Reading poetry, the Psalms, and wisdom

Open Proverbs 26 and read verses 4 and 5, one after the other. They sit side by side, in the same paragraph, in a book that most people read one verse at a time.

Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
lest you yourself also be like him.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
lest he be wise in his own opinion.

Proverbs 26:4 to 5 (NET)¹

That pair of verses is this lesson in miniature. Most of what isn't narrative in the Old Testament is poetry: Fee and Stuart put narrative at more than forty percent of the Protestant Old Testament, and the Psalms, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes are almost entirely poetry, as are most of the prophets you read in lesson 4.² Poetry works by different rules from the narrative of lesson 3 and the law of lesson 4. The rules aren't hard. But a reader who doesn't know them will misread a psalm as a list of doctrines, a proverb as a promise, and Psalm 137 as an endorsement of killing children, and will feel perfectly clear the whole time. That's the genre trap from lesson 3 again, and this lesson is the way out of it.

How Hebrew poetry works: the second line

Start with how a Hebrew poem is built, because everything else follows from it. Hebrew poetry doesn't rhyme sounds. It rhymes ideas. A poet says something in one line and then says it again in a second line that repeats, sharpens, contrasts or completes the first. Read the opening of Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the sky displays his handiwork.
Day after day it speaks out;
night after night it reveals his greatness.

Psalm 19:1 to 2 (NET)¹

Heavens and sky; declare and display; glory and handiwork. The second line isn't adding a new fact about a different object. Fee and Stuart, whose textbook this course follows, put it plainly: the four lines "are not trying to say four different things", and the poet "is not trying to say that the 'heavens' do one thing and the 'skies' another; together the two lines speak of one glorious reality".³ Then the second pair adds something: the speech goes on day and night, without pause.

This pairing is called parallelism. The name comes from Robert Lowth, Professor of Poetry at Oxford and later Bishop of London, who published his lectures on Hebrew poetry in Latin in 1753.⁴ He sorted the pairs into three kinds, and Fee and Stuart still teach the three with one example each from the prophets.⁵

Synonymous, where the second line restates the first (Isaiah 44:22, NET):

I remove the guilt of your rebellious deeds as if they were a cloud,
the guilt of your sins as if they were a cloud.

Antithetic, where the second line contrasts (Hosea 7:14, NET):

They do not pray to me,
but howl in distress on their beds.

Synthetic, where the second line simply carries the thought forward (Obadiah 21, NET):

Those who have been delivered will go up on Mount Zion
in order to rule over Esau's mountain.

The labels are useful and a little misleading, and you should know the correction. In 1981 James Kugel argued in The Idea of Biblical Poetry that "synonymous" lines are almost never simply synonymous: the second line seconds the first, and his shorthand for the relationship is "A, and what's more, B".⁶ Standard summaries of his argument set out the ways B can second A: going further, narrowing, intensifying, completing. Test it on Psalm 19. "Declare the glory of God" is general; "displays his handiwork" makes it specific, the sky as evidence of a maker. The second line is usually where the emphasis lands.

So the habit to build is this: whenever you meet a pair of lines, ask what the second one adds. Not "what does line B mean on its own", and not "these two lines say the same thing so I can skip one", but "what's more".

Imagery is the argument

The second thing to know is that poetry's vocabulary is, in Fee and Stuart's words, "purposefully metaphorical".³ In the Psalms the mountains skip like rams (114:4), enemies have tongues like sharp swords (57:4), and God is a shepherd, a rock, a fortress, a shield.¹ None of that is decoration on top of a plain statement. It's how the statement is made.

The mistake runs in two directions. One is to press the picture: to read Psalm 23 as a recommendation of rural life, or, as Fee and Stuart note about Psalm 51:5 ("a sinner the moment my mother conceived me"), to extract a doctrine about the sinfulness of conception from a line of hyperbole whose point is that the psalmist's sin goes back as far as he can remember.¹³ The other mistake is to strip the picture out and keep a proposition.

Set the two side by side and you can see what the second mistake costs. Fee and Stuart offer "God is revealed in his creation" as a prose rendering of Psalm 19:1 to 2, and call it "totally colorless".³ It is also shorter, and the difference is the whole point. The poem makes you supply four things the sentence hands over: that the sky is evidence, since "declare" and "display" are what a witness does; that the evidence is continuous, because day follows night follows day; that the speech has no words and is heard anyway, which is where the poem goes next in verse 3; and that the one being testified to is a maker, because "handiwork" is a word about hands. The prose sentence asserts all of that and shows none of it.

