In the first part of this post I supported the claim made by some commentators that Philippians 2:6–11 is poetic prose. This second part approaches the poetic prose idea from a different angle, and with a rather long digression before we return to Philippians.
When does poetic prose become poetry? Many English-speakers would answer: When it has rhythm and rhyme. But even for English this answer often doesn’t work. Shakespeare wrote much of his plays in blank verse: there is rhythm, but no rhyme. And look at the opening lines of The journey of the Magi by the 20th-century Christian poet T.S. Eliot:
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey,
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
There is no rhyme here, and the rhythm is irregular. The poetry lies in the shortness of words and lines, the alliteration of cold coming and ways . . . weather, and in the expanded repetition in journey, and such a long journey. With the alliteration Eliot draws on an ancient Germanic tradition continued in Old English poetry, which used alliteration to structure its lines, but not rhyme or regular rhythm. People who love English poetry don’t doubt that The journey of the Magi is poetry. But we could call it poetic prose if we wished, because the borderline between poetic prose and poetry is an artificial one that people would draw in different places. I choose to call it poetry.
Eliot’s lines also have some of the qualities of Biblical Hebrew poetry, of which the Old Testament has plenty. In Hebrew poetry, lines were often short, there was no rhyme or regular rhythm, and there was occasional alliteration. But one of its main characteristics was semantic parallelism.[1] That is, a pair of lines giving the same or similar thoughts in different ways, often with similar grammar too. Sometimes the two lines would express contrasting throughts. And sometimes the second line would expand on the idea of the first.[2] Take the opening lines of Isaiah 50 (NLT), in which God, somewhat ironically, asks the Judahites whether he was responsible for their being in exile in Babylon:
This is what the Lord says:
Was your mother sent away because I divorced her?
Did I sell you as slaves to my creditors?
No, you were sold because of your sins.
And your mother, too, was taken because of your sins.
Why was no one there when I came?
Why didn’t anyone answer when I called?
Is it because I have no power to rescue?
No, that is not the reason!
For I can speak to the sea and make it dry up!
I can turn rivers into deserts covered with dying fish.
I dress the skies in darkness, covering them with clothes of mourning.”
The semantic parallelisms are each shown in a different colour. The relationships among lines 2 to 5 are complicated, as your mother and sell you/you were sold cut across the parallelisms of lines 2–3 and 4–5. One can argue that the two lines shown in black are also a pair, but in this case a question-and-answer pair, and their very difference in thought structure from the first three pairs startles the reader into attention. The last three lines form a triplet instead of a pair, reinforcing God’s power.
A more complex feature of Hebrew poetry was the chiasm. Essentially, it is a set of parallels, each parallel embedded between the two lines of the previous one, with a single, often conclusive, line embedded between the two lines of the innermost parallel. This passage from Jeremiah 2:27–28 (NIV) begins with a simple parallelism (in blue) about the Israelites’ reliance on idols, followed by a single-line that draws a conclusion (They have turned . . .). Then comes the chiasm, expanding on They have turned . . ., with red and green marking its two parallelisms and fuchsia the ironic central question. In Hebrew these figures of speech are sometimes reinforced by, for example, words with similar consonants. Obviously these sound plays won’t usually translate into English, but happily parallelisms and chiasms often survive translation rather well.
They say to wood, ‘You are my father,’ and to stone, ‘You gave me birth.’ They have turned their backs to me and not their faces; A yet when they are in trouble, B they say, ‘Come and save us!’ X Where then are the gods you made for yourselves? B Let them come if they can save you A when you are in trouble!
What does this digression have to do with Philippians 2:6–11? Simply that when we read the passage in light of the material presented above, we see that it has some of the traits of Hebrew poetry, traits also shared by other ancient Semitic languages (Aramaic, Ugaritic). This has led some commentators to suggest that the passage was originally written in Aramaic, then translated into Paul’s Greek. Certainly, it is not conventional Greek poetry of Paul’s time, but Paul straddled several cultures, and may very well have written the Hebrew-style poetry of our passage in Greek. He was a diaspora Jew, growing up in a perhaps Aramaic-, perhaps Greek-, speaking family, and learning to read Biblical Hebrew from an early age. He lived in the multi-ethnic city of Tarsus with Greek as his day-to-day language, at least outside the home, and he was also a Roman citizen.[3] He was the embodiment of multiculturalism, and that was presumably a reason why God chose him to spearhead the proclamation of the good news outside Israel. He was certainly familiar with Hebrew poetry as it was translated into the Greek of the Septuagint[4] and there is no reason why he might not have written this kind of poetry in Greek.
