이사야 6장의 문체 구조 분석 ― 평행법 구조를 중심으로 ―

The literatures that Isaiah 6 has spawned are legion, a testimony to its continuing fascination and appeal. There are good reasons for such fascination and appeal. Apart from the fact that Isaiah 6 plays a pivotal role in summarizing the previous chapters and in anticipating the rest of the book, the text poses a series of interesting textual, historical and theological conundrums: for instance, the historical setting of Isaiah 6, its genre as a call narrative, the identity of the seraphim and their role, an apparent break within Yahweh’s speech between verses 11 and 12, the authenticity of the last three words in verse 13, zeraʿ qōdeš maṣṣabetāḥ, the theological implication of the divine hardening (Verstockung) in vv. 9-10 and so on. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to its poetic features. Such seems to be due partly to the narratival impression created by the sequence of wayyiqtols that permeate the whole chapter (vv. 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11). This impression may be reinforced by a heavy use of prose particles, w (41 times) ʾt (6 times), ʾšr (2/3 times), and h (16 times). But a closer study of the text shows a sophisticated poetic artistry throughout the chapter. In this paper, I will therefore restrict myself to the analysis of the poetic structure of Isaiah 6 without attempting to solve all its textual, historical and theological questions. The purpose of this paper is to show that Isaiah 6 is composed of two layers of text, namely, poetry and prose, which are closely integrated and yet separable from each other. To that end, various types of parallelism and their different distributions will be discussed together with “terseness” as a way of separating out poetry from prose in Isaiah 6. In particular, the notation system invented by Dennis Pardee will be used to map out various distributions of parallelism in the poetic portion of Isaiah 6. This article shows that parallelism dominates the poetic portion of the text while fulfilling what A. Berlin calls its “poetic function” in the text, and that the two layers of text are closely integrated to each other in such a way that we cannot fully appreciate the beauty of the text without reading the chapter as an integrated whole.