Most people who read the bible don’t notice how full of poetry it is.
They know that the Psalms are poetic, as psalms were written to be sung, but unless they have a bible where the typesetters have gone to the trouble of indenting whole sections, they may have missed the poetry in chapter after chapter of the prophetic books, to say nothing of Job, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, and even parts of Genesis.
Poetic creativity
Now there is a view that poetry is best read aloud by the poet, or, if the writer is no longer with us, by a fellow poet. While this theory is debatable, it does highlight the fact that some people understand poetry better than others.
Those who write poetry go to considerable lengths to get the best rhythm for their words, and to find turns of phrase that provoke us to think. Poetry carries a high level of creativity so it is no wonder that a creative God has so much of it in his book, sometimes giving words to the prophets directly from himself already in poetic form.
Poetic devices
Poets work hard to convey emotion so we can feel the atmosphere as we hear the words. They sometimes use repetition for emphasis. This is not a challenge to come up with two meanings because there are double the words.
When Isaiah 9:6 states, ‘For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders’, it is poetry. We can revel in the repetition of ‘to us’ without working overtime on the difference between ‘a child’ being ‘born’ and ‘a son’ being ‘given’.
Reading aloud
Those who have translated the Scriptures have obviously had to lean hard on God when putting the poetry into their own language. I think we should be leaning just as hard on God when we are reading it. If God in his creativity has given us poetry, we should be determined to do justice to it.
I am a great believer in reading the bible aloud so that we can hear it even as we see it. It must have been magnificent when Ezra read the law out loud to all those who had returned to Jerusalem after the exile, and what is more, he must have left some powerful pauses so that everyone could reflect on what they heard.
Nehemiah 8:5-8 tells us that there were Levites among the crowd working to make its meaning clear. Bible poetry also deserves to be read with pauses for reflection.
Poetic inspiration
My favourite poetic book in the bible is Lamentations - five poems that record the state of Jerusalem after its destruction in 586 BC. The first four poems are poems in which each verse (or set of three verses in the case of chapter 3) begins with a successive letter of the twenty-two-character Hebrew alphabet.
Psalm 199 is set up in exactly the same way as an acrostic poem. This could be seen as aiding the hearer’s memory but it could also be seen as a trigger to the writer’s creativity as he or she weighed how best to express the revelation God was giving. The effect of such creativity is amazing.
Here are the first two verses of poem 4 from the NIV translation of Lamentations::
How the gold has lost its lustre,
the fine gold become dull!
The sacred gems are scattered
at every street corner.
How the precious children of Zion,
once worth their weight in gold,
Are now considered as pots of clay,
the work of the potter’s hands!
Every time I read them I think of Paul’s words to the Corinthians.
“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”
Poetry is such an expressive medium that it enables us to think creatively. We can begin to see the positives in the midst of the negatives and to realise what it actually means to be ‘considered as pots of clay’, feeling the dusty residue of a devastated city making our lustre.
In a world of self-promotion and arrogance, where the humility that God brings often seems to count for little, bible poetry can challenge us to question our assessment of ourselves as sacred gems designed to be hidden away in holy places. There are times when, if we are really worth our weight in gold, we have to be facing the challenges of the rubble-laden street corners.
That said, there are also times when poetry has to lift us from the dust into God’s presence.
God has a way of targeting poetry to speak to our need.