Chapter Four

Zophar's second speech and 's answer (Job 20-21)

§ 1 Zophar's second speech

Job 20 S L L S L S S L S S S S 464:59 = 7.86

Earlier in the we have already seen four poems of 12 strophes (among which Job 19 just discussed), but after Job 20 there is only one more to come, Job 41, which is the last chapter completely in verse. The figures for Job 20 hardly deviate from those for Job 5: Ch. 5 contains 12 strophes, 27 verses, 55 cola, 205 words and 470 syllables Ch. 20 contains 12 strophes, 28 verses, 59 cola, 204 words and 464 syllables. Zophar here presents his second speech. Just as in ch.18, he has only one theme, which is given an exhaustive treatment. The result is a high level of synonymy, bringing with it the threat of monotony. This in tum means that it is not easy to find the proper articulation into strophes. The demarcation of stanzas is even more difficult. However, prosody comes to our rescue since it has a rigorously systematic structure of its own. Prosody does not always follow the inner movements of meaning and content. In the second strophe, two of the three verses already deal with the downfall of the wicked, which from a thematic point of view would link them to everything that follows. Prosody, however, sends us in a different direction, and eventually it turns out that there are several linguistic and stylistic decisions on the poet's part that point to accommodating the second strophe, together with the first, in stanza I. One of these decisions is the remarkable distribution of conjugations. I will start, however, by presenting the main characteristics of the prosodic profile ofJob 20. There are six stanzas of two strophes each. They all contain ten cola, except for the last one: the final stanza has one half-verse less, which means that the poet has decided against a round total of 60 cola for the poem as a whole. There are four stanzas that each combine a regular S with a regular L-strophe, i.e., contain a group of four plus a group of six cola. Stanza V also attains a total of ten cola, because it contains two units of equal length that, although S-

77 strophes, each contain one additional C-colon so that they show a balance of 5 + 5 cola. 1 The distribution of Qal and Hiphil is as follows: there are 37 Qal forms serving as predicates or substitute predicates.2 There are 12 Hiphil forms, whereas the five other conjugations together do not even reach this figure. Moreover, ten of these twelve cases occur in the first half of the poem.3 In stanzas I and III the Hiphil conjugation enters into a subtle ensemble play with the Qal. Another stylistic decision of the poet's has to do with the dominant third person masculine suffix referring to the wicked. This morpheme also shows a remarkable distribution, which becomes clear when we note down the totals per strophe: strophe no. 2 3 4 5 6 I 7 8 9 10+11 12 no. of suffixes 2 10 6 10 5 I 5 10 6 10 2

The pattern turns out to be perfectly concentric, and four times peaks at 10 suffixes - the round figure that was already at work in the number of cola per stanza. Stanza I (vv.2-6) consists of an '!'-strophe and a 'you' -strophe, in the com­ bination S + L. Strophe 1 has no fewer than eight first person singular mor­ phemes, against zero second person morphemes, and arranges two Hiphil and two Qal forms in a crosswise construction. Strophe 2, which is one verse longer, contains the same number of verbal predicates, but sets them out in a different pattern. The pivotal v.5 consists of two nominal sentences, but these are framed first by a poetic line containing two Qal forms, in v.4, and then by a poetic line containing two Hiphil forms, in v.6. Strophe 1 (vv.2-3) pushes its verbal predicates back in all cola. The first verse focuses on Zophar's inner life, whereas the second is about communication with Job. The predicates here in v.3 are 'to hear' and 'to (make) answer'. Zophar thinks that the reproaches coming from Job imply a defamation of

The sixth stanza also contains a C-colon in strophe 11, but because strophe 12 does not have one the strophic units there are made up of 5 + 4 cola. 2 By 'substitute' I refer to what the infinitives (in parallel positions in their strophes) do in vv.2b and 4b; in the surface structure they are part of what is only a complement, but if we change the preposition into a conjunction - a minor transformation - they become finite predicates. 3 The eleventh Hiphil is the predicative participle in v.18a, the twelfth appears in v.23c.

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