What is Hebrew poetry and how do we read it?

In this episode, Tony is joined by three of our long-term readers who are all working on PhDs at Cambridge University. Ellie Wiener is currently studying the book of Job, Megan Alsene-Parker is studying Lamentations, and Ben Rae is studying Ecclesiastes. Together, they discuss what poetry actually is, the features of Hebrew poetry, and why we should spend time digging into biblical poetry.


TH ink articles written by interviewees:

• The ABCs of Hebrew Acrostic Poems by Megan Alsene-Parker: https://tyndalehouse.com/explore/articles/hebrew-acrostics/
• The surprising joy of memorising Job by Ellie Wiener: https://tyndalehouse.com/explore/articles/memorising-job/

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Tyndale House podcast.

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Today, I am delighted to have three of our PhD students

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who are based here at Tyndale House for a discussion about Hebrew poetry.

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So we have Ellie Wiener, Megan Alsene-Parker, and Ben Rae.

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And I'm delighted to have you as part of this conversation.

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M: Thanks for having us T: So let's just tell us a little briefly, a little bit about who you are, where you’re from.

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T: What you’re working on? E: Sure, sure.

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So I am the Job girl, sometimes known as, my name is actually Ellie.

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But having some quality time with the Book of Job during my PhD.

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So entering my third year now and have been moving

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trending eastward generally from the States over the last couple of years.

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My name is Megan, and I am originally from Florida.

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I've been here in Cambridge now two years.

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And I am studying the Book of Lamentations.

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And thinking about,

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yeah,

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how this book reflects on the destruction of Jerusalem

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and how it kind of forms the memory of the different people

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who would have read this text over and over again in the generations following.

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And my name is Ben.

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I'm from Australia, and, I'm particularly looking at Ecclesiastes

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and trying to understand how the book fits

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together, and particularly how does it work

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as a story that the author is telling

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B: about the teacher in Ecclesiastes. T: Hmm, brilliant.

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So you're all working on nice, easy texts.

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A very merry pair, trio really.

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Yeah. Excellent.

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Let's start by,

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I mean, we're talking to all three of you because all three of your texts

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that you're working on contain Hebrew poetry.

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There's a huge amount in Job,

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Lamentations, obviously, is all poetry, isn't it?

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And there's some interesting bits in Ecclesiastes too.

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So yeah, but let's start by by broadening out to think

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about poetry in general.

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What what is poetry in a general, not that, not Hebrew

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poetry, but what is poetry?

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I think maybe it's helpful to think

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about language as a whole, to start with, and recognising

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that there's poetic elements to every language. And,

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we instinctively use them when we speak.

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So things like alliteration say something like ‘below the belt’

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sounds better than ‘under the belt’.

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And poetry is a sort of

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intensification of those kind of effects, whether it's alliteration

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or assonance or rhyme or various different things.

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So I think that's one aspect of it.

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I think another key aspect is that poetry

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is lineated.

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So as we hear it, or as we read,

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we arrange it mentally into lines that fit together.

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So the line, each line fits and is

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a sort of unit in itself.

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But then we recognize that it interacts with the subsequent lines

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and the previous lines, to create certain effects.

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And you write poetry don’t you?

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Oh, I write limericks.

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Do you want to give us one of your limericks?

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T: I'm sure people will be delighted by that. E: Yes.

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Well,

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I, yes, alright. So

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T: Putting you on the spot

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I've written

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I've written some about the different,

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different colleagues.

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So I'll give you one about Ellie,

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T: Excellent this is exactly what we want

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There is a young scholar

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called Weiner whose memory couldn't be keener.

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She’s stored all of Job in her temporal lobe.

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Though her social life has become leaner.

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It's doggerel, but

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I think that has the makings of going into the

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to the annals of the masterpieces English poetry.

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But it demonstrates very nicely what what you're saying

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about the lines connecting with each other. They

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there's the choice

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of words, but also the, the way that the,

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the flow goes.

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And the the one leading into the next, the,

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the matching up of the lines, all those kinds of things

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give us that sense of it being poetry, whether it's whether it's doggerel are not

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is not for me to say.

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Yeah.

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And I think that the Limerick probably also brings out another aspect of poetry

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that when we get to the end of the poem, there's a click of completion to it.

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So that that fifth line in a Limerick,

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it's got to rhyme with the first two lines to bring it together.

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And if it doesn't, it's a deliberate transgression.

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Yeah.

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Of of how it should feel.

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Yeah.

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And that,

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but that happens in other poems as well, whether they're sort of sonnets or,

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or in the sort of poems

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we'll be talking about today in the Bible.

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Yeah.

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I think it's worth mentioning as though when you refer

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to this note of completion, that is something that can be played with.

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So you have this readerly expectation that a poem is orderly

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and it comes to closure.

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But then sometimes authors do clever things to play on that expectation

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and to subvert it.

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Which then has a different kind of effect.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Yeah.

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That could be within sort of poetry writ large or within Hebrew

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Bible poetry as well, which is just kind of a general

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observation that's made whenever people talk about genre, that you have this

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sort of body of shared characteristics, family resemblance almost.

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And then there are different ways of riffing off of that general set of norms.

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Yeah.

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I think the, if I can? Yeah.

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I think the Limerick is also a good example of how poetry works

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differently in different language families and different cultural expectations.

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that one of the things often

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we expect with English poetry is that it will have some manner of rhyme.

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Yeah.

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And the Limerick very, very clearly had that feature.

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But that's not a shared necessarily a shared feature across

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all poetry in all languages, but that in the English poetry

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we have certain set expectations because of our corpus of poetry,

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because of these kind of,

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yeah, different ways

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that have become normalized for, for English poetry specifically.

