Poetry and Wisdom

Hebrew poetry does not work by rhyme, and its metre is disputed to this day. Its most obvious structural feature is that lines come in pairs, or occasionally threes, with the second line standing in some relation to the first. Robert Lowth described this in his Oxford lectures, published in Latin in 1753 as De sacra poesi Hebraeorum and later translated as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, and he gave us both the name, parallelismus membrorum, the parallelism of members, and the three categories every study Bible still prints: synonymous, where the second line restates the first; antithetic, where it states the opposite; and synthetic, where it completes or extends.

Lowth's categories are a genuine advance and a serviceable first pass. The problem is the first one. Generations of readers have been taught that synonymous parallelism means the second line says the same thing again in different words, which licenses skipping it. James Kugel, in The Idea of Biblical Poetry (1981), argued that this is almost never true. His formula has become the standard shorthand: the relation is 'A, and what's more, B'. The second line seconds the first, then goes further, narrows it, raises the stakes, makes it concrete, or turns it. Robert Alter made a parallel case in The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), describing a movement of intensification and focusing from line to line, and Adele Berlin in The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism (1985) showed that the correspondence operates at the level of grammar and sound as well as meaning.

Test it on Amos 5:24. 'But let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.' If the second line merely restates the first, nothing is lost by reading only half. The BSB's 'river' is a smoothing of the first line, whose Hebrew word is simply mayim, water. The imagery is doing precise work in a country where a wadi can fill with a violent torrent after a storm and be dry sand a week later. Water rolls down once; an ever-flowing stream does not stop. The second line converts the demand from a spectacular episode of justice into a permanent condition, which is exactly the reproach Amos is making to a nation with excellent festivals.

Test it again on something harder. Psalm 137:8-9 runs: 'O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, blessed is he who repays you as you have done to us. Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.' The first line names the city and pronounces its sentence. The second asks for repayment in kind, which could almost be spoken calmly. The third makes it unbearably specific, and that specificity is the sharpening Kugel described. Whatever you conclude about this psalm, notice that its poetry is working the way Hebrew poetry always works, and that the second line is where the poem actually is.

One practical rule follows. When you teach a verse of Hebrew poetry, never expound the first line and use the second as decoration. Ask what the second line added. It nearly always added something, and the something is frequently the point.

This is the plainest thing to say about the Psalter and the easiest to forget: it is a book of words addressed to God, not a book of statements about God. Both kinds of writing are in the Bible and both are true, but they are true in different ways, and the difference matters as soon as you start quoting. Calvin, in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, called the book an anatomy of all the parts of the soul, because there is no state of a human heart that is not represented somewhere in it. An anatomy of the soul is not a systematic theology.

So the Psalms are full of language that is exactly right as prayer and would be wrong as a proposition. God is a rock, a shield, a fortress, a bird sheltering chicks under her wings, a shepherd, a warrior waking from sleep. Enemies are lions, dogs, bulls, snakes whose venom is under their lips. The psalmist's bones waste away, his tears are his food, his soul is poured out like water. Read as doctrine, Psalm 22 has God ignoring a righteous sufferer, and Psalm 139 has God's thoughts countable in number if only one had time. Read as prayer, both are exact.

Hyperbole is normal in this genre and is not dishonesty. When a psalm says 'all day long' or 'my whole life' or 'they surround me', it is speaking as sufferers actually speak, not filing a report. The interpretive discipline is to ask what this language does in the mouth of someone praying, and then to ask what claim about God the prayer presupposes, which is a different and more careful question than asking what the verse teaches.

None of this makes the Psalms theologically thin. They make enormous claims, and the New Testament quotes the Psalter more than any other book. But notice how it quotes. Jesus takes Psalm 22:1 onto the cross, 'My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?', and he takes it as prayer, in the first person, not as a doctrinal statement about abandonment. The best use of a psalm is very often to pray it, and the second best is to teach someone else how to.

Hermann Gunkel changed the study of the Psalms by asking not who wrote each one but what kind of thing each one is and what occasion it belonged to. His work, completed after his death by Joachim Begrich and published in 1933 as Einleitung in die Psalmen, sorted the collection into a small number of types: the hymn of praise, the individual lament, the communal lament, the individual song of thanksgiving, the royal psalms, and several smaller groups. Sigmund Mowinckel pressed the question of setting further, locating many psalms in Israel's festival worship, and his reconstruction of an annual enthronement festival remains debated. Claus Westermann later refined the account of lament and praise. Gunkel's specific settings are frequently contested; the typology itself is standard equipment.

The most useful single thing to learn from it is the anatomy of a lament, because laments are the largest group in the Psalter and most Christians have never been taught to use them. The pattern runs roughly: address to God, complaint describing the trouble, petition asking for specific action, often a statement of confidence, and a vow to praise. Psalm 13 has all of it in six verses: 'How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?' and then, by the end, a resolve to sing. Knowing the pattern lets you see immediately when a psalm departs from it, and departures are meaningful. Psalm 88 has the address and the complaint and the petition, and then never turns. Its final line is 'darkness is my closest companion'. A canon that includes Psalm 88 is telling you that a prayer which ends in the dark is still a prayer that God gave his people words for.

