Bible 101, part 7: SONGS AND POETRY OF THE BIBLE
Psalm 8 Ruth 1:16-22
July 19, 2009
- Rev. Janet Robertson Duggins
Some people love poetry. Other people just don’t get it – either the poetry or the love of it. If you fall into the latter group, you might be a little dismayed when I tell you that a large part of the Bible – nearly a third of the Old Testament – is made up of poetry. But bear with me for a while. I hope that whether you love poetry or find it bewildering, you’ll have a better appreciation for how and why the Biblical texts say what they have to say in the form of poetry.
When you think of poetry, what do you think of? Maybe a favorite (or a famous) poem? If you think of what makes a poem a poem, perhaps you think of lines that rhyme. If that’s what comes to mind, and it is for many of us, it’s no wonder that we aren’t very used to thinking of the Bible as a book that has a lot of poetry in it. Because of course, translated into English, it doesn’t have rhyme schemes. But you know what? It doesn’t have rhyme schemes in the original languages, either, as a rule. Because Hebrew poetry (and a study of Biblical poetry does deal mainly with the Old Testament) didn’t use a device such as rhyme to mark the ends of lines but instead had a different kind of structure and form. We sometimes don’t see this in our Bibles because many of them print everything as if it were a prose paragraph, which is unfortunate. Why does it matter, you may wonder? It matters because poetry by its very nature is a particular kind of communication. Our understanding will be helped greatly when we know that what we are reading is poetry, and when we remember the nature of poetry.
The one book in the Bible which most people recognize as poetry is the Psalms; more precisely, these are songs intended to be set to music and sung by a community at worship and/or by individual members of the community. All of our hymns we are singing this morning are from the Psalms, and I chose them so that we could encounter them in something of the way they were intended to be encountered. Not just as texts to be studied but as songs to be sung, felt, experienced, shared, lifted up to God.
But in fact there is poetry in nearly every book of the Old
Testament, and other books besides Psalms are primarily made up of poetry. Most of the wisdom literature Jerry talked
about last week is in poetic form, as are the messages of the prophets. The
Song of Solomon is one long love poem – read it and you will realize that not
all the poetry in the Bible is of a pious nature! The book of Lamentations is also poetry, of a
sad nature as the title suggests. And
even the books we think of as mostly stories have a lot of poetry in them. It’s fairly obvious in some cases, such as
when something wonderful happens and a man or woman sings or prays to God, and
a beautiful song or prayer is recorded. Think of Moses and Miriam after the crossing
of the
If this seems a little odd to you, consider that much of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, existed in oral form long before it was written down. Poetry and song would have made it easy for people to remember and share and teach quantities of complex material. Think about how generations of schoolchildren knew the legend of Hiawatha, because they memorized Longfellow’s poem. Or how many people in my generation can explain the premise of the TV show “The Brady Bunch,” because we can sing the theme song.
But, unlike those poems, Biblical poetry, as I said, isn’t defined by rhyming lines. It does share things in common with poetry of many cultures, though.
There is a sense of rhythm and pattern to the way the words flow. Naturally, it’s not always as easy to grasp this in translation as it would be if we all read Hebrew fluently – alas! – but still it often comes through in English.
The heavens are telling the glory of God,
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. (Psalm 19:1)
There is extensive, even extravagant use of imagery and metaphor and simile:
“The Lord is my Shepherd” (Psalm 23:1)
“As
the mountains surround
so the Lord surrounds his people…” (Psalm 125:2)
“How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful!
Your eyes are doves behind your veil.
Your hair is like a flock of goats
moving
down the slopes of
And like poetry in any language, there is a great deal of feeling; it touches the reader on an emotional level. I’ll say more about that shortly.
What is particular to Hebrew poetry – and a little strange to us – is the way it constantly seems to repeat itself. You might remember getting back English papers on which the teacher underlined in red the parts where you repeated yourself, with “repetitive” or maybe just “rep” written in the margin. We’re used to the idea that repetitive isn’t good, but an ancient Hebrew poet wouldn’t understand this. The brevity of text messaging wouldn’t do anything for him. He is in no hurry to “get to the point.” He has time to stay with his theme, to give it a full and thorough expression. Repetition emphasizes what’s important, clarifies or deepens the meaning, heightens the emotional intensity, and gives a kind of balance to the composition.
