Hebrew Verse Structure Revisited (I): Which Words "Count"‪?‬

Michael Patrick O'Connor's work Hebrew Verse Structure appeared in 1980; its reissue in 1997, with a thirty-two-page "Afterword," is an occasion both for gratitude and for a fresh assessment. (1) The work was favorably reviewed at the time of its first appearance, (2) and its system of analysis has been adopted by several other scholars. (3) Both Wilfred Watson and Adele Berlin, in their works on OT poetry, describe O'Connor's analysis; (4) unfortunately the former scholar, though he sets forth O'Connor's system, has two or three details wrong. (5) I myself am convinced that O'Connor has really solved the nagging question of the analysis of the structure of Hebrew poetry: he understands the patterns to be not metric or rhythmic but syntactic, and he has set forth what he calls "constraints" on allowable syntactic patterns within a given colon.