The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Structural/Form Commentary?

Studies Books
#1

I’m not sure how to ask for what I’m looking for (if I did, I would just google it). But do you know of any commentaries that aren’t so much commenting on the text of the Bible, but on its form? Like if the text looks like poetry or rhymes or uses a bunch of onomatopoeia?

For example, I heard that Lamentations is highly structured, possibly the most composed in all of the Bible, using acrostics and poetic rhythm, showing that it was not a cry written in haste, but a well-thought-out cry which pained Jeremiah to write over a long period of time, maybe even after several revisions to get it just right.

And Peter Heitt’s sermon from yesterday pointed out that the Parable of the Good Samaritan contained 7 stanzas of a “finely crafted inverse parabolic ballad” where everything hinges on the middle stanza. I’m not sure that was clear in the original text, or an inference that he made, but it did cause me to think about its structure.

I’m looking for a commentary all about pointing out those kinds of things. Do you know of any?

BTW, I have Robertson Word Pictures, and that’s kind of what I’m talking about, but it deals more with specific words and their tenses, whereas I’m looking for something that deals with structures of whole paragraphs, chapters, and books.

#2

Here: amazon.com/Complete-Literary … bc?ie=UTF8
I’ve read it and still use it, it’s good.

Also see the Leland Ryken author page on Amazon.

#3

In a limited or more targeted sense there is this… Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke.

#4

Thanks. That’s close to the kind of thing I’m looking for, but not quite. That (and other books he wrote) seems to still be very much in book form, albeit with some examples. I’m definitely looking for something structured like a commentary, preferably something I can download to e-sword, but regardless, arranged in such a way that I can open it to a passage and read how that passage is structured.

#5

This is a little closer. Probably more detailed than I need though. A basic “this passage is an accrostic” or “this verse is structured like a Babylonian proverb” would be sufficient, going through the whole Bible.

Maybe I’m being too picky. :confused:

#6

I found a link that has a bunch of e-sword commentary files, but many of them don’t have any explanation as to what they are. But I’m downloading all the ones I don’t already have, in hopes of finding the kind of thing I’m looking for.

If you’re interested, here’s the link: eswordlibrary.com/v9-e-sword/v9-cmtx/

I already found one that could be useful, listed as BCWcommentary, which in E-Sword, clarifies that it is Bonnell’s Combined Word Book Commentary. I’m not sure what translation of the Bible it’s based on (looks like it might be KJV because I see some -est suffixes on verbs). Anyway, what it does is that counts words in books and lets you know all kinds of useful information, like what the most used words in the book are, what words are unique to that book, and then in what verse the first occurrence of significant words are found. Pretty neat.

#7

I really do think you’d love Poet & Peasant, STP. It IS very detailed, and it doesn’t of course cover the entire Bible, but what it does cover, it covers exceedingly well. And this isn’t his only book. There is a lot of detail and it may be you’ll want to skim, but I learned so much, just reading over the structure of the various poems, parables, etc. It makes it easier to see the same treatment when you come across it elsewhere. I bought a Kindle copy, but you’d find a hard copy much, much easier to use.

You might like the Rotherham Translation if only for the fuss he made over preserving the form of the Biblical poetry, prose, etc. A friend of mine calls it the “Yoda Translation,” and that is not a bad description. Nevertheless, it does help, especially in the poetic passages. The catch is, though, that you need a hard copy. Kindle doesn’t work for this translation at all. I got a used one and managed to get a good price on it, too.

We might ask [tag]Paidion[/tag] and [tag]JasonPratt[/tag] whether they have any good advice for you.

#8

If anyone is interested, I think I found something really close to the type of commentary I want: Companion Bible Notes by E. W. Bullinger (listed as Bullinger-companion-bible-notes on the link I posted). It still has a bit of comment on the text itself, and a LOT of merely stating what a word is in the original language, but it’s also easy to skim to find all kinds of literary tidbits, like figures of speech and such. For example, here is part of what it says for Genesis 1:1.

Good stuff! The type of thing I particularly was looking for was the comment about the Hebrew accent, a little tidbit I had completely forgotten about from my Hebrew courses, yet can have such a great impact on what to emphasize from a verse.

#9

I am DEFINITELY going to look into Bullinger!

Several of us here, myself included, are fans of Johnathan Mitchell’s NT translation (he has commentary books, too, but only on most of the epistles so far). It isn’t quite a form/structure commentary, but it presents a ton of grammatic, contextual options (along with mentioning the more important textual variations, and their grammatic, contextual options) for every verse in the NT. It has a Kindle edition now, although I haven’t checked to see how he ported over the several formatting cues he uses in print to distinguish options. (I think I owe hearing about him first from Cindy, btw. :sunglasses: )

I’m not sure if Bailey’s Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes contains all the material from the other earlier books – I don’t have them for comparison, and he doesn’t exactly say – but my impression (including from his preface) is that he updates and expands his earlier work there, mainly with commentary on unique (or more primary) GosMatt material, although with one chapter on the Johannine Adulteress incident. (The promo description says all four Gospels, but that may be a tad misleading: no unique or primary Markan material is mentioned, that I saw from a couple of quick content scans, although naturally there is some double and triple tradition.)

#10

I suppose I should add for disclosure that Mitchell is a Christian universalist and (as far as I can tell) a trinitarian.

(I have to qualify that, because I used Knoch’s concordant literal translation for years, with great profit – and still do – thinking he was a trinitarian non-universalist when he was in fact a dogmatic unitarian and a universalist, not to be confused with the modern UUs. {spit} :wink: )

#11

Well, I’m a little less impressed with Bullinger’s commentary now after using in my study quite a bit yesterday; it’s not quite as comprehensive on literary forms as I had hoped. But I still think it’s the closest thing to what I’m looking for. My search will continue!

Yes, I have Johnathon Mitchell’s NT installed in e-sword, and looked at it just yesterday actually. Not my go-to translation for devotional reading, but I see how it could be useful in study.

#12

I got Bullinger’s in yesterday, and I kind of adore it. :smiley:

Sure we obviously disagree on some points – his explanation for Mark 9:49-50 is a garbled mess, for example – but the historical harmonization side of my brain loved how he tried (though not successfully IMO) to connect Job of the poem by that name to Job son of Issachar in the days of Joseph, so that the story of Job takes place sometime late in Joseph’s life and with one of Job’s three friends being a son or grandson of Esau. (He tries to connect the other two friends but rather more vaguely. Like everyone up to and including God he ignores Elihu, at least in that theory. :laughing: )

How he got from there to Job still being alive to see the days of Moses, much moreso Moses thus counting as an “ear-and-eyewitness” (not just an earwitness, hearing Job’s story and passing it on), I have less than no clear idea. It doesn’t seem to fit the 400 years of the Egyptian sojourn at all. Still, I appreciate the effort, even if the effort seems a little crazy: he cared enough to try and found an ingenious method I myself hadn’t heard of before!

Also, the artistic side of my head loved that he decided, just for kicks apparently, to append a metrical translation of all the Job dialogues, at the bottom of all relevant pages, simply to give people more familiar with that poetic ‘form’ an experiential idea of how people familiar with how Hebrew readers experience the (very different) poetic forms of the actual book.