• Introduction - Biblical Poetry Beyond Parallelism


• Chapter One - "Verse, Properly So Called": The Line in Biblical Poetry


• Terminology


• Manuscript Evidence for the Line


• The "Verse Line" in Oral Poetry


• The Line from the Other's Perspective


• Internal Evidence for the Line


• Summary


• Chapter Two - The Free Rhythms of Biblical Hebrew Poetry


• Through Whitman's Eyes


• Biblical Hebrew Poetry is Not Metrical


• The Shape of Poetic Rhythm


• Orality, Song, and Music


• The Free Rhythms of Biblical Poetry


• Summary


• Chapter Three - The Idea of Lyric Poetry in the Bible


• The Hebrew Lyric


• Summary


• Lyric in extenso: Probing (Some) Possibilities in the Song


• Beyond Lyric: Toward a Richer Understanding of (Other) Biblical Poems


• Chapter Four - An Informing Orality: Biblical Poetic Style


• Some Preliminary Points of Orientation


• Prob(lematiz)ing the Question of Hebrew Narrative Poetry


• Nonnarrative Oral Poetry, Or: Orality Poeticized Otherwise


• Signs of (Nonnarrative) Orality in Biblical Poetry


• Emergent Textuality


• Conclusions


• Chapter Five - The Way of Poetry in Psalm 133


• I


• II


• III


• IV


• Closing


• Notes


• Bibliography


• Index

F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp is an Associate Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

On Biblical Poetry considers the characteristics of biblical Hebrew Poetry beyond its currently best known feature, parallelism. F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp demonstrates the many interesting and valuable interpretations that yield from a series of programmatic essays on major facets of biblical verse, careful attention to prosody, and close reading.