POETRY AND PROSE IN THE BIBLE

Prose and Poetry in the Bible

I have run into Christians who make a great virtue out of the fact that they understand the Bible literally, unlike those apostates who take it figuratively and symbolically. For example, one of them once told me, “If you don't believe that the stories in Jesus' parables actually took place historically, then you make Him a liar.” And he based that opinion on a vision that God had given him.

Actually, it is just as untrue to the teachings in the Bible to take a passage that is intended to be read as figurative, such as poetry, as if it were literal. In each case, it is a failure to take into account the literary context of the teaching.

I attended a church for years which bragged that they possessed the “perfect” hermeneutic principle (i.e., method of interpretation). Namely, they took the Bible literally. However, when pressed, they would hastily re-define the word “literal” to mean “according to the most commonly accepted way of understanding.” Of course, that robs the word “literal” itself of any real meaning, leaving only the statement that they read the Bible the way most literate people would read it. Hardly something to feel superior about!

The only “perfect” hermeneutic principle is to read historical accounts in the Bible as if they were history, poetry as if it were poetic, inspired teachings as if they were placed there by God for our guidance, etc. And practically everyone who has read the Bible will agree that it is a library containing a great variety of writings. Each different genre is best understood by knowing how these individual types of writings are constituted.

One way to divide the Bible in half is into the Old Testament and New Testament. But an alternative, or complementary, way of understanding it is according to whether it is prose or poetry. Thus, in the OT, to a great extent, the Pentateuch and Historical Books are written in prose while the Poetry, Wisdom, and Prophetic Literature is mainly written in the form of poetry. This is rather a broad generalization, however, since there are poetic passages in the Pentateuch and Historical Books, just as some of the books of Prophecy, such as Jeremiah for example, contain large chunks of historical prose.

Poetry and Prose Characterized

Therefore, it is helpful to provide a few guidelines to distinguish these two modes of writing from one another. I know of several ways by which to identify the one type from the other. The great Bible scholar David Noel Freedman provides an excellent introduction to this subject in his essay “Discourse on Prophetic Discourse.”

Standard Biblical Hebrew prose has its grammar and rules, its normal structures and patterns, and with rare exceptions it follows them. The same may be said for its poetry, with the proviso that the rules as well as the vocabulary are different. In the nature of the case, poetry is more evocative and emotive, it relies more on impact, whether visual or audile, in the arrangement of words and phrases and the sequence of sounds. It also has a more complex, often confusing grammar and syntax, along with a penchant for unusual words. The mastery of Hebrew verse comes only after much study, not to speak of pain and prayer, and even then we suspect that much of its subtle sophistication, its multiple meanings and larger senses, escape our notice.”

Emotion

As Freedman mentions above, one distinguishing feature that poetry possesses in relation to prose is its ability to evoke a certain amount of emotion in the reader. Consider as a useful case study, Judges 4-5 in which the first of these chapters describes a battle and its aftermath utilizing typical Hebrew prose, which tends to be very laconic and gets right to the facts in the case, often relating its information with the bare minimum of descriptive adjectives or adverbs. Just look at the death of General Sisera at the hands of Jael as an example:

“But Jael wife of Heber took a tent peg, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple, until it went down into the ground – he was lying fast asleep from weariness – and he died.” (Judges 4:21)

Now compare that with the poetic account given in the following chapter:

“She put her hand to the tent peg and her right hand to the workmen's mallet; she struck Sisera a blow; she crushed his head; she shattered and pierced his temple. He sank, he fell, he lay still at her feet; at her feet he sank, he fell; where he sank, there he fell dead.” (Judges 5:26-27)

Instead of just saying that Jael drove the peg into his temple, this poetic account uses four verbs of increasing intensity: struck, crushed, shattered, and pierced. And next, the author employs the verbs “sank” and “fell” three times each to hammer in its point (no pun intended).

Other emotions can be expressed best through a poetic style. Just look at how sarcasm and irony come through loud and clear in Isaiah's denunciation of the king of Babylon by piling on hyperbolic phrases followed unexpectedly by bringing him and the reader back to reality :

“You said in your heart, 'I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.' But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit.” (Isaiah 14:14-15)

In the above cases, the intent of the author is not to relay cold, hard facts to the reader; it is to convey some sort of emotional content instead. This is done through techniques such as hyperbole (exaggeration), metaphor, simile, rhetorical questions, irony, and personification (treating an inanimate object or property as if it were alive).

Repetition

Another hallmark of Hebrew poetry alluded to above is that of repetition. This can be simple repetition of the same words, as in Judges 5:27 or, more commonly, in what is called Poetic Parallelism. I have discussed this phrase in detail elsewhere, but suffice it to say that quite often the poet will use two lines of text instead of one to convey the very same, or similar, idea in each. And returning to Judges 5:26, we see a very simple example of this principle:

        “she struck                          Sisera a blow,

        she crushed                         his head;

        she shattered and pierced   his temple.”

This is called Identical Parallelism, and there are numerous variations of this hallmark of Hebrew poetry such as introverted, incomplete, antithetic, stair-step, synthetic and symbolic parallelism. For more on this subject, see my post titled “Psalm 58: Forms of Hebrew Poetry.”
Prose Particles

For those of you who are scholarly minded and would like a clearer distinction between poetry and prose in the Bible, here is another way to accomplish it. Freedman has spent a fair amount of his academic career developing a quantitative (or at least semi-quantitative) method of distinguishing the two types of biblical genres from one another. The method he and others have developed involves calculating the percent of “prose particles” found in a given text. Prose particles consist of 'aser (the relative pronoun), 'et (the sign of the definite direct object), and h (the definite article). His findings, after extensive examination, demonstrate that:

    Anything with a count under 5% is almost certainly to be regarded as poetry.