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Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah, sure, yeah.

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So to what extent is,

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are the kinds of things that you're saying, are those just as true of Hebrew poetry

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as of, as they are of English poetry?

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I mean, you’ve commented on the, the rhyming already.

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We'll come back to that in a minute, but that those general things about poetry.

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Are they also true of Hebrew poetry?

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Yes and no, I think. So

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in terms of,

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it being an intensification of language.

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Yeah, I think that is true.

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There are certain difficulties

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that we hit with Hebrew poetry

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because of our expectations that have been generated by other

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poetic cultures,

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as well as even simply how

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the poetic text is laid out in the Hebrew Bible.

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So for many poems in the Hebrew Bible, it's not broken up into obvious

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visual lines the way we're used to, and maybe even in our English Bibles,

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and certainly with poems that we might read elsewhere.

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So with Hebrew poetry, we're particularly

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dealing with an oral phenomenon rather than a visual one.

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So we've got to

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ask ourselves, how do we hear the line?

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And how do we distinguish it from the next line?

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And so on and so forth.

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And I think another complication is simply the fact that we're

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so temporally and linguistically removed from the poetry.

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Right?

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So I don't have when I come to Hebrew poetry,

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I don't have this innate sense of how this language works as I do with English.

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So in terms of being able to register what's clever, what's a deviation?

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Those sorts of questions, I can certainly,

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yeah,

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sharpen my ability to perceive and to answer.

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The more that I'm in Hebrew poetry.

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But just to recognize that,

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yeah, I have distance from this text in a way that does complicate.

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So I want to be a little bit careful whenever I say anything too prescriptive

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about this is how Hebrew poetry works, and is because I recognize I'm

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very much an explorer in kind of this unknown terrain.

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And I'm trying to gather observations, and say sensible things

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as much as possible about how this works and

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yeah, what it's for.

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And there is there's kind of two aspects, though.

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The, there is this distance, but there are, are things about poetry

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that do kind of tie people together across time and space, that there is

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experiential aspects of it and aesthetic aspects of it,

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that very much just,

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I don't know, in some ways are just screaming for someone

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to read them and identify with them,

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that there's something there that you kind of are able to feel.

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I know that's very feely language for it, but I think emotionally it's meant

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to connect. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

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to connect. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

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So you put me on to to Don Paterson,

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So you put me on to to Don Paterson,

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an English poet, recently, and I was I was reading some of the,

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some of his stuff after that conversation that we had, from his book, The Poem,

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and he talks about poetry being a meaning infused, aesthetic experience.

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And, and even with the, most people listening to

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this podcast are going to be reading in English

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rather than in Hebrew, but that the kind of things that you're

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saying, the fact that it's a meaning infused aesthetic experience,

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even comes through in translation, even though translation of poetry is so,

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well, I was going to say so difficult, actually,

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it's impossible, isn't it? You can't,

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you can't properly translate poetry.

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You can make a stab at it.

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Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about this the other day because I remembered

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hearing something when I was younger.

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Someone saying that,

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Hebrew was a particularly appropriate language

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for God to put the Psalms in because

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its poetry doesn't rhyme,

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and it has no meter.

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And, so it's just easily translatable into any language.

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And I was thinking, is, is that just a sort of one of those

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pious things that people sometimes say, but I think there’s actually more to it.

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There's more background to it.

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Which is that,

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Hebrew poetry has often

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been thought about as being constructed along parallelisms

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so that you get a line

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that states a certain idea, and then the second line

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either repeats it in different language or,

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contradicts it, or something like that.

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So which basically is saying

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the only poetic effects there,

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B: in terms of meaning, E: are conceptual,

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conceptual packages that you can easily convey in another language.

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Yeah.

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But actually when you start reading poetry in Hebrew,

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biblical poetry in Hebrew, you realize that actually that's not true.

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I mean, there is a, there are parallelism between lines quite often,

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but it's not a controlling thing.

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So it's not like every line needs to parallel.

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that sometimes happens just as there's sometimes

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matched rhythms between lines or rhyme between lines in Hebrew,

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but they don't follow all the way through like we tend to do in English.

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Yeah.

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And it's using all

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sorts of, different poetic features like alliteration,

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and assonance, rhyme,

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but it's switching them up as you go through.

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but it's switching them up as you go through.

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So are you are you saying then that we we can't

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in some sense define what we mean by Hebrew poetry?

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Because there isn't there aren't characteristic features

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There's a whole collection of features

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and we might see some or,

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or all even at play at different parts of the poem.

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But, but actually we can't draw a nice, neat box round and say

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these are the criteria for, for,

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for which this piece of text needs to,

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to meet them in order to be classified as a poem.

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I think I'm just generally skeptical of nice neat boxes.

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I think we probably all are

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I think few things fit into nice, neat boxes

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And that's one of the the difficulties of defining categories

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and especially genres and things like that.

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So there is kind of that aspect

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that I think the edges can be quite difficult to define.

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However, there is a corpus

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of poetic texts in the Hebrew Bible that for the most part,

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everyone agrees on, and that center is in many senses

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kind of easy to perhaps characterize rather than define,

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that it shares features with itself, even though some of those features

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are flexible and not, you know, tight constraints. And,

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yeah, there's these kind of different ways that you can characterize

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what's going on, but the edges will always be a little, a little fuzzy.

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Yeah. Yeah.

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Just speaking of edges,

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I was thinking of a conversation with Ben where he's talking about

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trying to figure out where a poem starts and ends.

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That might help us a little bit, just in thinking through creating boundaries.

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Yeah. So

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yeah to pick up

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on a few of those different things. Like Megan was saying,

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there's a poetic corpus that people just agree about.

