דינמיקה של צמדים בשירת הטבע המקראית: עמוס, תהלים, איוב Binary Opposites in Biblical Cosmological Poetry: Psalms, Amos, Job

The article offers a dynamic reading of word pairs and parallelism inselected poems throughout the Hebrew Bible. Psalmists are concernedwith world order and with the dangers facing that order. This tension isregularly represented by pairs of opposites or complementary naturalentities. The poets construct their parallel cola and strophes with aneye towards these binary opposites, using deliberate ambiguous orcontrastive structure in order to draw the reader’s attention to theconstant interchange of opposites. In biblical poems, this interchangemay lead to equilibrium while it may equally lead to chaos and loss ofcontrol. The border between these situations is fragile. This notion isdemonstrated with regard to the drama of world order in Psalm 85. Aclose reading of the Amos Doxologies follows. The article concludeswith a discussion of the hymns on nature in Job chapters 5, 10, andespecially chapter 26.