The Psalms & Biblical Poetry
May 29th, 2008 by Ben
I’m doing an essay on Psalms over the next couple of months, which hopefully I’ll get to posting about at some stage.
In the mean time, I’d like to recommend two books. The first is the sequel to one of the best books on the Bible I’ve ever read. The first one was The Art of Biblical Narrative, by Robert Alter. I read this book last year while we were studying 1 and 2 Samuel in Old Testament, and it changed the way I read the OT. I used to think that the Old Testament was pretty crudely written and consisted of fairly primitive forms of literature, because the narrative sometimes seems to go, “And then this happened, and then that happened, and then another thing happened…”. Alter changed all that for me, giving me a new sensitivity to the text and a delight in what is actually quite sophisticated literature. Brilliant.
The sequel is The Art of Biblical Poetry, which is exactly what it sounds like. I’ve only just started, but it’s typically great stuff from Alter. Unfortunately, the book is currently out of print, but you can still pick copies up for about US$16 from Amazon.
As a companion to this book, I also recommend getting Alter’s translation of the Psalms, which is really just his translation and some textual notes. He has a real feel for Hebrew literature (in a way I never will), which enables him to communicate the vibe of a psalm, rather than just the meaning of the words. It would be quite good as a devotional kind of book. It even has a ribbon to mark your place.
Interestingly, because he’s not a Christian, he can be a real help to us in avoiding seeing Jesus everywhere in the Psalms. For example, in Psalm 2, the reference to the “Son of God” is not a divine reference (neither the author nor the listener would have understood it this way), rather it refers to the anointed one, the king of Israel, the Messiah. It is only in Jesus of course, that the Son of God is God the Son. In a way, then, Alter and others like him, can protect us from the trap of neglecting the psalm in its pre-Christ context first. I’ll leave it to you too look up how he renders what is normally “Kiss the Son” later in Ps 2…
Finally, I’ll just mention again LibraryThing, an online catalogue of all your books. It’s really, really easy to add books and you can set up how to view them in your library, share your library online, see other people with similar libraries, share recommendations and heaps more. It’s free and fun.
You can see my (partially completed) library here (it’s all Christian stuff at the moment - we’ll add our stuff at home later).
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