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And when you're reading through Exodus and you hit the Song of the Sea [Exodus 15],

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for example, you don't really need to be told, oh, Moses is singing a song here.

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It just jumps out at you.

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It's clearly different from the surrounding material,

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and it feels like a poem or a song.

00:15:08:22 - 00:15:09:04
And so

00:15:09:04 - 00:15:12:16
maybe it's maybe it's helpful to ask the question of, well, how do you

00:15:12:16 - 00:15:16:14
distinguish poetry from prose in the Bible

00:15:16:18 - 00:15:19:18
or from Proverbs, on the other hand?

00:15:20:14 - 00:15:23:11
And, that helps to ask,

00:15:23:11 - 00:15:26:05
answer the question of, how do you know when a

00:15:26:05 - 00:15:29:05
poem begins and ends?

00:15:29:23 - 00:15:30:11
I think

00:15:31:12 - 00:15:33:13
what really distinguishes it from prose

00:15:33:13 - 00:15:36:19
is that prose just kind of runs on.

00:15:37:20 - 00:15:40:12
It just keeps going and going and going and going.

00:15:40:12 - 00:15:42:12
There's no

00:15:42:12 - 00:15:45:12
sort of feeling that this section

00:15:46:12 - 00:15:49:08
sort of fits together.

00:15:49:08 - 00:15:52:08
And then is related to the next little bit.

00:15:54:12 - 00:15:56:19
And one of the things that Paterson talks

00:15:56:19 - 00:16:01:15
about in his book is that sort of across cultures, the poetic line

00:16:01:15 - 00:16:05:08
seems to be roughly three seconds in length. 

00:16:06:10 - 00:16:09:10
And that seems to have to do with

00:16:10:06 - 00:16:14:16
how our minds work, that our brains kind of parse

00:16:14:19 - 00:16:17:19
three seconds as a moment

00:16:18:13 - 00:16:20:11
and anything longer than that

00:16:20:11 - 00:16:23:11
and we're trying, it's getting difficult to hold it all together.

00:16:24:11 - 00:16:26:02
Which has got to do with short term memory.

00:16:26:02 - 00:16:28:22
I think.

00:16:28:22 - 00:16:30:15
And it also helps to

00:16:31:18 - 00:16:33:22
work out what we mean by

00:16:33:22 - 00:16:38:13
a long poetic line or a short poetic line, like long or short compared to what?

00:16:38:14 - 00:16:41:14
Well, compared to three seconds.

00:16:41:20 - 00:16:45:04
And so as we hear poems,

00:16:45:22 - 00:16:49:15
we're trying to fit together the contents of it

00:16:49:15 - 00:16:52:15
into a roughly sort of three second package.

00:16:53:15 - 00:16:56:15
That's just what our minds will do.

00:16:57:18 - 00:17:00:17
We're trying to put that together.

00:17:00:17 - 00:17:03:10
And so I guess what I'm trying to say

00:17:03:10 - 00:17:08:07
is that as we listen to poetry, we hear it as poetry,

00:17:08:07 - 00:17:11:11
because we can break it into those rough

00:17:11:14 - 00:17:14:14
sort of three second chunks,

00:17:14:14 - 00:17:19:01
in a way that we don't with prose.

00:17:21:18 - 00:17:24:12
And we do see a similarity to it in Proverbs.

00:17:24:12 - 00:17:28:12
So Proverbs is usually sort of two line proverbs.

00:17:30:00 - 00:17:32:14
What distinguishes proverbs from poetry

00:17:32:14 - 00:17:37:18
usually is that we can't sort of package it together.

00:17:37:18 - 00:17:41:20
We can't package multiple lines together into a line group.

00:17:42:01 - 00:17:46:09
they might be thematically related, or they might share

00:17:46:09 - 00:17:50:00
common words that make sense to group them together.

00:17:50:16 - 00:17:53:12
But they're not creating a,

00:17:53:12 - 00:17:56:22
an effect together in the way that poems are.

00:17:57:03 - 00:17:58:01
Yeah, yeah.

00:17:58:01 - 00:18:00:23
And I think it's important to say that, like Proverbs

00:18:00:23 - 00:18:05:03
seems to be collected in those orders for, for reasons,

00:18:05:03 - 00:18:09:09
but that that still is kind of within small, very small chunks.

00:18:09:09 - 00:18:10:05
Right, right.

00:18:10:05 - 00:18:13:00
Yeah. And the sequences of proverbs often make sense.

00:18:13:00 - 00:18:13:18
You can sort of. Yeah.

00:18:13:18 - 00:18:14:02
Oh yeah.

00:18:14:02 - 00:18:16:02
They're all talking about roughly the same thing

00:18:16:02 - 00:18:19:10
or they're, they've got words that are connecting them,

00:18:20:00 - 00:18:24:03
but they're not kind of doing something together.

00:18:24:09 - 00:18:27:08
Yeah. In quite the same way that a poem is.

00:18:27:08 - 00:18:27:16
Yeah.

00:18:28:24 - 00:18:29:14
So does the

00:18:29:14 - 00:18:32:14
three second thing work for Hebrew poetry.

00:18:32:14 - 00:18:37:04
B: Yeah I was trying this out with some of the poems on Ecclesiastes T: I’m so glad

00:18:38:06 - 00:18:38:21
Yeah.

00:18:38:21 - 00:18:41:21
Yeah I think it does.

