| Through a detailed analysis of the type and distribution of parallelism, this study describes the structures of nine full poems preserved in the Ben Sira scroll from Masada, explicating the effects of these patterns and how these structures work in concert with the themes and rhetoric of the individual poems. Each poem is considered as a separate unit and its parallelistic structures are evaluated separately. Then, by extrapolating from these individual analyses, the study finds that characteristic of Sirach verse are (1) the repetition of lexical items within individual cola and between adjacent verses, (2) semantic parallelism within single cola, (3) grammatical parallelism between the two cola of a verse and between adjacent verses, and (4) the repetition of phrases across an expanse of text. In general, the result of these particular structures on the verse-level is that Ben Sira's poetry tends to juxtapose semantically distinct words in grammatically comparable environments which, in turn, engenders a wide variety of associations that are at once more complex and more vague than associations between traditional word pairs. This represents a development in the tradition of wisdom writings and perhaps reflects the re-evaluation of certain poetic forms at the time of Ben Sira's composition. Certainly, it reflects a distinct poetic strategy. Wisdom poetry is often described as exhibiting "regular" or consistent structure and this is also the case for Sirach verse, though Ben Sira has invented new forms within this general constriction. |
