Simple Songs for Psalms

The Psalms as literature

     As poetical literature, the Psalms are deliberate works of art. Of course, all the Scriptures are artful, so much so, that the Scriptures have determined to a great extent what shall be thought artful in Western literature. But the Psalms, and the other poetry of the Bible, have art as part of their purpose and intent. As poetry is different from prose, so the Psalms differ from the non-poetical parts of the Bible. It is significant that after the Psalms, in the canonical order, most of the books of the Old Testament, consisting primarily in the prophets, major and minor, contain much poetry. Some of the shorter books, like Micah, Nahum, and Obadiah, are entirely poetical in form.
     The Psalms provide the poetical paradigm of the Bible. Here the Psalmist slips from praise narrative to declarative to imperative to mystical image and back again with the ease of the most skilled navigator negotiating a torrent. For that is what underlies the Psalms—a torrent of praises, emotions, rages, griefs, hopes, assurances, resolutions, confidences, commands, condemnations, judgments, triumphs, humiliations, failures, and glories, all boiling up into a magnificent body of poetry that we call Psalms (after the Septuagint, the Greek word psalmos meaning “song,” with the implication that they be accompanied by string instruments), but the Jews called simply t’hillim or “praises.”
     Next, The Psalms as songs

 
Copyright, 2010-2011, by Robert McAnally Adams,
        Curator, Christian Quotation of the Day.
Logo image Copyright 1996 by Shay Barsabe, of “Simple GIFs”, by kind permission.
Send comments to curator@cqod.com.

Last updated: 3/6/11

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