00:18:41:21 - 00:18:43:19
I mean obviously it depends up,

00:18:43:19 - 00:18:46:19
on the pace that you speak at, but

00:18:47:20 - 00:18:49:17
one of the things that Paterson comments

00:18:49:17 - 00:18:54:05
is that lines that you would typically say shorter

00:18:54:05 - 00:18:58:11
than three seconds, we tend to say slower and lines

00:18:58:11 - 00:19:02:12
that are longer than three seconds, we tend to speed up through them,

00:19:03:16 - 00:19:05:21
to try and hold it to that roughly three

00:19:05:21 - 00:19:08:21
seconds kind of rule.

00:19:08:21 - 00:19:11:03
And I think it's actually quite helpful.

00:19:11:03 - 00:19:13:17
Well, I found it quite helpful in working out

00:19:13:17 - 00:19:16:17
where do the lines actually break

00:19:16:23 - 00:19:19:12
in Hebrew poetry.

00:19:19:12 - 00:19:23:10
Some of that you can work out just by how the sounds fit together,

00:19:23:11 - 00:19:24:19
it's quite natural.

00:19:26:15 - 00:19:28:12
But just at a cognitive kind

00:19:28:12 - 00:19:32:22
of level, when it starts to stretch out too long,

00:19:33:10 - 00:19:36:22
there's an increasing tension until it sort of snaps.

00:19:37:04 - 00:19:39:14
Yeah, right.

00:19:39:14 - 00:19:42:13
And when you talk about a line in this context,

00:19:42:13 - 00:19:45:06
how are you talking about the

00:19:45:06 - 00:19:49:08
the whole line or are you talking about the, you know, how how do we define a line?

00:19:49:16 - 00:19:54:09
So when we talk about parallelism, do we are we talking about the two halves

00:19:54:09 - 00:19:59:01
as being half lines or or they each lines?

00:19:59:08 - 00:20:02:02
T: Yeah. E: Fun with fractions.

00:20:02:02 - 00:20:04:11
M: People talk about this terminology differently.

00:20:04:11 - 00:20:07:10
But I think generally

00:20:07:10 - 00:20:09:14
what we would say in, in,

00:20:09:14 - 00:20:13:20
in our English Bibles is typically a verse like one proverb, for example,

00:20:13:20 - 00:20:17:21
is typically one verse, but it's broken into two lines.

00:20:18:07 - 00:20:22:03
And so those two lines often kind of parallel each other,

00:20:22:11 - 00:20:23:24
support each other in some way.

00:20:25:06 - 00:20:28:06
But yeah, are interconnected into one verse.

00:20:28:06 - 00:20:28:18
Yeah, yeah.

00:20:28:18 - 00:20:31:15
E: That would be similar in the Psalms and Job T: Yeah.

00:20:31:15 - 00:20:34:00
Sometimes it's three lines for a verse.

00:20:34:00 - 00:20:36:19
I mean, it can be a bit different.

00:20:36:19 - 00:20:38:23
But often that's how it's broken up.

00:20:38:23 - 00:20:39:22
E: Yeah T: Yeah

00:20:39:22 - 00:20:43:23
Maybe it's worth just talk about the different ways that that parallelism works.

00:20:44:02 - 00:20:47:02
There’s very straightforward,

00:20:49:03 - 00:20:52:09
it's almost a repetition, but it's, it's not quite a repetition.

00:20:52:09 - 00:20:56:07
But it's very similar words in this or very similar ideas in the same order.

00:20:56:14 - 00:20:59:14
What are some of the other variations?

00:20:59:18 - 00:21:02:14
Some would call one like a, almost a step

00:21:02:14 - 00:21:05:16
parallelism where the thoughts sort of build in sequence.

00:21:05:16 - 00:21:07:23
So they're not necessarily saying the same thing over,

00:21:07:23 - 00:21:10:23
but it's progressing the thought one more step.

00:21:11:19 - 00:21:14:12
I think Ben you mentioned as well sort of the contrastive,

00:21:14:12 - 00:21:15:24
B: Yeah. E: you have,

00:21:16:23 - 00:21:17:05
yeah,

00:21:17:05 - 00:21:20:02
one thought expressed and the next presents the opposite.

00:21:20:02 - 00:21:24:14
That's probably a very familiar form, especially from things like the proverbs

00:21:24:14 - 00:21:26:15
where you have the wise and the fool,

00:21:26:15 - 00:21:30:07
the wicked, the righteous, sort of contrasted in lines.

00:21:30:15 - 00:21:33:20
I wonder if the one who, Robert Lowth,

00:21:33:20 - 00:21:36:23
who came up with sort of these classic categories of parallelism,

00:21:37:21 - 00:21:40:12
I don't know this definitively, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of

00:21:40:12 - 00:21:43:18
that work was coming from Proverbs, because you do have a very neat,

00:21:44:23 - 00:21:48:16
you tend to have a pretty neat parallelism in a lot of those,

00:21:49:07 - 00:21:52:07
which is not necessarily evident everywhere you go.

00:21:53:10 - 00:21:55:05
Though parallelism is an important

00:21:55:05 - 00:21:58:05
feature of Hebrew poetry,

00:21:58:12 - 00:22:01:23
but there are examples of places in the Hebrew Bible

00:22:01:23 - 00:22:05:18
where lines aren't related to each other in parallelism.

00:22:06:13 - 00:22:09:22
But there's also something called enjambment, which is  actually

00:22:09:22 - 00:22:13:18
what a lot of Lamentations 1–4 is

00:22:14:01 - 00:22:17:14
You get a change in [chapter] 5 where it's parallelism, but enjambment is

00:22:17:14 - 00:22:20:14
where the two, the two lines,

00:22:20:24 - 00:22:23:12
can't actually grammatically stand alone.

