Sweeter Than Honey, Richer Than Gold E-Book

Leland Ryken

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Reading the Bible as Literature
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 157

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This is the second of a projected six-volume series called Reading the Bible as Literature (the first volume being How Bible Stories Work). An expert at exploring the intersection of the Bible and literature, Ryken shows pastors and students and teachers of the Bible how to appreciate the craftsmanship and beauty of biblical poetry and how to interpret it correctly. Dr. Ryken goes one step further than merely explaining the genre of poetry-he includes exercises to help students master this rich literary treasure.

Leseprobe

READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

Sweeter Than Honey, Richer Than Gold

A GUIDED STUDY OF BIBLICAL POETRY

LELAND RYKEN

Sweeter Than Honey, Richer Than Gold: A Guided Study of Biblical Poetry

© 2015 by Leland Ryken

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

First edition by Weaver Book Company.

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781683591542

Digital ISBN 9781683591559

Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Contents

Series Preface

Introduction:

What Is Biblical Poetry? And Why It Is Good for You

Part 1: The Language Poets Use

1.First Things First:

The Primacy of the Image

2.How Is A Like B?

The Use of Metaphor and Simile

3.Make-Believe:

Poetry and the Nonliteral

4.Artistic Beauty:

The Parallelism of Biblical Poetry

Part 2: The Composition of Biblical Poems

5.What We Need to Know about Biblical Poems

6.Putting All the Pieces Together:

How to Explicate a Biblical Poem

7.What Are the Main Types of Psalms?

Series Preface

This series is part of the mission of the publisher to equip Christians to understand and teach the Bible effectively by giving them reliable tools for handling the biblical text. Within that landscape, the niche that my volumes are designed to fill is the literary approach to the Bible. This has been my scholarly passion for nearly half a century. It is my belief that a literary approach to the Bible is the common reader’s friend, in contrast to more specialized types of scholarship on the Bible.

Nonetheless, the literary approach to the Bible needs to be defended against legitimate fears by evangelical Christians, and through the years I have not scorned to clear the territory of misconceptions as part of my defense of a literary analysis of the Bible. In kernel form, my message has been this:

1.To view the Bible as literature is not a suspect modern idea, nor does it need to imply theological liberalism. The idea of the Bible as literature began with the writers of the Bible, who display literary qualities in their writings and who refer with technical precision to a wide range of literary genres such as psalm, proverb, parable, apocalypse, and many more.

2.Although fiction is a common trait of literature, it is not an essential feature of it. A work of literature can be replete with literary technique and artifice while remaining historically factual.

3.To approach the Bible as literature need not be characterized by viewing the Bible only as literature, any more than reading it as history requires us to see only the history of the Bible.

4.When we see literary qualities in the Bible, we are not attempting to bring the Bible down to the level of ordinary literature; it is simply an objective statement about the inherent nature of the Bible. The Bible can be trusted to reveal its extraordinary qualities if we approach it with ordinary methods of literary analysis.

To sum up, it would be tragic if we allowed ourselves to be deprived of literary methods of analyzing the Bible by claims that are fallacies.

What, then, does it mean to approach the Bible as literature? A literary study of the Bible should begin where any other approach begins—by accepting as true all that the biblical writers claim about their book. These claims include its inspiration and superintendence by God, its infallibility, its historical truthfulness, its unique power to infiltrate people’s lives, and its supreme authority.

With that as a foundation, a literary approach to the Bible is characterized by the following traits:

1.An acknowledgement that the Bible comes to us in a predominantly literary format. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “There is a … sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.”1 The overall format of the Bible is that of an anthology of literature.

2.In keeping with that, a literary approach identifies the genres and other literary forms of the Bible and analyzes individual texts in keeping with those forms. An awareness of literary genres and forms programs how we analyze a biblical text and opens doors into a text that would otherwise remain closed.

3.A literary approach begins with the premise that a work of literature embodies universal human experience. Such truthfulness to human experience is complementary to the tendency of traditional approaches to the Bible to mainly see ideas in it. A literary approach corrects a commonly held fallacy that the Bible is a theology book with proof texts attached.

4.A literary approach to the Bible is ready to grant value to the biblical authors’ skill with language and literary technique, seeing these as an added avenue to our enjoyment of the Bible.

5.A literary approach to the Bible takes its humble place alongside the two other main approaches—the theological and the historical. These three domains are established by the biblical writers themselves, who usually combine all three elements in their writings. However, in terms of space, the Bible is a predominantly literary book. Usually the historical and theological material is packaged in literary form.

These traits and methods of literary analysis govern the content of my series of guided studies to the genres of the Bible.

