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The On The Song 's Development Essay

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Before proceeding in discussing the hypothesis on the Song’s development as somewhat analogous to the “shared internet”, I will discuss first recent scholarship that validates the poetic and rhetorical aspects of the Song s rooted from the oral tradition. Greek manuscripts provide special formatting for the Song such that verse lines are “graphically displayed.” Masoretic codices provide extensive notes for accentuations and cantillation for the Song. Although, Masoretic manuscripts do not provide graphic layout of the verse line for the Song, Septuagint manuscripts such as the Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, among others arrange the Song per cola et commata, such that the stichometry of the song is counted. Silences (marked by oblique strokes or space) and pauses (end of line verse) in the Song indicate it is rooted in oral performance. F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp makes the point; “Cutting up the flow of speech into meaningful chucks, phrases, clauses, and the like is crucial to the comprehension and enjoyment of larger wholes in oral verbal art.” He further strengthens the case for this “end stopping style” as “one of the surest signs of biblical poetry’s deep rootage in and enduring debt to oral performance” because such framing allow ideas to be easily digestible and memorized and there is “paratactic ordering and linear progression of thoughts.”

Further evidence of the Song as rooted in oral performance is that it is filled with sound play—“the ultimately a

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