On the Bible and Poetry (12/5/23)

Many years ago, I taught a course on poetry in the Hebrew Bible. The course was inspired by Jim Kugel's The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader's Companion with New Translations (Free Press 2012), Amazon here, but I drew on other sources as well.

For those who may be interested, I refer readers to Michael Edwards, The Bible and Poetry (The Paris Review 6/12/23), here, where the author discusses poetry in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible (consisting of the Old Testament which is close to the Hebrew Bible, although interpreted differently, and the New Testament).  

First of all, a caveat, that the following quote may indicate a Christian bias: "There are fewer poems in the New Testament, but they give even more food for thought."

With that caveat, here are some good excerpts that may whet readers' appetite to read the whole article:

It is true that the border between verse and a cadenced prose is not easy to determine in either the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Greek of the New: translators judge it differently. It may also be that the poems spoken by Jacob, Simeon, and many others come not from them but from the authors of the books in which they appear. The result is the same. We find ourselves constantly in the presence of writings that invite us into the joy of words, into a well-shaped language, in a form that demands from us the attention that we give to poetry and awakens us to expectation.

Certain scholars of the Bible have long known that the poetry is not there simply to add a dash of nobility, or sublimity, or emotive force to what the author could have said in prose. They learned from literary critics what the critics had learned from poets: poetry is in itself a way of thinking and of imagining the world; it discovers with precision what it had to say only by saying it; the meaning of a poem awaits us in its manner of being, and meaning in the customary sense of the word is not what is most important about it.

Should we not ask ourselves if the presence of so many poems changes not only the way in which the Bible speaks to us, but also the kind of message, announcement, or call that it conveys? How must faith perceive biblical speech? What does this continual turn to poetry imply about the very nature of Christianity?