00:22:23:12 - 00:22:26:10
So in parallelism you have two lines that are

00:22:27:16 - 00:22:31:04
sentences, for lack of a better, a better word, where grammatically

00:22:31:04 - 00:22:35:14
it's one full, complete thought and another full, complete thought.

00:22:36:01 - 00:22:39:01
T: Let me just... M: Yes, give an example, great.

00:22:39:01 - 00:22:40:16
I'm open at Psalm 81.

00:22:40:16 - 00:22:42:12
Just randomly, 

00:22:42:12 - 00:22:44:02
‘Sing for joy to God our strength.

00:22:44:02 - 00:22:45:18
Shout in triumph to the God of Jacob.’

00:22:45:18 - 00:22:46:21
T: So M: Exactly.

00:22:46:21 - 00:22:48:17
T: both of those can stand on their own

00:22:48:17 - 00:22:50:00
M: And they stand on their own. T: Yeah.

00:22:50:00 - 00:22:54:01
But whereas, enjambment is where, as an example,

00:22:54:01 - 00:22:57:01
in Lamentations 2, you get,

00:22:57:22 - 00:23:00:04
the, the verb

00:23:00:04 - 00:23:03:00
and a prepositional phrase in the first line,

00:23:03:00 - 00:23:06:06
and then you get the subject and the object in the second line.

00:23:06:13 - 00:23:09:15
So, ‘he cast down from heaven to earth

00:23:10:13 - 00:23:12:15
the Lord daughter Zion.’

00:23:12:15 - 00:23:16:15
And so you get this kind of the second line can't actually stand on its own.

00:23:16:15 - 00:23:18:10
It's just, ‘the Lord daughter Zion’.

00:23:18:10 - 00:23:21:10
That's not a, that's not a thought and not a complete thought.

00:23:21:24 - 00:23:24:09
So you also get lines relating to each other

00:23:24:09 - 00:23:27:09
in different ways from parallelism, even though that's,

00:23:27:20 - 00:23:32:05
yeah, kind of less, less common in biblical poetry.

00:23:32:08 - 00:23:32:12
So why is that a poem?

00:23:32:12 - 00:23:33:16
So why is that a poem?

00:23:35:11 - 00:23:38:11
why is it still a poem?

00:23:38:19 - 00:23:40:24
It's still poetic because it shares

00:23:40:24 - 00:23:43:24
all of the other kind of key

00:23:45:11 - 00:23:48:05
characteristics that you would think of these things like imagery

00:23:48:05 - 00:23:52:17
and the way that, it has kind of this density

00:23:52:17 - 00:23:55:17
of, of words and

00:23:56:11 - 00:24:01:14
yeah, the way that it kind of intensifies and has emotional and visceral language,

00:24:01:14 - 00:24:04:17
all of those sorts of things still kind of characterize it.

00:24:04:17 - 00:24:06:22
And it still has this lineation

00:24:06:22 - 00:24:09:19
that you get in the rest of Biblical Hebrew poetry.

00:24:09:19 - 00:24:13:00
But that's one of the little pushbacks on parallelism

00:24:13:00 - 00:24:16:18
as defining feature versus characteristic.

00:24:17:22 - 00:24:18:04
Yeah.

00:24:18:04 - 00:24:21:09
It's a characteristic that's in most of biblical Hebrew poetry.

00:24:21:13 - 00:24:23:02
T: Yeah M: yeah.

00:24:23:02 - 00:24:26:16
However, as defining feature, then you have these poems

00:24:26:16 - 00:24:30:05
and they're like, well, they're pretty obviously poems.

00:24:30:05 - 00:24:32:08
We all feel they're poems.

00:24:32:08 - 00:24:34:00
They fit,

00:24:34:00 - 00:24:37:07
even though they have these different features, these different aspects.

00:24:37:20 - 00:24:40:18
I think it's also worth mentioning, since you're talking Lamentations,

00:24:40:18 - 00:24:44:13
you often have things going on on a larger structural level as well that help

00:24:44:13 - 00:24:47:12
tip you off. So in the case of Lamentations, acrostics.

00:24:47:12 - 00:24:48:00
Yeah, yeah.

00:24:48:00 - 00:24:50:07
I mean, it's very clear Megan's done a lot more.

00:24:50:07 - 00:24:51:11
So I'll let her speak to that.

00:24:51:11 - 00:24:56:23
But that also very quickly, that's maybe one of the places where, Hebrew

00:24:56:23 - 00:25:00:19
poetry can also be visual poetry sometimes, too, because you may hear that.

00:25:00:19 - 00:25:04:19
But also it's really striking when you look down at it to see the same

00:25:05:11 - 00:25:08:13
letter, either in in chunks like you have in Psalm119

00:25:08:13 - 00:25:10:21
aleph, aleph, aleph for eight lines. Okay.

00:25:10:21 - 00:25:15:05
Next letter or you have subsequent letters of the alphabet, one after the other.

00:25:16:07 - 00:25:17:11
So that would be another

00:25:17:11 - 00:25:21:08
way of creating this sense of order and completeness.

00:25:21:08 - 00:25:22:10
Complete unit.

00:25:22:10 - 00:25:26:11
That's beyond just the level of the line, but actually for the unit altogether.

00:25:27:19 - 00:25:28:00
Yeah.

00:25:28:00 - 00:25:31:08
As I say, Megan’s done a lot more with acrostics, but yeah

00:25:31:08 - 00:25:31:10
T: Do you want to, tell us more about the acrostics then? M: Yeah.

00:25:31:10 - 00:25:34:01
T: Do you want to, tell us more about the acrostics then? M: Yeah.

