I just finished reading through the Psalms (finally) and am extremely intimidated for both the quiz and discussion in class tomorrow! While reading, I found a wealth of poetic devices and different techniques of the author - and I was just skimming through each Psalm because the book is so long! We have an extremely daunting task ahead of us in interpreting meaning from the Psalms because there is SO much meaning within each line!
Think of poems that we have read in the past - in high school, in other classes, etc. A poem that contains, perhaps, one or two stanzas could be filled with meaning and poetic devices that help create that meaning. For a poem with a single stanza, it is possible to write a five page analysis! We have about two hundred pages of complex biblical poetry, each with religious and cultural importance and masses of poetic devices to look upon.
I am torn in how I want to go about looking at the Psalms. As an English nerd, I love to analyze the author's decisions in each poetic devise he or she uses. After all, the poetic devise would not exist without the author's decision! But, as Doug mentioned before, we need to look at Biblical Poetry in a wider scale - what are sections or stanzas saying as a whole rather than words or single lines? I think that a healthy compromise between the two ways to interpret the Psalms must be drawn. Without looking at a bigger picture, details are unimportant. But without looking closely at details, the importance wouldn't have been built in the first place.
Audrey,
ReplyDeleteI think I said what I said because we can't really read the Psalms in a Hebrew way, since we're reading a translation.