Philippians 2:6–11 is set out below in a translation that attempts to imitate the Greek more closely than does, say, the more fluent English of the NIV or NLT. The colours pick out the Hebrew-like devices.[5]
A . . . who, being in form, God, thought being equal with God something not to hold tight to; rather, he emptied himself taking the form of a slave, assuming the likeness of human beings. B And, having acquired appearance as a human being, he humbled himself becoming obedient up to death X death on a cross. B Therefore God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name, the one above every name, A a so that at the name of Jesus b every knee would bend, c in heaven c and on earth c and under the earth, b and every tongue agree a that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
The form shown above is not a piece of cleverness. It is form used to divine purpose.
The whole passage is a massive chiasm, marked by the uppercase letters A, B and X. Its first half (A, B) tells us what Jesus did, leading to the crucial central line X, death on a cross.. Tom Wright says, ‘As you look at the incarnate son of God dying on the cross the most powerful thought you should think is: this is the true meaning of who God is. He is the God of self-giving love.’[6]
The second half of the chiasm (B, A) corresponds to the first, but now tells us what God did. Wright points out how extraordinary the Therefore at the start of the second half is. What is the connection between death on a cross and the glorification that follows? Paul tells us elsewhere (for example, Romans 5:8–18). It is that Jesus has broken the power of sin and evil by taking it upon himself, doing ‘what only God can do.’[7]
We can break the chiasm down a little further. The first A sees Jesus stepping down from the godhead to become human; as a result of X, his actions in human flesh, the second A sees him as Lord of all creation. The first B leads us to Jesus’ death, matched in the second B by his exaltation to the ’name that is above every name’ (see Part 1 of this post).
The second A of this grand chiasm itself contains a chiasm, marked by the lowercase letters a, b and c. Both a’s refer us to Jesus in his glory; the b’s form an obvious parallelism, every knee will bow and every tongue agree (that Jesus Christ is Lord); and the c’s tell us where: everywhere.
Embedded in this grand pattern are smaller figures of speech. In A the repetition of form (morphē) reinforces the contrast between Jesus as pre-existent God and Jesus as the lowest of the low, a slave. To the Roman Philippians morphē denoted not just outward appearance but also all-important status.[8]
Assuming the likeness of human beings and having acquired appearance as a human being form a straightforward Hebrew parallelism. It is a bald statement of the incarnation—Jesus becoming human. But having acquired … also moves us from A to B, he humbled himself which in turn reinforces the earlier extraordinary he emptied himself, and at the same time leads us to the parallelism enshrining the very centre of the poem, culminating in X, death on a cross.
The second B is joined to the second A by the repetition of the name, which gains more meaning each time it is expressed. In round 1, it is a name, in round 2 it is the name above all names, i.e. God’s name (again, see Part 1 of this post), and by round 3 Jesus’ name is Lord, God’s name.
One may ask whether the poem can simultaneously be the hymnos described in Part 1 of this post and the piece of Hebrew-style poetry described above. The answer is an emphatic ‘yes’. The purpose of a hymnos was to praise its subject, and Philippians 2:6-11 praises and glorifies Jesus for his death on the cross. The poetic devices magnify this purpose, contrasting what Jesus did with God’s response to it, and placing the cross where it belongs, as the link between them at the very centre. The poem is a piece of divinely inspired genius, and, looking more closely at it has helped me, at least, to see its sheer grandeur, as it focusses the reader’s attention on the most significant event in earth’s history.
Footnotes
- [^1] I take the term ’semantic parallelism’ from James J. Fox, Explorations in semantic parallelism. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2014, who shows that this poetic form is also present in traditional literature in eastern Indonesian languages, among others around the world.
- [^2] The first scholar to analyse biblical poetry in this way was Bishop Robert Lowth in his book, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753).
- [^3] For an account of Paul’s probable early life, see N.T. Wright, Paul: A biography (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018).
- [^4] The Greek translation of the Old Testament, used in Jewish communities in the diaspora within the eastern half of the Roman empire.
- [^5] I realise that there are other ways of analysing the poem. I offer this one because doing the analysis has helped me better comprehend something of the poem’s inspiration. Apart from specific references in other footnotes, I have been helped by reading pages 191–193 of Peter T. O’Brien’s The epistle to the Philippians: A commentary on the Greek text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1991); Morna Hooker’s paper referenced in Part 1 of this post; and the post with accompanying comments on Marg Mowczko’s blog.
- [^6] Tom Wright, Paul for everyone: The prison letters (London: SPCK, 2002), to whom I also owe the observation that death on a cross lies at the centre of the chiasm.
- [^7] See footnote 6.
- [^8] Joseph H. Hellerman, 2009. Mορφη Θεου as a signifier of social status in Philippians 2:6. Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 52:779–797.