now, the Hebrew
does also have the word and, but it does not mean to provide additional information. The piece
of Hebrew is in poetry. There is parallelism, The same thing is said in two different ways. The
Ass and the colt, the foal of an ass, are not two distinct animals but one animal described in two
different ways.

Lowth didn’t use this example but he did taker other passages from the Old Testament
where this mistake had been made, especially in Jewish interpretation, of thinking that one
thing that was described in two ways was actually describing two things. Later on in this lecture
it will be necessary to evaluate Lowth’s arguments although, in spite of a certain amount of
criticism and refinement, they have stood the time. But for the moment we have to ask the
question why was it only in the first part of the eighteenth century that somebody rediscovered
this characteristic feature of Hebrew poetry? How did it come about that the nature of Hebrew
poetry was forgotten for more than fifteen hundred years until it was rediscovered in the
eighteenth century? The most exhaustive study of this matter is the book by James Kugel. He
lists a number of factors that can best be described as the background to Lowth’s work.

First, there was the fact that the Jewish interpreters of the bible who worked in the early
centuries of the common era believed that anything and everything in the bible was significant
however obscure it might appear. The fact that the bible often described the same thing in
different ways meant for these interpreters, as the example of Matthew’s account of the
triumphal entry, that two things, not one, were being described. Another example comes from
Psalm 146:1 which reads:

While I live will I praise the Lord,

Yea, as long as I have any being, I will sing praises unto my God.
 ‫ְהו֣ה ְּב ַח ָּי֑י‬
ָ ‫ֲא ַהל ְָל֣ה י‬
‫ֽאֹלהי בְּע ֹודִ ֽי׃‬ ֣ ַ ֵ‫ֲאזַ ְּמ ָ ֖רה ל‬

The second line repeats substantially what is in the first line. But the Jewish interpreters
almost always took it to be referring to two different things: ‘while I live’ referring to the
present world and ‘while I have any being’ referring to the world to come.

The second factor was the system of punctuation of the Hebrew text of the Bible devised
by the scholars of Tiberius, and this became standard in the manuscript tradition. According to
these scholars there were three poetic books in the Old Testament – Job, Psalms and Proverbs
only – and the Masoretic scholars therefore devised a different system of punctuation for those
three books compared with the rest. So that point was that Job, Psalms and Proverbs were
poetry and the rest were not, so of course that rules out the prophets.

Third, with the spread of Greek culture among the Jews from the fourth century B.C.,
Greek poetry became sufficiently familiar to some Jewish scholars to become the norm by which
poetry was to be distinguished from prose. Now, Hebrew texts did not conform to these Greek
norms and were not therefore regarded as poetry.

And fourth, when a tradition of Hebrew poetry did emerge in the middle ages, from
roughly the tenth century onwards, it was based upon Arabic models of poetry in which, among
other things, every line of verse ends with the same rhyme. And rhyme is not an obvious feature
of Hebrew texts.

So, these were all factors militating against the idea that there could be poetry, and
certainty against the idea that the prophetic books could be poetry. Kugel’s chapter entitled
Biblical Poetry and the Church covers a great deal of ground and comments on the attempts of
scholars, in particular Origen, and Jerome. Origen and Jerome were great biblical scholars.

Origin (185-c.253) lived, first of all, in Alexandria and then Caesarea, whilst Jerome
(347-419) lived for many years in Bethlehem where he learnt Hebrew from the Jewish scholars
there and translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin. They also argued that if there
was Hebrew poetry it was characterised by metre. Although Jerome and Origin argued that
Hebrew poetry had to have metre, they didn’t know what it was because even by their time the
way in which Hebrew had been pronounced in the biblical period had been forgotten. But the
sum total of the efforts of people like Rogen and Jerome was to persuade the church that
Hebrew poetry, especially the Psalms and Job, had metre – but that that certainly ruled out the
prophetic books as being poetry.

So, this was how things stood immediately before Lowth began his lectured in 1741.
Although we need now to fill in the picture a little more fully. Because there were two scholars
who, to some extent, anticipated Lowth, although that takes nothing away from his work.