That supplying is the reading work, and it's why poetry compresses. A prose writer spells out the connections; a poet leaves them for you. Read a psalm as a list of propositions and you strip out the part where the meaning lives, which is the leap between line A and line B and between the picture and what it points at.

The Psalms: words to God that are also God's word

The book of Psalms is a collection of 150 prayers and songs in the Hebrew numbering, which Protestant and most modern Catholic Bibles follow. In the Hebrew Bible it's called Tehillim, "praises", and it stands among the Writings, the third section of the Tanakh you met in lesson 1.

Two things about numbering, before you go looking anything up. The Greek and Latin tradition counts differently from about Psalm 10 to Psalm 147, so a psalm this lesson calls 51 is Psalm 50 in an Orthodox psalter or an older Catholic Bible, and Psalm 137 is 136. And the Greek Psalter has a Psalm 151, which Orthodox Bibles carry; the Psalms Scroll in the photograph below has it in Hebrew. Lesson 8 takes up why the canons differ.

The Psalter is prayed, and has been continuously, in more places than a Protestant reader usually notices. In the synagogue: Ashrei (Psalm 145) three times a day, Hallel (113 to 118) at the festivals, a psalm for each day of the week, Psalm 30 in the morning service, psalms in a house of mourning. In the monasteries: the Rule of St Benedict has the community pray the whole Psalter every week, and the modern Liturgy of the Hours spreads it over four. In the Orthodox churches: the Psalter is divided into twenty kathismata and read through weekly, and twice a week in Lent. That is the practice this lesson is describing from the outside, and those traditions have simply done it.

This is what praying the psalms as psalms sounds like from inside the tradition whose book it first was (Psalm 19:8, JPS 1917):⁷

The law of the LORD is perfect, restoring the soul;
the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.

Most of the Bible is words from God to people. The Psalms are words from people to God. Fee and Stuart call this "a unique problem of hermeneutics": how do "words spoken to God function as a word from God to us"?³

We hold by faith, with the whole church, that these prayers are Scripture. But the way they're God's word differs from the way a law or a letter is. A psalm doesn't teach doctrine by stating it. It teaches by giving you words to say to God, and shaping you as you say them. Fee and Stuart's answer to their own question is that the psalms work for us "precisely in the ways they functioned for Israel in the first place", as "opportunities to speak to God with the help of words he inspired others to use to speak to him".³ So the first reading rule for a psalm is: this is a prayer. Ask what it does, and what it would do to you if you prayed it, before you ask what it asserts.

The types, and how to tell them apart

The second rule is that psalms come in types, and each type has a shape. Israelites didn't need to be told this any more than you need to be told that a lullaby and a football chant are different kinds of song. We have to learn it as a list.

The modern study of the types goes back to Hermann Gunkel (1862 to 1932), whose introduction to the Psalms was completed by Joachim Begrich and published in 1933.⁸ Gunkel's argument had two halves, and this lesson uses one of them. The first half is the one everybody kept: psalms fall into recognisable forms. The second is that each form had a Sitz im Leben, a setting in Israel's life, usually in the temple's worship. Sigmund Mowinckel pressed that further and argued that most psalms were written for the cult rather than as private devotion, which is where the name "enthronement psalms" in the list below comes from: he read them as the liturgy of an annual festival.

That second half is argued, and it cuts against the reading rule I just gave you. If most psalms are liturgy first, then "what would this do to you if you prayed it" is not the original question; the original question is what it did in a service. Christine Hayes, who taught the Hebrew Bible at Yale, notes that the form critics have multiplied Gunkel's categories since: "the very serious form critics will give you upwards of 13, 14, 15 or more different forms".⁹ What survives either way, and what this lesson needs, is that the forms are real and that knowing one changes how you read.