00:25:34:01 - 00:25:39:01
So, well, I guess going back to talking about limericks way back at the beginning,

00:25:39:01 - 00:25:42:16
that's a form, that we're familiar with in English poetry.

00:25:42:16 - 00:25:44:08
It's kind of a set expectation

00:25:44:08 - 00:25:47:16
of how many lines you have and how those are structured together.

00:25:48:20 - 00:25:51:09
So one of the different forms

00:25:51:09 - 00:25:55:14
that Hebrew poetry has is, alphabetic acrostics.

00:25:55:21 - 00:25:58:03
And so this is where,

00:25:58:03 - 00:26:01:12
the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are kind of successively

00:26:01:21 - 00:26:06:01
at the beginning of either a line or a,

00:26:06:18 - 00:26:09:18
yeah, some manner of unit of poetry.

00:26:09:22 - 00:26:12:13
It can be different in different poems.

00:26:12:13 - 00:26:15:11
And so as you kind of continue throughout the poem,

00:26:15:11 - 00:26:18:16
you expect, you're anticipating the next letter.

00:26:18:16 - 00:26:21:16
It's aleph, bet, gimel.

00:26:22:06 - 00:26:23:14
Or English

00:26:23:14 - 00:26:25:15
it would be a, b, c,

00:26:25:15 - 00:26:29:05
and so you have that kind of building expectation as it kind of guides

00:26:29:05 - 00:26:32:13
you towards the end when you get to the final letter of the alphabet.

00:26:33:18 - 00:26:36:19
And so Lamentations 1, 2, 3, and 4

00:26:36:19 - 00:26:39:19
are all set in kind of varying,

00:26:41:04 - 00:26:42:09
varying ways of doing

00:26:42:09 - 00:26:45:09
the alphabetic acrostic, but they're all alphabetic acrostics.

00:26:45:09 - 00:26:49:02
And Psalm 119 is the, the obvious example.

00:26:49:02 - 00:26:51:23
A lot of people, a lot of people look to that one.

00:26:51:23 - 00:26:54:23
But also even Proverbs 31, the,

00:26:55:06 - 00:26:58:06
the wife of noble character, a woman of noble character.

00:26:58:17 - 00:27:02:20
However people put that, is also one of those those poems

00:27:02:20 - 00:27:06:16
that has a kind of sense of, you very much know the beginning

00:27:06:16 - 00:27:11:05
and end of that delimitation, because it's the whole the whole alphabet.

00:27:12:05 - 00:27:13:23
T: Yeah. M: yeah.

00:27:13:23 - 00:27:18:02
Lamentations also raises the question of, of the form of the poem, doesn't it?

00:27:18:02 - 00:27:22:23
Because with, its lamentations, these, these are laments, they

00:27:24:01 - 00:27:26:14
are they, are they all qinot?

00:27:26:14 - 00:27:29:16
and, and and what constitutes a . . . M: oh, great.

00:27:30:12 - 00:27:32:16
T: What constitutes a qinah, 

00:27:32:16 - 00:27:35:11
a lament, within Hebrew poetry?

00:27:35:11 - 00:27:38:18
Well, I mean, it's an, again, one of those questions

00:27:38:18 - 00:27:41:18
that doesn't have the most clear answer.

00:27:42:08 - 00:27:46:13
So genres and forms in the Hebrew Bible in general

00:27:46:24 - 00:27:50:24
and within poetry, they're, they're all kind of

00:27:52:14 - 00:27:52:21
I mean,

00:27:52:21 - 00:27:57:02
genre is very fluid in some ways that again, we can see the center

00:27:57:02 - 00:28:00:06
kind of easily, but then there's lots of things that kind of interact

00:28:00:06 - 00:28:04:04
and draw from multiple things and do parodies and all of that.

00:28:04:04 - 00:28:08:05
So, I won't have the most straightforward answer, but,

00:28:09:01 - 00:28:12:19
typically with Lamentations, you think of, each of the chapters

00:28:12:19 - 00:28:16:21
as being slightly different in genre or form or

00:28:17:04 - 00:28:20:04
however we're parsing those two terms.

00:28:20:08 - 00:28:22:21
So when you get to Lamentations 5,

00:28:22:21 - 00:28:25:22
it's quite clearly a communal lament

00:28:25:22 - 00:28:29:17
and it very much could sit among the Psalms in many ways.

00:28:29:17 - 00:28:32:01
Other than that, it it doesn't have a happy ending,

00:28:32:01 - 00:28:35:11
which many communal laments in the Psalter do.

00:28:36:13 - 00:28:38:20
But 1, 2

00:28:38:20 - 00:28:43:08
and 4, people sometimes say it's a dirge.

00:28:43:18 - 00:28:47:21
So saying that someone's died, sometimes you talk about the kind of,

00:28:48:20 - 00:28:51:20
qinah rhythm, which is kind of

00:28:52:09 - 00:28:54:22
people say it's almost, limping,

00:28:54:22 - 00:28:57:22
which I don't, I don't love because it almost sounds,

00:28:58:17 - 00:29:01:10
negative, like it's it sounds like a negative characterization,

00:29:01:10 - 00:29:05:17
but it does have this almost uneven sort of rhythm where you have a longer

00:29:05:17 - 00:29:09:11
and then shorter line, often paired next to each other.

00:29:09:11 - 00:29:12:11
So you're kind of moving forward

00:29:12:16 - 00:29:15:02
in that way.

00:29:15:02 - 00:29:17:23
Some people talk about it being like city laments

00:29:17:23 - 00:29:20:23
in the broader ancient Near Eastern culture.

00:29:21:10 - 00:29:24:23
And then of course, Lamentations 3 is different from all of those,

00:29:25:15 - 00:29:30:12
it has forms of individual lament from the Psalms and forms of communal lament.