    Anything with a count over 15% is almost certainly to be regarded as prose.

However, there are many other biblical texts with numbers in between including much of OT prophecy. And one must take into account the known fact that poems may be found right in the middle of a narrative, which skews the average percentages.

Meter

Another guideline that is sometimes used as a distinguishing factor is meter and rhythm. It is generally recognized that parallel lines of Hebrew poetry consist of the same or similar number of syllables. However, again this is only a general rule to which there are exceptions. And it is always possible to divide most any prose sentence into two lines of almost equal length if one wants to. Nevertheless, it is quite common to see poetic verses in which the element in one line has been expanded so as to achieve roughly the same length in both. One random example is shown below:

    “Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,

                                             things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” (Job 42:3b-c)

Notice how the second line compensates for leaving out the subject and verb of the thought by expanding on the writer's incomprehension. In the original Hebrew, the two lines would be similarly equal in length.

Typography

This is the technical term indicating the style and appearance of printed matter. And for us non-experts in the Hebrew language, it is probably one of the most commonly used guides as to whether a text is poetry or prose. Basically, it boils down to this: Although the original Hebrew manuscripts did not provide any convenient way to distinguish poetry from prose, the situation is different in most English translations. Except for KJV, The Living Bible, and a few other translations which do not contain any easy way of showing which genre is which, prose lines are not indented, except at the start of a new paragraph. By contrast, various forms of indention are utilized to indicate poetry. But even here there are caveats to note since a comparison of more modern translations will show that sometimes there is disagreement as to what constitutes prose and what is poetry.

Concerning the book of Hosea:

    TEV only recognizes 2:19-23; 11:1-4,8-9 and 14:4-8 as poetry while the rest of the book is presented as prose.

    In stark contrast, NEB indents all of Hosea as poetry except for the following short prose sections: 1:1-42:18-23; and 14:9.

    RSV and NRSV come somewhere in these two extremes by labeling as prose Chapter 1; 2:16-20; and Chapter 3 with the rest indented as poetry.

    The Jerusalem Bible agrees somewhat with RSV and NRSV except that it indents 2:16-20 as poetry. The same is true of NIV.

    One paraphrase, The Message, treats the whole book as poetry with the exception of 1:1,10-11.

Does It Matter?

The above is not just a theoretical exercise. How one views the genre of a biblical passage will help determine how one understands it.

1. Let us look at the first chapter of Genesis for example. Liberals often fall into the temptation of dismissing the whole story of creation as “mere” legend or myth probably borrowed from an earlier Near Eastern culture. And some of these scholars would write off the whole account as an attempt to fabricate a justification for the custom of sabbath observation.

By contrast, fundamentalists generally treat it as a straightforward, factual account of the exact order of creation presented as a scientifically-defensible narrative, nothing more or less. And if scientific “results” disagree with the biblical account understood in that manner, then that only goes to prove that scientists are atheists. Fundamentalists generally also feel that any explanation of “day” in this passage as other than a 24-hour period is a caving in to “the spirit of the times.”

Somewhere in the middle are those whom I will label as biblical conservatives who recognize in these verses several aspects generally ignored by the other two groups of interpreters. One is the fact that there is a definite theological point being taught here, namely, that the elements of creation such as the heavenly bodies, the land and sea, and the living creatures are not to be worshipped since they all come from the hand of the Almighty God. Another point brought out by the orderly way in which the three realms of sky, sea, and land are first created followed by population of those realms in the same order is that this whole progression mirrors the logical mind of the Creator in addition to His power and might.

2. Here is another example chosen at random from literally hundreds in the OT that could be cited. It is a typical case of Identical Parallelism in which the first poetic line is echoed in thought by the second line, but expressed using synonyms:

    “Therefore by this     the guilt of Jacob will be expiated,

                     and this    will be the full fruit of the removal of his sin.” (Isaiah 27:9a)

An older school of interpretation failed to recognize that this should be understood according to the rules of poetic language. Thus, they read the whole sentence as a piece of prose in which the connecting word “and” generally introduces an entirely different thought. And so, they would mistakenly try to explain how the concept of expiation is entirely different from removal of sin. By contrast, in poetic language, the word “and” signals that the same thought is now going to be restated in slightly different terms.

3. As a final example, consider the OT prophecies. One branch of hermeneutical thinking demands that they be completely and literally fulfilled. And even if the NT writers state that a certain prophecy was fulfilled in their times, that will usually not satisfy them. In that case, they merely state that the prophecy will be more completely fulfilled in the future. This error in interpretation stems from the mistake of reading the poetic language of most OT prophecies as if it were literal prose instead of being filled with hyperbole, symbols, and metaphors.

Just look at the verse in Isaiah 40:3 which John the Baptist quotes in Matthew 3:3 and parallel passages.

    “Prepare the way of the Lord,

     Make his paths straight.”

I have read complicated scenarios from dispensational premillenialist explaining how when Jesus comes for the second time, there will be a great earthquake in Israel which will have the effect of leveling all the topography so that a straight path will be made for Him to enter Jerusalem. Such tortured attempts to “salvage” a literal meaning out of a poetic statement has the effect, as in this case, of actually arguing with the clear interpretation already supplied by the NT authors and personages.