Fee and Stuart use seven types, which is enough for a reader.³ Each has a test you can apply, which matters more than the psalm numbers:

• Lament. Is the trouble present? Then it's a lament: address, complaint, petition, and usually a turn toward trust. "More than sixty", individual (3, 22, 42, 88, 139 among them) and corporate (12, 44, 80, 94, 137).
• Thanksgiving. Is the trouble past and the rescue already given? Then it's thanksgiving, and Fee and Stuart give it five parts: introduction, the distress recalled, the appeal reiterated, the deliverance described, and testimony. They work it on Psalm 138. Six community (65, 67, 75, 107, 124, 136) and ten individual (18, 30, 32, 34, 40, 66, 92, 116, 118, 138).
• Hymn of praise. Is there no particular occasion at all, just God praised for who he is? Sixteen of them, in three groups (8, 19, 104, 148; 66, 100, 111, 114, 149; 33, 103, 113, 117, 145 to 147).
• Salvation history. Does it retell the exodus and the wilderness? (78, 105, 106, 135, 136.)
• Celebration and affirmation. Is the subject the covenant, the king, or the city? Covenant renewal (50, 81), Davidic covenant (89, 132), nine royal psalms (2, 18, 20, 21, 45, 72, 101, 110, 144), the enthronement psalms (24, 29, 47, 93, 95 to 99), and the Songs of Zion (46, 48, 76, 84, 87, 122).
• Wisdom. Does it read like Proverbs set to music? Eight (36, 37, 49, 73, 112, 127, 128, 133).
• Song of trust. Is it confidence with no crisis being worked through? Ten (11, 16, 23, 27, 62, 63, 91, 121, 125, 131).

The first test is the one you'll use most, and it's a question about tense: is the psalmist still in it?

Look at the first bar, and then at the ones under it. Lament is the largest single type, larger than any one kind of praise, and Fee and Stuart remark that this "probably says something about our common humanity".³ Be careful about the sentence that wants to come next. Add the praise categories together, thanksgiving and hymns and celebration, and they outnumber the laments, so the Psalter is not mostly complaint. What's true, and worth knowing before you decide what counts as a proper prayer, is that no single kind of praise is as large as lament. The laments bar is drawn at exactly 60 because the source says "more than sixty" and gives no number; do not read a precision off it that Fee and Stuart didn't supply.

Psalm 13, read badly and then well

The whole psalm is six verses.

1 How long, Lord, will you continue to ignore me?
How long will you pay no attention to me?
2 How long must I worry,
and suffer in broad daylight?
How long will my enemy gloat over me?

3 Look at me! Answer me, O Lord my God!
Revive me, or else I will die.
4 Then my enemy will say, "I have defeated him."
Then my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

5 But I trust in your faithfulness.
May I rejoice because of your deliverance.
6 I will sing praises to the Lord
when he vindicates me.

Psalm 13 (NET)¹

Read badly. Treat it as a list of claims. Verse 1: God ignores people and pays them no attention. Verse 5: God is faithful and he delivers. Verse 6: God vindicates. A reader who takes the psalm as doctrine has to either pick a verse and discard the rest, or conclude that the psalmist changed his theology between lines. That isn't reading the psalm; that's arguing with a list.

Read well. Ask what type this is. The trouble is present, so it's an individual lament, and Fee and Stuart, comparing all the laments, find six elements that appear "in one way or another in virtually all of them", usually in this order: address, complaint, trust, deliverance (the petition), assurance, and praise.³ Now lay the psalm on that template.

• Address: "Lord", in the first line, and again in verse 3, "O Lord my God".
• Complaint: the "how long" questions of verses 1 and 2. Notice they escalate: ignored by God, given no attention, left alone to worry and suffer in broad daylight, and then gloated over by an enemy. That's parallelism doing its "what's more" work across four questions.

So the psalm isn't a set of claims that contradict. It's a movement, and the movement is the meaning. A person in real trouble speaks the trouble to God at full strength, asks, and then, without the trouble being resolved, chooses to stand on what he knows of God's character. The word the NET gives as "faithfulness" is the Hebrew hesed, the loyalty God promised in the covenant you met in lesson 2. The psalmist reaches for the covenant when he can't see the rescue.

One caution, from the same textbook. The six elements are "our discovery, not a rigid form a psalmist felt compelled to fit the musical poem into".³ Psalm 88 is a lament that never reaches praise; it ends on the word "darkness". The shape is a strong pattern with real exceptions, and the Psalter kept the exceptions.

Psalm 137, and the verse people tear out

One psalm shocks nearly everyone who finds it, and it needs everything you now have: the type, the shape, and the covenant behind it.

