WHY DID THE PROPHETS WRITE USING POETRY?

I was recently asked this question by a friend and had to admit that I wasn't quite sure how to answer him. And even after a lot of research on the subject, I am still not 100% sure of the reason.

We first need to consider the process involved in composing the prophetic books. At an earlier point in time, the scholarly consensus was that the prophets delivered their addresses to their audiences orally, and they were not written down until much later by editors who often added their own comments in prose. “Anderson and Freedman note that oral speech, as a general rule, is more 'poetical' than literary compositions. This observation, while valid, served in past generations as a justification for the assumption that all poetic prophetic texts began as oral speeches and all prose prophetic texts are the product of editorial, literary work. However, in recent decades this assumption has been shown to be simplistic.” (J.A. Cook)

According to that scenario, the oracles were originally presented in poetic form because of its relative ease of memorization, by both the prophet and his audience. The advantages in this regard that poetry has over prose are several.

    1. For one thing, poetry tends to be much more concise than prose. We can see this most clearly in the proverbs (generally written as poetry), which are very terse and easily remembered.

    2. Secondly, poetry generally contains more picturesque language than prose and more frequently utilizes memorable similes, metaphors, puns and alliteration.

    3. In addition, there is a definite emotional aspect of poetry that is missing in prose. And that is especially important in trying to convey the urgency of God's message to a straying people. This emotion is often expressed using irony, sarcasm, and colorful hyperbole (poetic exaggeration).

    4. And getting back to the basic advantages of poetry as an aid to memory, the whole basis of Hebrew poetry is the concept of parallelism of thought. Thus, the first line in a verse of poetry presents a basic thought which is repeated with variations or expanded upon in subsequent lines of that verse. This serves as a great advantage in memorization since the first line alone generally prompts the more easy recollection of the other lines.

    5. There is even the possibility that some of these poetic prophecies were sung to accompaniment since they do possess a form of meter to them. As Cross says, “Perhaps it is also useful to remark that in 2 Kg 3:15 a prophet, asked for an oracle, requested a minstrel in order to prophesy.”

The scholarly scenario presented in the first paragraph has had to be modified in more recent years (see below), but this new understanding does nothing to undermine the advantages that poetry has for the prophet in accurately delivering a divine message and for the audience in remembering it later.

The amount of prose material in the books of prophecy varies tremendously from book to book, but even in those case where it is pretty much agreed that the whole book is poetic in nature, there is still room for disagreement among scholars. Take the case of the Book of Micah as an example. Here is how several English translations parse the verses in that book:

    NIV, RSV and JB treat the first verse as prose and the rest of the book as poetry.

    NEB feels that four of the verses are in prose and the rest in poetry.

    The Anchor Bible admits to more difficulty sorting out the poetry from prose, but generally opts for about thirteen verses in prose, with the rest basically as poetry.

    TEV writes only seven verses in the book in poetic form, with the majority as prose. However, since it is more a paraphrase than a translation, we should probably not make too much of this division.

The reason behind the ambiguity concerning the form of the prophetic books lies in the subjectivity in defining what constitutes poetry vis a vis prosaic writing. For example, what is one to do if a passage contains similes and metaphors but does not exhibit concise language or parallelism of ideas between adjacent lines? In a huge advance toward finding some objective measure to go by, David Noel Freedman devised the concept of “prose particle count,” which has been adopted by a large number of Bible scholars.

According to this method, the relative number of Hebrew prose particles (i.e. the definite article h-, the relative pronoun !aser, and the sign of the definite object !et) in a passage are counted. As a rule of thumb, he considered anything below 5% as poetry, compared to most prose writings which are above 15%.

“The remainder may to a substantial degree constitute a third category of elevated speech, which we call prophetic discourse.” (Freedman) Thus, J.A. Cook report, “F. Anderson and D. Freedman report that according to this measure, most prophetic literature is neither clearly poetic nor clearly prose but rather is 'an intermediate mode.'

Returning to the earlier question as to which came first, oral or written composition, Cook says, “The distinction between prose and poetry in the Prophetic Books is part of, and sometimes confused with, the more crucial issue of the distinction between literary and oral.” And C. Hassell Bullock states: “I am in agreement with Widengren that it is wrong to build too great a contrast between the oral and written stages of prophecy. The two aspects of the process were taking place at the same time...Whereas the time lapse between speaking and writing was in some cases brief, in others it may have been as long as a decade or two. But the prophet remembered his words and could recall them. The written (and not the oral) form was the principal form of the prophetic materials. When oral transmission did occur, it sometimes could be checked against a written document.

Millard concurs with this opinion: “Undoubtedly, prophetic words could be remembered by prophets and hearers and repeated to the majority who could not read. The oral and written existed side by side.”

And as one final complicating factor, Frank Moore Cross sees a historical development from orally composed poetry in the early period to poetry composed in writing in the late period. “Parallelism is a technique of the traditional poet, the bard...In the Hebrew Bible all the hallmarks of oral composition adhere to the corpus of premonarchial poetry...One should remember that while alphabetic writing rapidly increased literacy in the Early Iron Age, oral forms dominated in the transmission of literature and culture.”