Phyllis Trible The Art Of Persuasion

Observation of the environment inspires and enriches authors’ literary expressions. The resulting figurative descriptions, in turn, help form an integral part of one’s rhetoric as he addresses a specific audience. Phyllis Trible noted that ancient rhetoricians divided their subject into five “canons” or “faculties” to persuade their audiences. The five faculties included Invention (inventio), Arrangement (disposition), Style (elocutio), Memory (memoria), and Delivery (pronunciatio). Invention concerned itself with the discovery of material suitable to the occasion. Arrangement organized that material into an ordered whole from introduction through conclusion. Style sought the appropriate word choices for the content of that specific

Trible, in short, stated, when discussing the “Art of Persuasion,” that how a writer shaped his discourse was the key to setting the interest of his message. Ancient wisdom literature spiced its rhetoric with analogies and images inspired by different spheres of life. Those analogies and images were related to nature, including both fauna and flora, and reflected its impact upon the author’s perception of the world. Solomon, for example, spoke of the cedars in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall, as well as of beasts and birds, and reptiles and fish. It was Job who, likewise, called on every creature in the universe to bear witness to his argument that the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer: "But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to

Her directed research focused on these zoological, literary, and conceptual aspects of fauna imagery within the Book of Proverbs. She, while relying on existing assumptions of prior zoological investigations, studied the linguistic and stylistic elements of the images within their literary pericopes before concluding why the teacher referenced the specific images he did. Forti’s concise methodology follows. First, the zoological aspect helped disclose how the animals were seen and understood in the times of the Minor Prophets. Second, the literary aspect clarified the syntactical and thematic setting of the fauna images within their literary pericopes (i.e., extracts from each book). Third, the conceptual aspect revealed how the animals were linked to the thematic framework of each individual book in its era. These aspects proved to be the means by which Forti determined the viewpoint of the teacher of Proverbs, as well as the direction for the audience’s daily