First of all, it’s interesting that Jewish scholars were actually writing hymns and prayers
before the time of Lowth, and very often copying the style of the biblical psalms and using
parallelism. They were, in effect, writing in the style of biblical poetry but without realising it.
One of the scholars who became aware of parallelism prior to Lowth was a Jewish scholar
Azariah ben Moses dei Rossi (1511-1578). Lowth knew his work and quoted it. This man was a
Jewish physician and scholar who lived and died in Mantua in Italy and he wrote a great work,
The Light of the Eyes (‫ )מאור עינים‬and he discussed the nature of biblical poetry and reached the
important conclusion that what mattered about it were not the words or symbols but the ideas
and the ways in which they were joined together. And Lowth in fact translated and quoted these
words from Azariah:

Do you not see that if you translate some of them [ie., the
poetical passages] into another language they still keep and
retain their measure [he meant their ideas] if not wholly at least
in part which cannot be the case in those verses, the measures of
which arise from a certain quantity and number of syllables. 2

To put that into clearer language, let’s refer to the Hymn: “O God Our Help in Ages Past.”
if you try to translate that into another foreign language and try to reproduce the rhythm and
the rhyme, this is a very tall order indeed. But, when it comes to the Hebrew, even when you
translate that into another language, the ideas remain. Let’s go back, for a moment to Isaiah
chapter 40:

Every valley shall be exalted,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low:
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough places plain:
And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together:

2
This appears to be a rendering of Lowth’s translation of ‘Rabbi Azarias’ original Latin text:
“Nevertheless (that is, though the sacred poetry be not possessed of metrical syllables , and divided into feet, which is
the opinion of this learned man ) we cannot doubt that it has another species of metrical arrangement, which
depends upon the subject. — Is it not evident, that if you translate some of them into another language, they still
retain this metrical form , if not perfect, at least in a great degree ? which cannot possibly take place in those poems,
the metre of which consists in the number and quantity of syllables." R . AZARIAS in Mantiss. Dissert. ad Libr. Cosri, p .
420. Quoted in Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. (Boston/New York: Crocker & Brewster/J
Leavitt, 1829), p.36.
 We get a sense of the ideas, how they are there in parallelism, and translatikon doesn’t
take that away from the Hebrew poetry. This was the very important thing that Azariah had
discovered: that you can’t reproduce rhyme and rhythm easily from one language to another.
But in the case of Hebrew you can translate the ideas and they resonate together as in the
original.

It is perhaps unfair to Lowth to mention at this point another scholar who was also
working on this problem. Unfair because, Lowth, who was a very fair-minded and generous
scholar, almost certainly didn’t know about his work be cause I’m sure that he would have
quoted it if he had known it. It was published in two volumes in Leipzig and Dresden in 1733
and 1742 and it’s the work of a man named Johann Christian Schoettgen (1687-1751) who
preferred a career as a schoolmaster to that of an academic, was head of the distinguished
grammar school in Dresden but was also a prolific scholar. He published a work about the Bible
and the Talmud in 1733 with a fifteen page essay on what he called exergasia,3 a classical Greek
word meaning, in Rhetoric, how you join together statements of the same significance. And so
Schoettgen assumed that a line of Hebrew poetry had two parts or clauses in which the subject
matter was joined together in various ways. He set out ten rules or examples of how this joining
together occurred and some of these anticipated Lowth’s classifications.

Psalm 33 verse 7 exemplifies rule 1 of Schoettgen that the second line adds nothing of
significance to the first. This is close to what Lowth would later call Synonymous Parallelism.

He gathers /as in a water skin /the waters of the sea,

And places/as in a treasure house/ the deeps.

‫כ ֵֹּנ֣ס ֭ ַּכנֵּד ֵ ֣מי ַה ָּי֑ם‬

‫נ ֵ ֹ֖תן בְּאֹצ ָ֣ר ֹות תְּ ה ֹומֹֽות׃‬

Someone of whom Lowth was aware was a man named Francis Hare (1671-1740), a
contemporary, educated in Cambridge and was later Bishop of St Asaph and then of Chichester.
Five years before Lowth began his Oxford lectures, Hare had published a work on the Hebrew
Psalms in which he claimed to have discovered the poetic metre in which they were written.
Lowth disagreed so profoundly with Hare’s theory that he wrote a refutation that was appended
to later editions of the Oxford lectures. Lowth’s basic objection to Hare’s system was that it was
inconsistent, that it required the same Hebrew word sometimes to consist of long syllable
followed by a short one, at other times the same word had to be a short stressed syllable

3
See "De Exergasia Sacra," a fifteen-page essay at the end of Johann Christian Schoettgen's Horae Hebraicae et
Talmudicae (1733)
followed by a long one, and at other times the same word had to be two equally stressed
syllables. This is quite inconsistent but it was needed to make the facts fit a theory that was not
based on the facts.

So, we now come fully to Lowth. As Kugel has written: “By Lowth's time all the elements
of the puzzle he was to deal with had been laid out. His task was primarily that of arrangement
and synthesis-but this was no small matter.” 4 It was Lowth, through his lectures and his book of
1753 who changed the way we read the bible and the way the bible is printed.