Which brings us to the imprecatory psalms, and there is no honest way to make them comfortable. Psalms 58, 69, 83, 109 and 137 ask God to do violent things to enemies. Psalm 109 asks that a man's children be fatherless and his wife a widow. Psalm 137 blesses the man who kills Babylonian infants. These are not obscure corners; Psalm 109 is quoted in Acts 1:20.

Several serious responses exist and you should know them as responses rather than as solutions. C. S. Lewis, in Reflections on the Psalms (1958), refused to defend these passages, treating them as the natural and terrible speech of wronged people, valuable precisely because they show us what resentment is and because pretending we do not feel it is worse. Erich Zenger, in a book translated as A God of Vengeance? (1996), argued nearly the opposite: that these psalms are the cry of victims who hand their vengeance over to God instead of taking it, and that a comfortable church silences them because it has never been the victim. John N. Day, in Crying for Justice (2005), argued that they remain a legitimate Christian prayer because the church still prays for God's judgment on evil, and pointed to the martyrs' cry in Revelation 6:10. Others hold that the imprecations belong to a stage of revelation that the teaching of Jesus about enemies supersedes, and that a Christian may read them as evidence of what sin does to sufferers without praying them.

What should not be done is what is usually done, which is to skip them, or to print an edited Psalter, or to explain that the little ones are really our sinful habits. The allegorical dodge has a long pedigree and it is still a dodge. Honest handling means saying plainly what the text says, naming the fact that the church has never agreed on what to do with it, and letting students see a teacher who does not need scripture to be tidier than it is.

Proverbs is the genre most often misread in the whole Bible, and the misreading is a single move: taking a proverb as a promise. A proverb is a calibrated observation about how life usually goes, compressed for memorability, and its truth is the truth of a generalisation. The book itself tells you so, in the most direct way available, by printing two proverbs that contradict each other on purpose.

Work the anchor. 'Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he become wise in his own eyes.' Read as rules, these cancel. Read as wisdom, they are a complete education in about twenty words. Sometimes engaging a fool on his own terms drags you down to his level and you become what you argued with. Sometimes refusing to engage leaves him confirmed in his own estimate and unchallenged in front of others. Both are true. Neither is a rule. What the pair actually requires of you is judgment about which risk is live in the situation in front of you, and judgment is precisely what wisdom literature exists to form. The ancient editor who placed these two verses in this order knew exactly what he was doing.

Now watch the misreading at work on a beloved verse. Proverbs 22:6: 'Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.' Taken as a promise, this verse has done immense damage, because it tells every faithful parent of a wandering adult child that the fault is theirs. Three things are worth knowing. First, it is a proverb, in the book that gave you 26:4-5, and it states a tendency. Second, the Hebrew is more open than the English. It reads, literally, 'according to his way', al-pi darko, with no word corresponding to 'should'. That has generated several readings: that it means the way appropriate to the child's stage or character, which is roughly the traditional reading; that it means the child's own way or bent, which would turn the verse into a warning that a child indulged in his own direction will not leave it; and that darko refers to the way of wisdom taught throughout the book. Third, the verse has its own literature. Ted Hildebrandt devoted an article in Grace Theological Journal in 1988 to this half-verse alone, which tells you how unsettled the reading is. I am not going to pick a winner. What I will say is that a teacher who presents any one of the three as the obvious meaning is concealing a real dispute, and that on none of the three readings is the verse a guarantee.

The same discipline applies across the book. Proverbs 10:4 says 'Idle hands make one poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.' That is broadly and usefully true, and it is the sort of thing a father tells a son. It is not a law of the universe, and if you make it one you have a theology in which every poor person is lazy, which the prophets flatly contradict. Proverbs 13:24 on the rod must be read as one saying inside a book that also warns repeatedly against harshness, and not as a parenting manual.

And here is the most striking thing about the canon's own handling of this. It does not leave the correction to us. Job and Ecclesiastes are in the Bible, and both of them are arguments against the mechanical version of the retribution principle. Job's friends are Proverbs readers. Their theology is that suffering indicates sin, which is Proverbs generalised into a law, and they apply it to a man the narrator has already told the reader is blameless. God's verdict on them in Job 42:7 is that they have not spoken about him accurately. Ecclesiastes says it flatly in 8:14: there are righteous men who get what the actions of the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the actions of the righteous deserve, and the Teacher calls this hevel, vapour (futility in the BSB), the word that runs through the book. Ecclesiastes 7:15 says the same thing from experience: 'In my futile life I have seen both of these: A righteous man perishing in his righteousness, and a wicked man living long in his wickedness.'

So the wisdom books do not agree in the way a manual agrees with itself. They agree the way a seminar agrees: Proverbs states the pattern, Job attacks the misuse of the pattern on an innocent man, Ecclesiastes reports that the pattern often fails outright, and the whole set together produces a reader who can tell the difference between a tendency and a promise. Teaching any one of the three without the others is what produces the two failures you will meet in ministry, the prosperity teacher who has only read Proverbs and the cynic who has only read Ecclesiastes.