Melody of the text

Texts are musical.  How?  Both texts and music display a paradoxical quality.  Let’s start simple.

On the one hand: The sequence of words is a temporal sequence, and we couldn’t recognize a sequence of words as a sentence unless one sound or written word yielded its place to the next.  Each word in the sequence must die if the next word is to live; each dies for the sake of the whole sentence.  But it’s through that death that the sentence comes alive.  If the first word refused to sacrifice itself, refused death, but continued to sound as I spoke the rest; and if the second word also resolutely refused to fade, and the third, and fourth, and so on, we couldn’t discern articulated differentiated words, a sentence, at all.  Music is like that too, with some variations.  In music, a single note can drone along while others play, and the music is sensible.  Yet, there is also a sense in which one note has to yield to the next if there is to be a melody.  If every note droned on and on, we wouldn’t have a melody but noise.

On the other hand: I can only recognize the sentence as a sentence if I also, in some fashion, grasp the whole thing together.  If I lose the first part of the sentence when the sound waves dissipate, I won’t grasp the meaning of the sentence.  I won’t even recognize it as a sentence.  I will hear only disconnected words.  Musical notes have to accumulate too, and be in some sense simultaneous, if a melody is to be heard.  Memory is essential to making sense of music, and of sentences.

More complexly: Literary reading is melodic.  A reader or hearer has to read or hear two moments in a text simultaneously if he is going to grasp the literary richness and beauty of a text.  If you’ve forgotten Joseph’s first robe by the time you get to the second one, you won’t grasp the melodic quality of this motif.  It’s just be one robe, then another, then another.  If you’ve forgotten that Moses was saved through water when you come to later uses of the water motif in Exodus, you won’t grasp this major theme that flows through the entire book.  Motifs form a melody together.  Each new use of the motif is indwelt by the earlier uses, and extends those earlier uses.

We should not read motifs this way: x ¹ | x ² | x ³

Rather:  x ¹ -> x ¹⁺¹ -> x ¹⁺¹⁺¹

At yet another level, we can say that the melodic quality of Bible is one of the ways Scripture communicates wisdom to us.  Augustine uses speech and music as analogues of the passage of time in general.  By learning to read Scripture melodically, we learn to understand history.  We are trained in grasping the significance of historical sequences, the meaning of an historical movement.  We are trained to keep event A in mind when events B and C follow, and to hear the melody (often a dissonant one!) that results.