people have asked me you teach Hebrew it's great that you can do all this stuff with Hebrew poetry but I don't know Hebrew I'm not gonna go to seminary I'm not gonna study Hebrew sorry I mean they mean that with no offense they usually say that no offense is there anything I can do to make me a better reader of biblical poetry yes there are several things the first thing I would say is you need to read poetry period and preferably poetry written in a traditional formula format so I'm not thinking about things that are public the Norton book of modern poetry but things that are fairly traditional because reading poetry of any kind prepares our mind to think in a slightly different way about language and words and even in a slightly different way about seeing reality because poetry is another way of using language or the other way some would say and so training ourselves to read poems of any kind biblical or not is teaching ourselves to think differently than we're accustomed to so what can you do well find a poem

and read it and read it out loud. Read it out loud again and three or four more times. And then start playing with it. Read it out loud in a silly tone of voice, even if it's a sad poem. In a sad tone of voice, and if it's a silly poem, in an angry tone of voice. Even if it's a love poem, just play with the language and play with hearing it, and play with hearing how as you read it, your voice changes the meanings of the words. Read it in a soft voice, and a whisper, and a shout. Read it and read it over and over again until you become familiar with what the poem is saying. The same goes for biblical poems. Do that with a psalm. Why is it that so few of us read any biblical poetry the way that we'd read a poem? We just don't. We rattle through. I've heard so many churches where somebody said, I'm going to read Psalm whatever it is, and then they rattle through it, and you would think they were

reading seriously the head from yesterday's newspaper. It doesn't make any difference. It should make a difference. We should, we should have this language just as part of our thought. And so we read English poems by anybody. Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, just two of my favorites. That's all, nope, no pressure. William Shakespeare, whoever. It doesn't really matter. Read poetry because it will change the way you think about the way language works and even about the way the world works. Then you come to a biblical poem and you start to pay attention to the way the poem is put together. So something that you can see in English is, look, here's an example. Psalm 121 says, I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Where does my hope come from? You know what's interesting about that? The answer is in the next verse, verse 2. My hope comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. And then, and then the word I never occurs in the rest of the poem. It's all about you. The Lord is the one who watches you. The Lord is

one who keeps you it's all you why is that that's the question to ask what changed here and here's another interesting thing he uses the word help and help her or help her twice in those first two verses he doesn't use the word help again instead he switches to the word watcher or watch over or to watch or keep or guard different translations do different things and that doesn't really matter so we say will the Lord help me sure but that's such a vague term what does it mean will he help me pay my balance my bank my bill that the bank will he help me get my car started will he give me a part one but what this says is no the first two verses say the Lord is my helper okay now what kind of help does he provide and that's what the rest of the psalm is about and you can see that in English you can see both those things you can even see things occasionally like where the psalmist or the poet whether it's a psalm or a

proverb or anywhere else leaves out a word. Psalm 1 verse 5, for example, we'll probably a most translation to say something like this: the wicked don't stand up in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. There's no verb in the second line. You have to put in the verb. That's because the verb is missing in Hebrew. So the question is, why did he leave the verb out? Did he expect me to supply the same word that was in the preceding line? Well, sure, why not? And you probably did it automatically. You didn't even know he did it. But asking the question, noticing what's there and in that case, noticing what's not there, there's no verb, helps us read and pay more attention. And really, in the long run, there's no substitute for just spending lots of time with it. You know, I've been teaching poetry, English poetry as well as Hebrew poetry for a while, years, and one of the things that I've discovered is that many of my favorite

poems are poems that I didn't understand the first time I read them. And then I started reading them again and again and again. I, I. There are poems that I've read for two or three years before I felt like I understood them. And that's something we need to think about when we read scripture and read biblical poems. It takes time. It takes thought. It takes great patience with ourselves. And we have to say to ourselves. We have to say this. If the, if the infinite eternal God, the creator, sustainer of the universe, put this down so that I could read it, does it matter? Does it really matter if it takes me five years to understand it? What's five years in light of eternity? I've read it. I pay attention. I try reading it out loud. I read it in different ways. I look for what's there, what isn't there. I ask myself, why did this change? What's going on here? What's he doing? What's he saying? And then I remind myself that the goal isn't just to come up with some abstract

theological statement as a summation of the poem. That's actually illegitimate. There's even a famous essay by Cleanth Brooks called The Legitimacy of Paraphrase. He says it's illegitimate to say, What does this poem mean? and then put it in a sentence. If the poet wanted to write a sentence, you would have written a sentence. It's not a poem. So instead, I'm trying to understand this poem as it was meant to be read. And you can do that in English. Now, are there things that you won't see because you're not reading it in Hebrew? Of course, there are. Of course, there are. There's no way to do that. But the same thing would be true if you're reading Beowulf, which is written in Anglo-Saxon, and you're reading a modern translation. There are things in Anglo-Saxon that you're not going to see in the English trinium in your modern translation. They're just not there. There's no way to translate them. There's no way to bring those things across from one language to

another but there are beauties to be seen and the beauties are the beauties of content. Those are the things we focus on, what the words mean and what they say to us. Okay, but there are also beauties in the way that the poem is put together. Think of this example. You're a poet, I know, maybe you're not, but that's okay. You're a poet and you think, I want to write a sonnet. Do you know what you just did? You condemned yourself. You condemned yourself to saying in 140 syllables arranged in two sets of iambic pentameter that are ten syllables long. That is Dada, Dada, Dada, right? Set in a particular rhyme scheme so that the last syllable, the tenth in each of those set of ten, follows a particular pattern and that's organized into patterns of logic, four, four, two, or eight, and six. So you present a problem and then you answer the question. That's what you've condemned yourself to. And the person who reads it needs to say, needs to say, not

just wow. This says something profound. He's also to say this says something profoundly. And that's what we're trying to do when we read biblical poems. We're trying to come to the point where we appreciate it and begin to recognize, even in English, even in translation, we begin to recognize the artistry, the care with which they were composed. I mean, think of this example. Song of Songs is very famous for the lovers' descriptions of each other. You know, your hair is like a flock of goats, your teeth are like sheep that have just been washed, your cheeks are like pomegranates, and all that sort of thing. Your pools are like ice, or like pomegranates. And we laugh at that, we mock it, you know, we think, Aren't they silly? Well, to us, yes, that was just their language. But that's not really the point. That's the way, that's those were their, I mean, we call each other cookie and sweetheart. What does that mean? Well, what I want you to think about is

this how much time, and how much love does it take to think about how to describe someone in those terms. When was the last time that you thought about someone you loved and thought, How would I describe his or her hair, teeth, cheeks, temples, nose, eyes, all those parts? And because then, because you've trained yourself to pay attention to the way things are, you can pick this example in this one, in this one, and put them together into this gorgeous, gorgeous portrait. That's what it means to write a poem, and learning how to see that is what it means to read them. This is beauty incarnate in words, and that's what we want to see. And you can do that in English with your English Bible, you do it in Hebrew, your Hebrew Bible. That's a wonderful thing. I hope you enjoy it. You.

How to Read Biblical Poetry

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