Tuesday 23 March 2010

Parallelism and redemption

I'm currently reading a most beautiful book: Adele Berlin's The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism. One of the things that strikes me is that the particular way of understanding theological exegesis that I've often attempted to formulate in posts on this blog—i.e. that the living divine substance of the text reveals himself to us afresh within the form of the old, and that perceiving this requires a constant dialectic between, e.g. OT and NT, dogmatics and history, particular text and canonical whole—seems to be consistent with the mode in which large chunks of the OT itself has been composed. In other words, my (Childs', Barth's) theory is consistent with the compositional style of the Hebrew Bible (on the relation between literary mode and theology see the Minear's comments on typology in Revelation).

The literary mode is parallelism. Parallelism is held to be the defining feature of Biblical poetry, and one of the things Berlin does in her book is to extend this concept beyond the realm of parallel lines within poetry to contiguous lines in prose and to larger chunks of text, such as strophes and even whole psalms (she doesn't go that far, but others do). The function of parallelism is ultimately to communicate a message, and it does this by creating contrast within equivalence. Equivalence is established on various levels—e.g. grammatical, phonological, and semantic—, thus binding the pairs together, and yet within this bounded unit contrasts are set up. The contrasts that are set up have a double function: both to disambiguate and to ambiguate the previous part of the parallelism (i.e. they create redundancy and ambiguity, one of the major dichotomies in linguistic discourse). The significant point is that both functions occur simultaneously and that they occur for the sake of doing justice to the subject matter. Here's a quote from Berlin:

A parallel line does both; it insures the delivery of the information in the first line and, even in the context of the first line, it encourages a second view of things, an alternate interpretation. Redundancy and ambiguity (disambiguation and polysemy) are locked in eternal struggle in parallelism. To choose one is to lose the other, and thereby lose the major dialectic tension of parallelism. There is no better way to sum this up than to quote

Ps 62:

אחת דבר אלהים // שתים שמעתי

One thing God has spoken // Two things I have heard.

This verse not only lends itself to discussions of hermeneutics—that one statement has many interpertations—but it also reflects the essence of parallelism. Parallelism is constituted by redundancy and polysemy, disambiguation and ambiguity, contrast within equivalence. Parallelism focuses the message on itself but its vision is binocular. Like human vision it superimposes two slightly different views of the same object and from their convergence it produces a sense of depth (p. 99).

I would say that parallelism, whether in a poetic couplets like the above or within the juxtaposition of entire chapters like Gen 1 and 2, functions like a “stereoscope.” The true referent is neither line a or line b, but rather some other abstraction beyond both, an abstraction that can only be perceived via the dialectic tension of both.In terms of Ps 24, what is the referent of the singular feminine object pronoun in v. 2a and b? Tevel or Eretz? Or another reality that both point to imperfectly.

Paul Minear once pointed out that there is a connection between literary technique and theology (see my post Eschatology and historical methodology). Can we see that here? A major attribute of the Biblical God is that he is both creator and redeemer, he redeems his creation, he takes what he already once found good - the old - and brings it to its goal - the new (as I wrote in my post Beauty and the Piss Christ).

In a similar way, I wonder if one could call parallelism redemptive," in that partialities are made to point beyond themselves to something "more true." Redemption is the instantiation of the Kingdom of God, the eschatological New Creation. Whatever that is, it is both continuous and discontinous with this side of creation (see Paul's argument about resurrection). Though I certainly don't think that poetic parallelism was created for the purpose of witnessing to this reality (it's just a mundane literary tool that can be put to all kinds of banal uses), the dialectic between old and new that is the stuff of Biblical theology lends itself nicely to such a paratacic literary technique.

Perhaps if Biblical scholars trained their vision to be able to see what emerges from between the seams of the Bible, their exegesis would bring us and the world closer to the reality that evoked the whole of Scripture in the first place.

8 comments:

Andrew said...

This really is a great book ... taking parallelism out of the realm of grammar and seeing it employed at many other levels of the text is a brilliant contribution of Berlin (following Jakobsen).

I can't cite a page number since my copy is boxed up for a move, but I especially like her section on "perceptibility" and parallelism. She notes that we can't always expect the types of matchings to be simple since simplicity can, at times, equal boring. Thus more subtle forms of parallelism help to heighten interest in the text.