After two introductory lectures Lowth turned directly to biblical poetry and the
question of Hebrew metre. He thought that biblical poetry must have a metre but that it was not
possible to recover it. He write: “He who attempts to restore the true and genuine Hebrew
versification erects an edifice without a foundation.”

So, how was it possible to identify and describe biblical poetry if one of the
fundamentals of poetry according to Greek and Latin models was beyond our reach? If we
couldn’t discover metre and there wasn’t any rhyme how could we tell it was poetry. Lowth first
made an observation that will not be lost on anyone who has studied biblical Hebrew. “The
Learner who is a proficient in the historical books, when he comes to the poetical parts will find
himself almost a perfect stranger.”

I can certainly verify that from my own experience. You think you’re doing quite well,
you can read Ruth and you can read the narrative parts of Samuel or Kings, and suddenly you
get to the Psalms or the Prophets and you come across a whole load of words you don’t know,
put together in ways you don’t understand.

Obviously, striking as that is (and its very striking when you’re learning Hebrew), it
doesn’t in itself constitute a convincing theory for defining Hebrew biblical poetry. And so
Loweth had to take another route, and it was a very clever route. He pointed out that there are
in the Psalms and elsewhere some compositions that we call alphabetic or acrostic
compositions in which each line begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

The great example of this of course is Psalm 119. In Psalm 119 the first eight verses
begin with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the second eight verses with the second letter
of the Hebrew alphabet and so on. And since there are twenty-two letters of the Hebrew
alphabet you multiply twenty-two by eight and you get one hundred and seventy-six, the
number of verses of Psalm 119.

4
See Kugel, p.273
 But the point is that this gave a consistent way of determining what a line of Hebrew line
of poetry was because if you begin each line with a new letter of the alphabet you, in that way,
delineate what a line is. In this way Lowth determined what a line of poetry was and pointed out
that each line consisted of two statements or two clauses. The description of Hebrew poetry,
then, is a matter of looking at this parallelism as Lowth came to call it and working from there to
describing biblical Hebrew poetry and, more importantly for our purposes, to arguing that the
prophetic books of the Old Testament are largely written in poetry.

To assert that much of the prophetic literature was indeed written in poetry was to go
against the weight of traditional Jewish and Christian teaching for well over a thousand years.
As noted earlier the traditional Jewish punctuation of the Hebrew text recognised only three
books – Job, Psalms and Proverbs – as poetry. Jerome, who had translated the bible from
Hebrew into Latin also denied that the prophets wrote in poetry. For many hundreds of years
Jerome’s work provided the only access to any sort of knowledge of Hebrew in the Western
church. It wasn;t until the 12th century that you begin to get Christian Hebrew scholarship and
another big boost at the time of the Reformation with the invention of printing and so on.

Lowth had to put together some argument that these days we would consider to be
rather feeble. But we have to remember that he was writing in the eighteenth century and not in
the twenty-first century. And what he said doesn’t affect or nullify his findings. Lowth argued
that those whom God had called to be prophets had been trained in the art of poetry and music
in a kind of college for potential prophets.

He appealed to the incident in I Samuel 10 where Saul encounters a band of prophets

who cause him to prophecy. According to Lowth this band of prophets had come down from the
college where they were studying. Lowth also linked music to prophesying where a prophecy of
Elisha is inspired by a minstrel. At I Chronicles 25 the names are give of temple musicians
whose task was to prophesy with various musical instruments. Lowth claimed that the Hebrew
word ‫ נביא‬equally denoted a prophet, a poet, or a musician under influence of divine inspiration.

Now, as I say, modern scholarship would not accept Lowth’s use of these passages. In
any case, he claims too much for the passage about Saul meeting the prophets because there is
not mention of a holy mountain of God or of a sacred college. Nut, if Lowth had to resort to
arguments that would not be acceptable to modern scholarship this does not invalidate his
conclusions. He was opposing the accumulated wisdom of centuries of Jewish and Christian
learning and having to use the scholarship of his day. The convincing part of his argument was
that many passages in the prophets are identical in form with those in the books acknowledged
to be poetic – ie., Job, Psalms and Proverbs. And if parallelism is a feature of Hebrew poetry in
those books – Job, Psalms and Proverbs – then that is also the case with the prophetic books.

Lowth demonstrated that there is such a thing as Hebrew poetry, that it depends not on
rhyme or metre but on parallelism, and those things can be found in the prophetic books and
therefore the prophets wrote in poetry.

I need to tell you about the types of parallelism that he distinguished. The first type of
parallelism Lowth called ‘Synonymous Parallelism’ where the same sentiment is repeated in
different but equivalent terms. An example is Micah 6:6-8

Wherewith shall I come before the LORD,

and bow myself before the high God?
shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves of a year old?