Although individual books in my series are organized by the leading literary genres that appear in the Bible, I need to highlight that all of these genres have certain traits in common. Literature itself, en masse, makes up a homogenous whole. In fact, we can speak of literature as a genre (the title of the opening chapter of a book titled Kinds of Literature). The traits that make up literature as a genre will simply be assumed in the volumes in this series. They include the following: universal, recognizable human experience concretely embodied as the subject matter; the packaging of this subject matter in distinctly literary genres; the authors’ use of special resources of language that set their writing apart from everyday expository discourse; and stylistic excellence and other forms of artistry that are part of the beauty of a work of literature.

What are the advantages that come from applying the methods of literary analysis? In brief, they are as follows: an improved method of interacting with biblical texts in terms of the type of writing that they are; doing justice to the specificity of texts (again because the approach is tailored to the genres of a text); ability to see unifying patterns in a text; relating texts to everyday human experience; and enjoyment of the artistic skill of biblical authors.

Summary

A book needs to be read in keeping with its author’s intention. We can see from the Bible itself that it is a thoroughly literary book. God superintended its authors to write a very (though not wholly) literary book. To pay adequate attention to the literary qualities of the Bible not only helps to unlock the meanings of the Bible but also honors the literary intentions of its authors. Surely biblical authors regarded everything that they put into their writing as important. We also need to regard those things as important.

Introduction

What Is Biblical Poetry? And Why It Is Good for You

Next to narrative, poetry is the largest literary genre in the Bible. We cannot avoid it if we tried. Yet many Bible readers minimize their contact with the poetry of the Bible, and many who read it regularly feel uneasy with it. They read it more as a duty than a delight. Most preachers rarely preach from the poetry of the Bible. These considerations lead to the conclusion that the poetry of the Bible is experienced by most Bible readers as a problem requiring a solution. This guided study to the poetry of the Bible aims to open a doorway to biblical poetry. If it achieves its goal, you may find that the poetry of the Bible will become your favorite part of it.

Biblical Poetry as a Problem Genre

Much is to be gained by giving people’s misgivings about poetry an airing. Once we have acknowledged the perceived obstacles to reading biblical poetry, we are in a position to address them and solve the problems. This unit of the chapter will lay the allegations out to view; the next unit will show that the perceived difficulties have good solutions. I have phrased the difficulties as reasons not to immerse oneself in the poetry of the Bible.

Reason #1: poetry is too difficult to understand. Even though not all biblical poetry is equally difficult, most of it requires more analytic skill than ordinary people possess (says the person who does not value poetry highly). Here is a specimen of the difficulty:

My soul is in the midst of lions;

I lie down amid fiery beasts—

the children of man, whose teeth are spears and arrows,

whose tongues are sharp swords. (Ps. 57:4)

No one’s soul is in the midst of lions, and there is no such thing as fiery beasts. Similarly, no one’s teeth are spears and arrows, nor are their tongues sharp swords. Ordinary people simply do not operate on this wave length.

Reason #2: poetry is optional in a person’s life, not a necessity for everyone. Given the difficulty of poetry as a form of communication, some people regard it as optional reading and a matter of personal preference. People who love poetry and have an aptitude for it are free to choose it, say the skeptics. Those who do not have the aptitude for it should feel no obligation to burden themselves with it, and they should not feel guilty about leaving poetry for people who relish it.

Alternatively, even if people feel obligated to have some contact with biblical poetry, they are content to receive a vague feeling of elevation or peace from reading a psalm. They need not go to the effort of understanding a psalm in detail.

Reason #3: poetry is an unnatural form of discourse and therefore does not appeal to ordinary people. Prose is the normal form of communication, while poetry is an unnatural form. Just consider the following specimen:

I will greatly rejoice in the LORD;

my soul shall exult in my God,

for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation;

he has covered me with the robe of righteousness. (Isa. 61:10a)

In ordinary discourse we do not say everything twice the way the poet does here. In real life we do not wear garments of salvation or a robe of righteousness. Any form of writing that deviates this far from the ordinary way of expressing ourselves is an unnatural form of writing.

Reason #4: poetry is not worth the effort that it takes to master it. In view of all that has been said above, poetry is more of a liability than an asset. There is plenty of other material in the Bible to keep us occupied and edified.

Even people who do not subscribe to the foregoing reasons for not mastering the poetry of the Bible feel some degree of initial sympathy with the statements. It is helpful to see the case against poetry because it enables us to clarify what is true about biblical poetry.

Why Poetry Is Good for You

Despite an element of truthfulness in the objections to poetry, to accept them as a final verdict on biblical poetry will mislead us. The purpose of this unit of the chapter is to challenge the viewpoints expressed above.

Consideration #1: exactly how difficult is biblical poetry? All literary genres (such as stories or epistles) provide us with a continuum in regard to difficulty. Stories can be simple or complicated. A passage in an epistle might be easy to read, but it is just as often hard to piece together and understand.

