Rhetorical Criticism and the Poetry of the Book of Job

Rhetorical Criticism and the Poetry of the Book of Job deals with the structure and meaning of the poems we find in Job 3-42,6. It is demonstrated that these poems exhibit a consistent pattern of cantos and strophes. The recurring structures often place the various thematic aspects of the texts in a different light. The analysis of the poems relates their rhetorical framework to the device of distant repetitive parallelism. These verbal repetitions appear to display distinct patterns and help to discover recurring and leading ideas. The final section offers a new theory on the demarcation of the (three) speech-cycles which give structure to chs. 4-31 and 38-41. This theory is of special importance for the interpretation of chs. 24-28. The work is of interest for all who study the forms and meaning of classical Hebrew poetry.