What are the distinctive features of a biblical Hebrew poem? In the centuries since Robert Lowth's pioneering work, scholars have explored every conceivable aspect of parallelism. Others have tried to describe the essence of Hebrew poetry through various counted constraints, whether they be stresses, or syllables, or grammatical slots in a clause. Still others stress the importance of the cantillation marks and allow them to be the guide to interpreting biblical poetry. But for all that effort, it still seems that we are missing something fundamental. In this book, Emmylou Grosser provides a new and groundbreaking model for describing the genius of Hebrew poetry and for interpreting individual texts. The cognitive poetics approach she advocates is a major insight and provides a powerful tool for the analysis of the poems of the Bible."
