MEAT/BREAD AS A PARALLEL WORD-PAIR IN BIBLICAL POETRY
Vol. 47, No. 1, 2019
11. Frankel, David, The Murmuring Stories of the Priestly School: A Retrieval of Ancient Sacer-
dotal Lore, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum Vol. LXXXIX, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002 pp. 63-
117. In contrast to the other modern commentators I have reviewed, Frankel’s traditions are not
based on what the Lord fed Israel in the desert.
12. According to Frankel, that tradition wasn’t exactly the same as the one now found in Num-
bers 11, in which the quails are sent only after the manna had been coming for some time; it may
be reflected in Psalm 78. See Frankel, pp. 111-113.
13. See F. Brown, S.R. Driver and C. Briggs, eds., The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and Eng-
lish Lexicon, Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, reprinted from the 1906 edition, pp. 536-7.
Hereafter, “BDB.”
14. See Frankel, p. 114. He gives the words in Hebrew characters, and I have transliterated them
here.
15. In addition to all the descriptions of authorized sacrifices in Leviticus and Numbers, see for
example the Passover sacrifice in Exodus 12, and Gideon’s sacrifice in Judges 6:21, both of
which involve an animal and matzot [unleavened bread].
16. See Mitchell Dahood’s discussion in Rummel, Stan, ed., Ras Shamra Parallels: The Texts
from Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible, Vol. 3, Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1981 p. 47. By the
way, he notes that the pair bšr/lḥm occurs in Ugaritic only as a “collocation,” i.e. non-parallel
words that appear in different poetic cola or in different clauses of a prose sentence.
17. As we have seen, meat was either prepared as part of a meal to honor important guests, or as
part of a sacrifice (including those made in connection with an extended family feast – e.g., I
Samuel 20:6).
18. See for example Genesis 14:18 and Judges 5:25.
19. See also Dahood, M. “The Chiastic Breakup in Isaiah 58:7,” Biblica 57, 1976 p. 105, where
he refers to I Kings 17:6 as an example of the use of this word-pair in this way.
20. Honeyman described the use of this type of figure of speech in the Hebrew Bible; see Hon-
eyman, A.M., “Merismus in Biblical Hebrew,” Journal of Biblical Literature 71:1, 1952 pp. 11-
18. A merism may simply be two (or more) examples of a class, such as tzo’n uvakar [flocks and
cattle] which is used to mean “livestock.” However, it often takes the form of a “polar expres-
sion,” in which two extremes are used to indicate the entire spectrum between them, such as
shamayim va’aretz [heaven and earth] which is used to mean “the entire universe.”
21. Note that neither Honeyman (see Note 20) nor Krasovec mention “bread and meat” as a
merism. See Krasovec, Joze, Der Merismus im Biblisch-Hebräischen und Nordwestsemitischen
(BibOr 33), Rome, 1977.
22. The B term “on its coals” may be parallel to “in a fire” in the clause preceding this bicolon;
in addition, it might be possible to argue that the actual A/Aʹ pair is “I baked/I roasted and ate.”
The relationship of the preceding clause to this bicolon, and whether it is in fact a tricolon, is not
relevant to the points being made here. The 3:3 rhythm assumes that the short prepositions and
conjunction are unstressed; see Gray, George Buchanan, The Forms of Hebrew Poetry, first
published in 1915, republished as part of The Library of Biblical Studies, edited by Harry M.
Orlinsky, KTAV Publishing House, 1972 p. 150. Note also that Ginsberg described anacrusis
(single extra-metric words) as a characteristic of Ugaritic poetry; see Ginsberg, H.L., “The Re-
bellion and Death of Ba‘lu,” Orientalia 5, 1936 p. 171.