The Word of God: Prose and Poetry - Page 3

Reading the Bible is in a sense similar to reading a newspaper. When we pick up the newspaper, we find news reports, obituaries, classified ads, cartoons, movie reviews, political essays, economic forecasts, stock reports... One reads a stock report differently from an obituary; one would read a cartoon differently from a horoscope. When we open up the Bible, we find genealogies, sagas, psalms and canticles, chronicler's reports, miracle stories, prophecies, apocalypses, letters, homilies,... One would not read a genealogy in the same way as one would read the Ten Commandments, for example, or a psalm in the same way as a letter. This observation just reinforces what we already find expressed in Dei Verbum: that the Truth is accomodated to the literary form that expresses it.

Given these considerations therefore, we move on to an assertion of a fact: if we are going to gather all the literary forms found in the Bible, we will come up with two general collections: biblical prose and biblical poetry. The general reader understands what these means. A romance novel is prose; so is a spy story. This article is prose, so is your newspaper's editorial. A haiku is a kind of poem. Poe's "The Raven" is a poem. These last two fall under "poetry." But what is biblical prose? What is biblical poetry? There is the catch. I don't know. What Augustine said about time can also be said here: If no one asks me about biblical prose and poetry, I know what they are; If someone does ask me about them, I don't know. The truth is, to answer those questions, one must have begun to theorize about the way prose and poetry are found in the Scriptures. And when one realizes that what is called biblical prose and poetry are to be found in the middle of a gradient whose ends are what some -- in the twenty-first century -- would consider as pure prose on the one hand and pure poetry on the other (if they exist), then all we can do is point out the characteristics of each and illustrate them with examples taken from Scriptures itself. This last will be our task in the articles yet to come.

[1] A literal understanding of the Scriptures cannot go beyond the morphology, grammar and syntax of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. If this were all that is needed, then all of us should be reading lexicons for Biblical Hebrew and Greek.