Most instances of this poetic repetition are seen in what literary scholars of the Bible call “parallelism.” Jerry introduced several kinds of parallelism last week when he discussed the wisdom literature.
Psalm 8, which we read today, is a beautiful example:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established.
It’s more than the structure created by words and their sound and rhythm; it’s also a pattern of thought that pairs or balances or contrasts ideas and images, too. As Jerry showed us last week, parallelism in Hebrew poetry can be like this, with a second thought that’s very similar to the first in meaning. Sometimes we see a thought taken a little further, an explanation or a reaction is given… again with a kind of parallel structure and balance:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established.
What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
You can see that the first two lines form a pair in which the second line reiterates the thought of the first; the other two lines do the same thing. Then the two pairs of lines together create another pair of thoughts which are observation and reaction, a kind of a balance of thought that is parallelism within parallelism
Sometimes the parallelism of Hebrew poetry presents not a repeated idea but an opposite or a contrast.
The Lord watches over the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish. (Psalm 1:6)
Some Hebrew poetry just piles up the repetition for emphasis. This is from the prophet Zephaniah, talking about a day of God’s judgement:
That day will be a day of wrath,
a day of distress and anguish,
a day of ruin and devastation,
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness,
a day of trumpet blast and battle cry
against the fortified cities
and against the lofty battlements. (Zephaniah 1;15-16)
He could have just said it will be really terrible, but that wouldn’t quite have had the same impact.
I should say that the structure of Hebrew poetry is not always as obvious as some of these examples we are looking at. Like poets writing in any language, Hebrew poets varied and branched out from the basic common forms. But once you become aware of it, you can perceive how a sense of balance and rhythm underlies all of the poetic forms in the Old Testament.
I want to show you one other example. This is the song of Deborah, from Judges, and she is celebrating the downfall of a terrible enemy at the hands of another woman named Jael.
She put her hand to the tent peg,
and her right hand to the workman’s mallet.
She struck Sisera a blow, she crushed his head,
She shattered and pierced his temple.
He sank, he fell, he lay still at her feet
At her feet, he sank, he fell.
Where he sank
There he fell
Dead. (Judges 5:26-27)
The parallelism in this poetry is called climactic parallelism for the obvious reason that it builds in intensity as it goes along. And the last word, being the only part that’s not part of the parallel structure, has all the more impact. If you just said that Jael clobbered the enemy Sisera with a tent peg it would still be a violent story but it wouldn’t convey the same drama.
Those last two examples should disabuse us of any notion we may have that the poetry of the Bible is all praise and comfort and beautiful images.
In fact, just in the Psalms alone we discover that along with songs which celebrate creation, God’s law and wisdom, God’s faithfulness and blessing and so forth, there are also songs focused on penitence, personal pain, shared tragedies, and experiences of God’s anger or absence. The range of emotion expressed runs from joy, awe, gratitude… to doubt, sorrow, anger and even hate. Someone has described what’s going on in the Psalms as a “dialogue of trust and questions.” It’s honest and heartfelt.
That, I think, is the nature of poetry – to speak on a heart level, and not so much to the head. We have to read it with that awareness, with an openness to that level of communication, to understand its intentions… and to remember what it is not.
Certainly theology – truths we can learn about God – can be discerned in the poetry of the Bible. But we should not make the mistake of looking for systematic theology there. These parts of the Bible deal more with knowing God than with knowing about God.
We can find a great deal of wise advice and guidance about how to live, too, especially in the wisdom literature and the prophets. But it’s not the same as a comprehensive set of ethical principles or laws or how-to’s or instructions.
Poetry deals not in facts or rules or theory but in the lived experience of faith … in which we have to deal with lovers and enemies and illness and anger and doubt and work, as well as with God and nature and comfort and blessing and thankfulness.
If we are more comfortable with an intellectual approach to faith, if we like rules and regs and facts and figures and knowledge and certainty… the poetry of the Bible presents us with a real challenge.
The way of poetry is the way of imagination, beauty, hope, struggle, questioning, and feeling. The poetry of the Bible invites us to engage life - and to engage our God - with our hearts as well as our minds. It’s about embracing the adventure of living faith in the real world with all its messiness. And yet under the words there is this underlying sense of rhythm and balance, a structure that communicates fundamental trust in the God who made and sustains it all.
Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (Psalm 90:2)