Adele Berlin, "Motif and Creativity in Biblical Poetry," Prooftexts 3 (1983): 231-241.

Berlin presents a series of literary criteria to be applied in textual analysis and proceeds to apply them to four passages with the "creation motif," Isa 40:12-27; Psalm 104; Prov 8:22-31; and Job 38-39, and concludes that although these passages contain the same motif, the structures of each expresses it differently, since it is used for a different purpose in each poetic context. This leads her, as is her forte, to discuss poetics (the rules of literary construction) and to the principle that when one understands that motifs and other literary conventions are used creatively one is in a better position to understand the motif and the specific passage in which it occurs.