I like your ability, Phil, to take this to the next level though. Nice job fleshing out the theological implications of such a strategy!

cjbatch said...

hi Phil,
I'm a MTh student in Sydney Australia writing a thesis on Isaiah's servant songs, and I have just been reviewing Adele Berlin's book. I'm interested in your comment 'she doesn't go that far (i.e. extend her ideas about parallelism to larger 'swathes' of text) but others do'. Who are these others? I have been fascinated with her illuminating ideas about parallelism, and have realised that what I have until now thought of as 'dramatic foils' to the Servant within the text of Isaiah are actually things drawn into parallel with the Servant - e.g. Cyrus, King Hezekiah etc. However I am worried about overapplication of this idea, and hoping to find more to read in the area. Also, do you think that things like parables are aspects of the same kind of thinking that draws parallels to reveal meaning? I hope its not too long since your post to have some discussion about it, looking forward to hearing from you,
Caroline

Phil Sumpter said...

Hi Caroline,

I'm sorry about the late and unfortunately brief answer, I'm currently suffering from a seemingly common malady called "time pressure."

The other scholar that immediately sprung to mind when writing the post was Childs in his Isaiah commentary. There he talks about the juxtaposition of the prophecies about Babylon and Assyria and the theological significance of this move. He doesn't use the word parallelism, but I feel there is a strong similarity between what he has to say there and what Berlin says here.

That's an interesting idea, seeing Cyrus "in parallelism" with the Servant. I'm not informed enough about Isaiah to say, unfortunately, though in my forthcoming posts I'm going to be citing Childs' Isaiah commentary a lot.

I could say the same thing about parables. Though I do worry that I'm overapplying the idea. I'm not sure it's fruitful to say that anything that is set in juxtaposition is parallelism ... On the other hand, Berlin does draw on literary theorists who have a broad definition of what parallelism is.

It's been a while since I wrote this post and it was intended as a spontaneous thought experiment, so I apologize that I can't be any more helpful right now!

cjbatch said...

hi Phil,
thanks for your response. I thought you might be interested to know that I gave a paper a couple of weeks ago at the 2nd Australasian Christian conference for the academy and the church) where I spoke about some of these possibilities of parallelism (my topic was 'Subverting power cliches in Isaiah'). I suggested that under the broad question posed by Isaiah (and particularly by 40 ff) 'who is Yahweh?' that the poet has drawn various servant images into parallel - Hezekiah, Cyrus, other conquerors that are 'raised up', Israel, Isaiah himself... in order to explore what it means to be 'raised up', 'anointed' 'taken hold of', 'chosen', to 'wait for him', to have Yahweh's spirit - whether one is pagan, powerful, weak, conquered, dispossesed etc.
I aksed 'If parallelism is a structural principle in what Adele Berlin calls the ‘dynamic microworld’ of the text, why should something similar not operate in the larger structure of the book, working in the same way but between images and characters, exploring ‘contrast within equivalence’ to give meaning, in effect structuring the way the reader perceives the content of the text by drawing parallels between its elements?'
Anyway, the idea was received very favourably - I specifically asked for feedback on it. I'm not sure where it will take me in my future thinking about Isaiah and the Servant, but it has been fruitful so far!
blessings
Caroline

Phil Sumpter said...

Wow,that sounds very interesting and in light with what I was thinking about in the post. Has Childs' commentary been of much help to you? I'm interested in how he is generally received.

Best wishes with your studies

cjbatch said...

Thanks -sorry for this (very!) late reply. I haven't used Child's Isaiah commentary much yet, though its sitting on my desk. Its something I hope to get into. At the moment I'm reading parts of Child's 'The Struggle to understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture', and I have benefitted very much from his 'Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture' of course. My supervisor's comment about Child's commentary was that it was disappointing; that he doesn't wrestle with the text enough, or go into enough detail.
Just a quick question: I need to find a fairly recent German article, preferrably on Isaiah 40 - 55 for a German translation class. Do you have any suggestions, or do you know which German scholars are writing on Isaiah at the moment? thanks and blessings, Caroline

cjbatch said...

Thanks -sorry for this (very!) late reply. I haven't used Child's Isaiah commentary much yet, though its sitting on my desk. Its something I hope to get into. At the moment I'm reading parts of Child's 'The Struggle to understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture', and I have benefitted very much from his 'Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture' of course. My supervisor's comment about Child's commentary was that it was disappointing; that he doesn't wrestle with the text enough, or go into enough detail.
Just a quick question: I need to find a fairly recent German article, preferrably on Isaiah 40 - 55 for a German translation class. Do you have any suggestions, or do you know which German scholars are writing on Isaiah at the moment? thanks and blessings, Caroline

Phil Sumpter said...

Who's your supervisor?

As for German language articles on Second Isaiah, I'M afraid nothing really occurs to me spontaneously. I did a quick search and the most recent article seems to be quite old:

Leene, H. "Auf der Suche nach einem redaktionskritischen Modell für Jesaja 40-55." Theologische Literaturzeitung 121, no. 9 (September 1, 1996): 803-818.

I can't tell you anything about it, though, I'M afraid. I'm a big fan of Beuken, but he hasn't got any German language articles on this section (that I can find)