How to Read the Psalms and other Biblical poetry

Poetry is a dying art. Few people write it, read it, or would even know how to if they tried. It requires a heart, an imagination, and the ability to sit within a tension. In today’s sound-bite culture people have lost the essential ability to read with the kind of reflection and pacing necessary to read a poem.

This is a deeply tragic cultural illiteracy. Being unable to dwell in poetry means you are unable to dwell in the world of the Bible because so much of the Bible is poetry.

Obviously there are poems that make up the Psalms, but poems also are scattered throughout almost every book of the Bible in one way or another. The prophets are almost entirely written in poetic form and some of the deepest theology in the New Testament is created employing forms of parallelism in the Greek text that dwell on the rich heritage of Hebrew Poetry (look at Philippians 2 for example). Jesus himself used poetry more than any other source to frame and define his action to the Jewish world he inhabited.

Understanding biblical poetry is essential to understanding the Bible as a whole.

I have had difficulty learning how to read poetry in the Bible. For many years I struggled. Biblical poetry doesn’t rhyme. It doesn’t have meter. Even after I learned the original languages of the Bible I found it difficult.

The thing that helped open up the poetry of the Bible was learning about a feature of biblical poetry called parallelism.  What parallelism basically means is that one line of poetry has a direct relationship with another line of poetry, and must be read in that relationship in order to be understood. The meaning of the passage is not just in the lines themselves but in the tension created between the two lines. It’s like creating a perception of depth by seeing a truth through both eyes.

Parallelism can function in a number of ways. A few years ago a teacher at seminary, Robert L Hubbard , Jr. helped me to understand this better using the symbols = < and >. I would go through a poem and make one of these three marks next to each line to help me think about the relationship between the two lines. I will explain what each symbol means below:

If a line of poetry is = to the line that follows it then the parts of the lines are interchangeable. The second line ECHOES the first line.

An example of this kind of poetry can be found in Amos 8:10

1. I will turn your feasts into mourning
2. and all your songs into lamentation;