By the rivers of Babylon
we sit down and weep
when we remember Zion.

Psalm 137:1 (NET)¹

Then, after seven verses, six of grief and one already asking God to remember what Edom did, the last two:

O daughter Babylon, soon to be devastated,
how blessed will be the one who repays you
for what you dished out to us.
How blessed will be the one who grabs your babies
and smashes them on a rock.

Psalm 137:8 to 9 (NET)¹

Read badly. As an endorsement: the Bible blesses killing infants. Or, the mirror reading, which is just as bad: tear the page out, because a Christian can't say this.

Read well. Notice, first, what the psalm is. It's a prayer, spoken to God, by people who have watched this done to their own children. Verse 8 says so: "for what you dished out to us". The image in verse 9 isn't the psalmist's invention; it's what a besieging army did, which the prophets describe elsewhere in the same words (2 Kings 8:12; Hosea 13:16; Nahum 3:10), and the psalmist asks that Babylon receive its own measure. Fee and Stuart note that the language is "hyperbolic language of the same extreme sort found in the covenant curses themselves", and that the psalmist "calls for judgment according to the covenant curses" of Deuteronomy, the sanctions you met in lesson 4.³

Notice, second, what the psalm doesn't do. It doesn't pick up a sword. It hands the rage to God and leaves it there. Paul asks for exactly that, and he asks for it by quoting Deuteronomy:

Do not avenge yourselves, dear friends, but give place to God's wrath, for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," says the Lord.

Romans 12:19 (NET)¹

The line Paul quotes is Deuteronomy 32:35, which in the NET reads "I will get revenge and pay them back at the time their foot slips".¹ Paul's instruction is: don't take vengeance, give it to God. Our reading of the connection is that the psalm is what obeying that instruction sounds like from the bottom, when you're the one who has been wronged past bearing. That's a reading, not something the psalm says about itself. Fee and Stuart put the function this way: these psalms "guide or channel our anger to and through God verbally rather than to or at anyone else", and "it is God who is the actual hearer of these angry words".³ They add that this doesn't contradict Jesus' command to love enemies.³

And here is the objection, at its full strength, because it survives all of that. Grant every word above. The psalm is a prayer, it's hyperbole, it invokes the covenant curses, it hands the case to God rather than taking up a sword. It still asks God to bless the man who kills babies, and this lesson is inviting you to pray it. C. S. Lewis, who loved the Psalter, called the spirit of the cursing psalms "devilish" and refused to defend it, while holding that the psalms are still Scripture and that the honest thing is to say what they are. And the Roman Catholic Church, whose clergy and religious pray the Psalter through every four weeks, reached a practical conclusion: the Liturgy of the Hours revised in 1971 omits Psalms 58, 83 and 109 altogether and cuts the imprecatory verses from others, including these two, on the ground that they're unsuitable for public prayer in the vernacular.

So Christians who pray these psalms daily have landed in different places, and you should know that before you decide. This course keeps them and prays them, for the reason given above. I won't pretend that makes verse 9 comfortable. It doesn't, and it isn't meant to. What the genre does is tell you what kind of speech this is: a prayer, from the bottom, by people who weren't allowed to sing.

Wisdom: a proverb is not a promise

Now to the other half of the lesson. Three books in a Protestant Old Testament are usually classed as wisdom: Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, with Song of Songs and the wisdom psalms sometimes added.¹⁰ Catholic and Orthodox Bibles carry two more, Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach in particular is the closest ancient relative Proverbs has; lesson 8 gives the case for each canon.

Wisdom, in the Bible's sense, is the skill of making good choices in a world God has ordered. Proverbs is its plainest form: short sayings that state how life usually goes. The Hebrew word for these sayings, mashal, covers "figures of speech", "parables", and "specially contrived sayings", and Fee and Stuart draw the consequence: "The briefer a statement is, the less likely it is to be totally precise and universally applicable."¹⁰

That's how a proverb compresses, and it's worth holding next to how a poem does. A poem compresses by leaving the connections to the reader. A proverb compresses by stating a pattern in the fewest possible words and leaving the exceptions to the reader. "Look before you leap" doesn't tell you how long to look or what to look for, and it isn't about jumping.¹⁰ Neither is "a stitch in time saves nine" about sewing. Everyone handles English proverbs correctly, by instinct. The trouble starts when the same kind of sentence appears in the Bible and the instinct switches off, because "if it's in the Bible it must be a promise".

