Genre

Classical

Words used by Judd to describe classical genre theory

• Rules to be followed
• Static categories
• Synchronic
• Essentialist
• Structuralist
• Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics

Examples of formal genres in the classical sense

• Dactylic hexameter
• Shakespeare’s sonnets, tragedies, comedies
• Haiku, limerick

Gunkel’s Gattungsgeschichte

• Small oral units, such as psalms
• Intersection of social setting, form, and meaning
• Hymns, God's enthronement, complaint, thanksgiving, royal, wisdom

Modern

The set of cultural knowledge, shared cues, familar structures, etc., that facilitates communication. Authors borrow elements with the assumption that the audience already has some familiarity and predictable associations.

Low-level conventions a culture maintains to aid communication

• Language, writing systems
• Because Internet: all-caps is yelling, emojis
• Music: Rock n' Roll is necessarily 4-4 time; waltz is necessarily 3-3 time; western music has twelve tones, major and minor key

Emphasis that cultural conventions can change, overlap, mix, be deliberately manipulated

Family-resemblance model

Israelite and Judean

Low-level distinction between prose and poetry (parallelism)

Wisdom harder than you might think to nail down

Blenkinsopp argues that wisdom and law are not so different

Liane Feldman argues at length that P legal and narrative material need to be read holistically

Apocalypse is relatively definable, but late

Scholarly terminology can be helpful even if the original authors would not have consciously defined such categories

Hebrew Poetry and the Scholarly Description Thereof

Parallelism of lines

• Lines can be paired (sometimes triplets) of closely related meaning
• Labeled A and B
• B can intensify or extend A, be synonymous with A, or be opposite of A.
• Small letters a, b, c used for words within a line such as A: a-b-c, B c-b-a (harder to identify in English translation).
• Redundancy generally helps clarify, but can create problems for literal interpretation (Matthew 21:7 interprets Zechariah 9:9 to mean Jesus rode on both a donkey and a colt).

[A] A voice proclaims: 
	[A] In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD! 
	[B] Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God! 
	[A] Every valley shall be lifted up, 
	[B] every mountain and hill made low; 
	[A] The rugged land shall be a plain, 
	[B] the rough country, a broad valley. 
	[A] Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, 
	[B] and all flesh shall see it together; 
[B] for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

Chiasmus

• Takes its name from the Greek letter Chi, χ, which looks like an X.
• Topics or forms can be mapped A-B-C-D-D′-C′-B′-A′.
• Prime marks can be used whenever you want to mark same-but-different.

Bookending

• Similar forms or ideas open and close a unit.
• A voice proclaims... for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

Resumptive repetition (Wiederaufnahme)

• Repeats forms or ideas to signal picking up where left off after an interlude.

Structural Analysis of Leviticus 19:16-18

A: No go slander neighbor¹
B: No stand on blood neighbor²

A: No hate neighbor³ in heart
  A: Reprove neighbor⁴ and no bear on him sin
  B: No revenge and no grudge neighbor⁵
B: Love neighbor² like you