Lesson 6 | Text Structures: Poetry
[1] Divide Lines
After identifying the extent of the poem you are working with, you first need to divide up the Hebrew text into lines.
- Divide lines
- Combine lines into stanzas
- Group stanzas into blocks
Use Cantillation Marks
The easiest way to divide lines in a preliminary fashion is to use the disjunctive cantillation marks: you should divide at the end of a verse, at an atnakh (ב֑, which divides a verse in half), and possibly at zaqeph qaton (ב֔, which divides a verse into quarters). This is similar to English: you will naturally pause when there is a punctuation mark, like a comma or period. In addition, those breaks often coincide with lines break in modern Bibles.
You should know, though, that Job, Psalms, and Proverbs have slightly different cantillation marks than the other 21 books of the Hebrew Old Testament. (For more information, see the first section of Chapter 41 of A Modern Grammar of Biblical Hebrew.)
Follow Clauses
Once you've done that, check each of your divisions based on the following rules:¹
1. Lines typically contain at least one verbal idea.
Nearly every line will contain a clause with a verb of some sort: a finite verb, a verbal participle (not a substantival or adjectival participle), an infinitive, the particles אֵין and יֵשׁ, or an implied verb.
Not every line will contain only one verb, though. Some lines may contain multiple clauses. Indeed, a poetic line differs from a clause in that a line may include up to 3 verbs of some sort. But if there is more than one verb or verbal, only one of the verbs may be accompanied by a noun.²
2. Lines contain no more than five words.
This rule aids you in determining exceptions to rule 1, when a line does not contain a verbal idea, not even by means of an implied verb. You’ll be able to tell when a non-verbal clause needs to be divided by following this second rule. For example, if a clause is followed by a prepositional phrase, and that prepositional phrase makes the whole clause contain more than five words, the prepositional phrase will need to be divided even though it contains no verb.
(Note that “small particles such as כִּי or אִם or prepositions such as אֶל” are not counted as “words” in this sense.³)
Let’s see this in action. In Jonah 2:3 (Hebrew), after the atnakh, there are five words, including two verbs. Based on the number of words, we could keep all the words together on one line. But because both verbs are accompanied by a noun, we should divide the line in two thus:
We also have divided the first half of this verse in half, though not because of either of our rules required it. 22a–b only contains five words when אֶל is discounted, and only the first verb is accompanied by a noun. Even so, two verbs ought to lead you to at least consider dividing into two lines, and—since the second verb is parallel to the last line of this verse—dividing makes the most sense here.
In the next step, we will see how to combine lines into stanzas.