volume 16, issue 2, 2024, pages 201-229

DOI: https://doi.org/10.64438/sbsAQAW7778
Published online: 2024-12-01
Published in print: 2024-12-30

Abstract: Not only Jotham’s fable (Judg 9:8-15), but his entire speech (9:7g-20) has poetic features. The main aim of the article is to establish the structural and rhetorical poetry characteristics in this text. The structural characteristics include the following: chiasmus (antithetic, structural, split-member), gender pattern, metrical pattern, refrain-like structure, and threeand-four pattern. The following poetic constructions and rhetorical figures give Jotham’s oration a poetic character: anaphora, assonance, hendiadys, homophone, merismus, metonymy, oxymoron, parallelisms (syntactic and antithetical) play on words, and polar word pairs.