00:29:31:10 - 00:29:33:19
So it is kind of tricky to parse,

00:29:33:19 - 00:29:36:22
to parse these things out very specifically,

00:29:37:17 - 00:29:41:17
because they kind of draw from different, different forms and different genres

00:29:42:02 - 00:29:43:00
within the Hebrew Bible.

00:29:45:01 - 00:29:47:03
do we, do we need to parse them out?

00:29:47:03 - 00:29:51:01
Do we, do we need to do, what is it, the, why do we want to try to characterize

00:29:51:01 - 00:29:52:15
these things in this way?

00:29:52:15 - 00:29:55:04
Does it, to what extent does it matter?

00:29:55:04 - 00:29:56:18
It depends who you ask

00:29:56:18 - 00:30:00:10
well it certainly does matter some because when you,

00:30:01:14 - 00:30:03:12
yeah, when you're trying to categorize things

00:30:03:12 - 00:30:06:12
that's part of understanding them and making sense of them.

00:30:06:13 - 00:30:10:24
So even if they defy your categorization, trying to relate them to

00:30:10:24 - 00:30:14:17
other things is actually really helpful for understanding what they're doing.

00:30:15:18 - 00:30:18:18
And so there is this sense in which

00:30:18:23 - 00:30:22:05
even if someone is going to look at Lamentations 1 and say, well, it's

00:30:22:05 - 00:30:27:04
actually dirge and qinah and city lament and, you know, whatever else.

00:30:28:07 - 00:30:28:20
Well, that's

00:30:28:20 - 00:30:32:20
actually, weirdly enough, still defining it and characterizing it

00:30:32:20 - 00:30:36:07
because you're characterizing it in relation to all these other things.

00:30:36:07 - 00:30:40:03
It has these elements, and that helps understand what it's doing.

00:30:41:11 - 00:30:45:04
Even if it's tricky, I think it tends to be worthwhile question.

00:30:45:04 - 00:30:48:08
And maybe, yeah, maybe you're interested in pushing back, but

00:30:48:17 - 00:30:53:05
I think there is a very helpful feature in characterizing

00:30:53:05 - 00:30:56:17
and categorizing, even though it's so challenging to do.

00:30:57:11 - 00:31:00:08
Yeah, I think that's the question of

00:31:00:08 - 00:31:03:16
what is it doing is a really helpful one.

00:31:03:16 - 00:31:06:16
And I think that is why we're trying to,

00:31:07:12 - 00:31:10:12
distinguish poems from prose

00:31:10:12 - 00:31:13:12
on the one hand, or proverbs on the other, or,

00:31:14:17 - 00:31:16:17
understanding how different

00:31:16:17 - 00:31:19:17
types of poems relate to each other,

00:31:20:05 - 00:31:21:19
and how they're distinguished from each other

00:31:21:19 - 00:31:25:09
because they're doing something, they're doing something

00:31:25:24 - 00:31:28:21
different from what different things are doing.

00:31:29:20 - 00:31:30:15
And as we

00:31:30:15 - 00:31:33:22
read Scripture, we want to be asking,

00:31:34:10 - 00:31:37:05
what is God doing to me?

00:31:37:05 - 00:31:40:04
What does he intend to do to me through this

00:31:40:04 - 00:31:43:03
particular form and this content?

00:31:43:03 - 00:31:47:08
And I think generally maybe lots of Bible readers

00:31:47:16 - 00:31:51:01
just sort of grew up in the church, assuming that it's all the content

00:31:51:12 - 00:31:54:22
that you just sort of need to extract these true doctrines

00:31:54:22 - 00:31:56:22
and true principles from the scriptures.

00:31:56:22 - 00:31:59:14
Is the Bible true? Yes and amen.

00:31:59:14 - 00:32:03:18
I would also say that the scriptures do something through their form.

00:32:03:23 - 00:32:07:11
And so actually the ways in which God has communicated

00:32:07:11 - 00:32:11:03
through these human authors in different contexts

00:32:11:03 - 00:32:15:01
across many thousands of years, that matters too.

00:32:15:04 - 00:32:19:02
And it, I always want people to know the Bible isn't just true, which it is,

00:32:19:02 - 00:32:21:10
it's also brilliant and it's beautiful.

00:32:21:10 - 00:32:23:12
Like, this is exquisite

00:32:23:12 - 00:32:27:10
and it's something to taste like honey, you know, and to savour.

00:32:28:05 - 00:32:32:20
And I think that's one of the areas where poetry is just so captivating.

00:32:32:20 - 00:32:35:23
I just find my eyes lighting up over and over when I know I'm

00:32:35:23 - 00:32:40:23
only catching a small, small fraction of its wit and its artistry.

00:32:40:23 - 00:32:44:00
But whenever I do catch a glimmer, I'm like, oh, that is fun.

00:32:44:00 - 00:32:46:03
And that's really, really beautiful.

00:32:46:03 - 00:32:47:20
And it's more memorable.

00:32:47:20 - 00:32:51:04
Ben's mentioned this before, too, that poetry is often memorable

00:32:51:13 - 00:32:54:11
in a way that prose isn't.

00:32:54:11 - 00:32:57:11
And Megan was talking before also about emotion.

00:32:57:18 - 00:32:59:05
So I mean, Job is quite striking.

00:32:59:05 - 00:33:02:05
You have two chapters of prose in the beginning,

00:33:02:10 - 00:33:05:17
and then all of a sudden, I call it, the verbal floodgates opening.

00:33:06:01 - 00:33:09:13
And here's just this torrent of verbiage from Job and his friends and,

00:33:10:05 - 00:33:15:24
and it's it's very quickly, this interior view, for Job and his friends.