We can see the same principle with poetry. The passages quoted above are on the more difficult half of the continuum, with their references to teeth like arrows and a robe of righteousness. But a passage like the following is on the easier half of the poetic continuum:

The LORD is good,

a stronghold in the day of trouble;

he knows those who take refuge in him. (Nahum 1:7)

We recognize this as poetry rather than prose, and as partly figurative instead of literal, but it is no more taxing on us than normal discourse.

In regard to the alleged difficulty of poetry, therefore, we need to be careful not to concede too much. Some poetry is decidedly difficult, but almost always a passage of difficult poetry will be immediately balanced by easier material. We also need to be forthright about the fact that the Bible is not an easy book to read but a difficult one. I will speak personally in saying that most times when I read a passage for daily devotions there is much that challenges me and quite a lot that I find perplexing. I regularly find myself consulting the notes of a study Bible to satisfy my questions about a passage, even in devotional reading.

Biblical poetry is within the reach of any dedicated reader who makes a good faith effort to understand it. The more we know about how poetry works, the easier we will find it to read biblical poetry with understanding and enjoyment. This guided study is designed to equip you to be a competent reader and teacher of biblical poetry.

Consideration #2: why biblical poetry is not optional but required. If we ask how we know that God intends for us to understand and enjoy poetry, the answer is that approximately a third of the Bible is poetic in form. Poetry is literally everywhere in the Bible. For starters, we can think of whole books that are wholly or largely poetic in format: Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and Job. Additionally, vast parts of most of the Old Testament prophetic books are poetic. Then we need to add that the books of Ecclesiastes and Revelation, though mainly printed as prose, are actually poetic in technique.

Those are the obvious places where we find poetry in the Bible. But imagery and figurative language abound in parts of the Bible that we do not regard as poetry. The discourses and conversations of Jesus are an example: “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12 and 9:5); “you are the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13). Poetic language is also interspersed throughout the New Testament epistles: “at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light” (Eph. 5:8).

The conclusion is obvious: so much of the Bible consists of poetry that it is unthinkable to regard biblical poetry as optional in our reading diet and our menu of passages for Bible teaching. It is instructive to ponder Paul’s claim that Christians are God’s poem: “For we are his workmanship [Greek poeima, from which we get our word poem], created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph. 2:10).

Consideration #3: exactly how unnatural is poetry? Is poetry an unnatural form of discourse? The answer is yes and no.

We can begin with how poetry is more natural than we may think. Everyone uses figurative language during the course of a typical day. We speak of road hogs, game changers, cliff hangers, and nightmare tests, even though we know that none of these is literally true. No one has ever literally juggled a schedule or killed time, but we keep speaking in these terms anyway. We do so because it seems like a natural way to name the experiences that are in view.

Additionally, it is an interesting fact of literary history that in most ancient cultures, poetry preceded prose as an accomplished form of expression. How could that be if prose is the natural form of expression and poetry an unnatural form? We wrongly think that prose is a natural medium; it is actually a sophisticated form of expression. In everyday situations we do not speak prose (complete sentences with a subject and predicate). We speak an associative discourse comprised of single words and phrases, disjointed and incomplete sentence fragments, and arrangement by stream of consciousness instead of formal syntax (sentence structure). Prose is everyday discourse on its best behavior.

But in other ways it is true that poetry is an unnatural or extraordinary form of speaking—something out of the routine and not the way people usually express themselves. So much the better. Poetry has a quality that J. R. R. Tolkien ascribed to fantasy and fairy tales: “arresting strangeness.” Poetry can overcome the cliché effect of ordinary discourse. It startles us with its unusualness and forces us to analyze a statement when ordinary ways of stating the same content are overly familiar. A poem is like a still-life painting of a bowl of fruit: it compels our attention when the same scene in real life makes little or no impact on us.

Consideration #4: biblical poetry is definitely worth the effort of mastering it. There is a religious side to this claim and a literary side. The religious side is that God entrusted a third of the Bible—his revelation of himself and his ways—to poetry. No one wishes to carry a Bible with a third of its pages removed. We would not even want the Psalms to be missing.

Quite apart from this religious argument, poetry offers literary rewards that are unique to it. Of course the same is true of other literary genres. No other form of writing is an adequate substitute for poetry. Poetry combines truth and beauty in a higher concentration than other genres. For anyone who remains skeptical of this claim, I extend an invitation to undertake the journey with me that I will conduct in the rest of this guided study.

What Is Poetry?

Thus far I have assumed that we are all on the same page regarding what poetry is, but I need to sharpen the focus here at the end of the chapter.

It is possible to be so struck by the unusualness of poetry that we overlook that it belongs to the overall genre known as literature. At this level, poetry possesses all of the usual qualities of literature. Its subject is human experience, concretely rendered. It is truthful to human experience and life. It possesses artistry that is self-rewarding as a form of beauty. It is entertaining as well as edifying.