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,

or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good;

and what doth the LORD require of thee,
but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

‫בַּמָּ ה֙ אֲקַ ֵּ ֣דם י ְה ֔ ָוה‬

‫ֵאֹלהי מָ ֑ר ֹום‬
֣ ֵ ‫אִ ַּ ֖כף ל‬
‫הַאֲקַ דְּ ֶ ֣מּנּו בְע ֹ֔וֹלות‬
‫ַּב ֲעג ִָל֖ים בְּנֵ ֥י שָׁנָ ֽה׃‬

‫ֲהי ְִר ֶ ֤צה י ְהוָה֙ בְַּאל ְֵפ֣י אֵי ִ֔לים‬

‫ֵי־ש ֶמן‬
֑ ָׁ ‫ב ִ ְּֽרב ְ֖ב ֹות נַ ֽ ֲחל‬
‫ש ִ֔עי‬ְׁ ‫ַהא ֵּ ֶ֤תן בְּכ ִֹור ֙י ִּפ‬
‫פ ִ ְּ֥רי ִב ְט ִנ֖י ח ַּ ַ֥טאת נַפ ְִשֽׁי׃‬

‫ה־ט ֹּוב‬֑ ‫ָאדם ַמ‬ ֖ ָ ֛‫ִה ִּג֥יד לְָך‬

‫ּומָ ֽה־י ְה ָ֞וה ד ֵ ֹּ֣ורׁש ִממ ְָּ֗ך‬
‫ִּכ֣י אִם־ע ֲ֤ש ֹׂות מִשְׁ פָּט֙ ו ַ ְ֣א ֲהבַת ֶ֔חסֶד ְו ַהצְנֵ ֥ ַע ֶ ֖לכֶת עִם־ ֱאֹלהֶ ֽיָך׃‬

You can see how through this passage you get the synonymous parallelism:
“Wherewith shall I come before the LORD / and bow myself before the high God?” and so
on. That was synonymous parallelism.
 The second type of parallelism was called antithetic, because the main senses that
were joined together are opposites. In the book of prophets this form is very frequent:

A wise son rejoiceth his father

But a foolish son is the grief of his mother

There are two nice examples from Isaiah 54 and 65 and the translation that you have
here are from Lowth’s translation of Isaiah.

In a little anger have I forsaken thee,

But with great mercies will I receive thee again.
In a short wrath I hid my face for a moment from thee,
But with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee.
That’s the first example. The second one:

Behold my servant shall eat,

But you shall be famished.
Behold my servants shall drink,
But ye shall be thirsty.
Behold my servants shall rejoice,
But ye shall be confounded.
Behold my servants shall sing aloud for gladness of heart,
But ye shall cry aloud for grief of heart.

That is the Antithetical Parallelism. The third type of parallelism Lowth called ‘synthetic’
or ‘constructive’ parallelism – a category that has been quite severely criticised and questioned
by later scholarship. Lowth claimed that it was not characterised by sentences answering each
other in either synonymous or antithetic parallelism, but by what he called the ‘form of
construction’. He gave as an example Isaiah 58:5-8. Here the prophet describes the fast that is
acceptable to God. We note here that the grammatical forms of the words in the first three lines
are similar: the verb comes first, the nouns second:

To dissolve the bands of wickedness,

To loosen the oppressive burdens,
To deliver those that are crushed by violence

This is just the barest outline of Lowth’s arguments. In the lectures and the preliminary
dissertation to Isaiah there are many, many examples, including examples of how biblical
Hebrew poetry in the prophetic books is built up into larger units. May aim in this lecture has
simply been to introduce Lowth and how it was that he changed the way that we read and print
the bible by demonstrating that the prophets are written in poetry and that poetry is
characterised by parallelism.
There is a basic question, of course, that I’ve not asked and that you may want to ask me
at the end, but it comes really in next week’s lecture: What is poetry? What is a poem? I shall
address these questions next week from the unusual angle of the philosophy of knowledge. And
this will lead us to the fundamental question that these lectures will address. Is it an accident
that the Hebrew prophets delivered or wrote their messages in poetic form? Is it essential to
their message? Supposing they had used prose rather than poetry. Would it have made any
difference? That is a fundamental question and I think that that question has not received the
fundamental attention it deserves in biblical scholarship. Is there something about the nature of
poetry that makes biblical prophetic poetry the proper language for understanding God, and
God’s word, and God’s world. These are questions that I first raised in my sermon in Wales and
these are the questions that I shall be exploring in the next four weeks.