00:33:15:24 - 00:33:19:05
Poetry is spoken right in in characters’ voices.

00:33:19:05 - 00:33:20:09
It's not from the narrator.

00:33:20:09 - 00:33:22:11
It's a very voiced thing.

00:33:22:11 - 00:33:25:09
So that often kind of drives you to the interior as well, which is,

00:33:25:09 - 00:33:29:03
I think, why we often find it so sort of emotionally resonant.

00:33:31:15 - 00:33:31:24
Yeah.

00:33:31:24 - 00:33:35:24
So I would just add that to what you guys have already been helpfully articulating.

00:33:36:06 - 00:33:39:14
It is striking that the Lord has given us so much poetry.

00:33:39:14 - 00:33:41:03
T: Isn’t it? E: Yeah, about a third,

00:33:41:03 - 00:33:44:03
people typically say of the Hebrew Bible, is poetry.

00:33:44:03 - 00:33:44:19
Yeah.

00:33:44:19 - 00:33:48:10
And it's it's funny just talking about what

00:33:48:20 - 00:33:53:04
why is biblical Hebrew poetry in the Hebrew Bible in the Old Testament?

00:33:53:20 - 00:33:56:05
I think that gets to the wider question of like,

00:33:56:05 - 00:33:59:08
why do we have the Old Testament and what is, what is the whole

00:33:59:08 - 00:34:02:08
the whole corpus, the whole book doing?

00:34:03:10 - 00:34:06:13
Because, yeah, I always get slightly uncomfortable

00:34:06:13 - 00:34:10:14
when people talk about the Bible as like an instruction manual.

00:34:12:02 - 00:34:16:03
There are definitely aspects that could make it similar to that.

00:34:16:03 - 00:34:20:06
But, you know, it's not just how to live.

00:34:20:13 - 00:34:24:16
I think there's so much more about just shaping and forming a people

00:34:24:16 - 00:34:27:18
that there's something about actually engaging in the text

00:34:28:11 - 00:34:32:07
that's supposed to shape you and form you, and do something to you just by

00:34:32:21 - 00:34:36:12
M: by reading it and meditating on it and E: arguing about it.

00:34:36:13 - 00:34:36:22
Yeah, arguing about it.

00:34:37:23 - 00:34:40:14
And discussing it and,

00:34:40:14 - 00:34:45:02
being in community, speaking God's Word together like there's so many different

00:34:45:02 - 00:34:48:23
kind of aspects that can't kind of be boiled down propositionally.

00:34:50:13 - 00:34:50:20
Yeah.

00:34:50:20 - 00:34:55:15
And you talk about kind of having Job in you in a way of like it's

00:34:55:15 - 00:34:59:08
meant to actually do something to me as a text,

00:35:00:00 - 00:35:03:00
that is living and active in the word of God.

00:35:03:08 - 00:35:05:14
M: That it does shape people. E: Yeah.

00:35:05:14 - 00:35:09:00
I think that's a brilliant point on which to close this conversation,

00:35:09:00 - 00:35:11:23
that it's been a really fascinating discussion,

00:35:11:23 - 00:35:14:14
as I knew it was going to be with, with you three.

00:35:14:14 - 00:35:16:06
That's been very entertaining.

00:35:16:06 - 00:35:18:04
It's just worth

00:35:18:04 - 00:35:21:10
emphasizing, of course, that most of us are not reading in Hebrew.

00:35:22:05 - 00:35:25:23
And we can get so much out of this even without learning Hebrew.

00:35:25:23 - 00:35:29:04
I mean, yeah, I mean, go and learn Hebrew, it gets better.

00:35:29:04 - 00:35:30:15
Though the poetry is the hard stuff.

00:35:32:14 - 00:35:34:01
My Hebrew is not great, and I,

00:35:34:01 - 00:35:37:17
and I get into the poetry and I think, oh, I thought I was doing all right

00:35:37:17 - 00:35:38:19
And now it’s hard.

00:35:38:19 - 00:35:39:17
So

00:35:39:17 - 00:35:41:13
Yeah. I'm glad I can still doing it,

00:35:41:13 - 00:35:43:23
still, still read this in English.

00:35:43:23 - 00:35:46:01
It does work in translation.

00:35:46:01 - 00:35:47:09
You lose,

00:35:47:09 - 00:35:50:09
you don't get some of the nuances, some of the cleverness

00:35:51:06 - 00:35:54:18
but the Lord has enabled us to understand his Word through translation as well.

00:35:55:04 - 00:35:58:10
So, yeah, do go away and read

00:35:58:10 - 00:36:01:23
some of the Bible's poems, meditate on them, reflect on

00:36:02:04 - 00:36:06:11
what God is doing to you through the form as well as as through the words.

00:36:07:05 - 00:36:11:17
Let's not just pull these things to bits and try to turn them

00:36:11:17 - 00:36:14:19
into a set of propositions, but let's let

00:36:15:18 - 00:36:18:22
the Bible's poetry seep into us and transform us.

00:36:19:03 - 00:36:21:06
So thank you very much for joining us.

00:36:21:06 - 00:36:23:23
Please do rate and review this podcast.

00:36:23:23 - 00:36:26:06
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00:36:26:06 - 00:36:28:14
Tell your friends particularly about this conversation.

00:36:28:14 - 00:36:31:09
Well, and about all the others as well.

00:36:31:09 - 00:36:35:08
There's so much more good stuff to come on the Tyndale House podcast, so thanks for joining us.

00:36:35:08 - 00:36:37:09
Thank you guys. Thanks, Tony.