Fee and Stuart give four guidelines for reading Proverbs. The first is the one to memorise: "Proverbs Are Not Legal Guarantees from God."¹⁰ The blessings in the book "are likely to follow" wise choices, "but nowhere does Proverbs teach automatic success". The other three, worth knowing you have: proverbs are worded to be memorable rather than technically precise; they use highly specific language, sometimes figurative, to make a general point; and they're not exhaustive, so no single proverb should be pressed as though it were the whole of what the Bible says about its subject.

Proverbs 22:6, the verse that has hurt the most parents

Train a child in the way that he should go,
and when he is old he will not turn from it.

Proverbs 22:6 (NET)¹

Read badly. As a guarantee to parents. Raise your child rightly and they'll stay in the faith. The reading feels like taking God at his word, and it produces two kinds of damage. Parents whose grown children have left the faith conclude they failed, or that God did. And parents whose children stayed conclude it was their doing.

Read well. As a proverb: a compressed statement of how things usually go. A child shaped early in a good direction usually keeps it, and that's true, and it's a good reason to do the shaping. It isn't a mechanism that overrides the grown child's own choices, and the book that contains it knows that, because the same book contains Proverbs 26:4 and 5, which you read at the top of this lesson. A collection that puts two opposite instructions side by side is telling you, in its own form, that its sayings are situational.

Fee and Stuart make the same point from Proverbs 16:3, which they quote in the NIV as "Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed"; the NET has "Commit your works to the Lord, and your plans will be established".¹¹⁰ They call it "the sort of proverb that is most often misinterpreted". Some readers dedicate a selfish or foolish scheme to God and expect it to work. Others commit a good plan and watch it fail. Both, they say, "have failed to see that the proverb is not a categorical, always applicable, ironclad promise, but a more general truth".¹⁰

The wrinkle. Someone will say that this is a convenient way to explain away the verses that don't come true. It's worth asking whether anything in the Bible itself treats proverbs this way, or whether this is a modern reader's escape hatch.

There is, and it's the sharpest thing in the wisdom books. Job's three friends spend most of the book quoting wisdom at him. Suffering follows sin; the wicked don't prosper; put your house in order and God will restore you. Much of what they say could be lifted straight out of Proverbs. At the end, God speaks:

After the Lord had spoken these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, "My anger is stirred up against you and your two friends, because you have not spoken about me what is right, as my servant Job has."

Job 42:7 (NET)¹

The friends took true generalisations and applied them as guarantees to a case they didn't fit, and God says they haven't spoken rightly of him. Fee and Stuart read the verse the same way, and warn: "Do not engage in the kind of wisdom Job's friends did."¹⁰ So the rule that a proverb is not a promise isn't a modern escape hatch. That's how we read Job 42:7, and the textbook reads it the same way. (A fair caution: 42:7 says the friends have not spoken rightly about God, and readers differ on whether their fault was mainly their theology or mainly their misuse of a form. The two are hard to separate, because the form they misused was a form about how God runs the world.)

Job and Ecclesiastes, and what they do to Proverbs

Why are Job and Ecclesiastes in the Bible at all? The reading this course takes, and it's Longman's, is that they're the canon's own defence against turning wisdom into a slot machine. They do it in two different ways.

Job is a dialogue with a frame. A prose prologue (chapters 1 and 2) tells you, before anyone speaks, that Job's suffering isn't punishment, and a prose epilogue (42:7 to 17) vindicates him against his friends.¹⁰ Between them sits a long argument in poetry, chapters 3 to 41, in which the friends argue that the world is fair and Job argues that it isn't. The reader is given information the speakers lack, which means you can't read any speech in Job as "what the Bible teaches" without asking who's speaking and what God says about them at the end. Job's own conclusion is double: on whether life is fair, Job prevailed, "it is not"; on why him, God prevailed, and Job never gets an answer, only God.¹⁰

Ecclesiastes is a monologue with a frame. The Teacher, Qohelet in Hebrew, speaks in the first person from 1:12 to 12:7. Around him sit a prologue (1:1 to 11) and an epilogue (12:8 to 14) that talk about him in the third person.¹⁰ The book opens by calling him "the son of David, king in Jerusalem" (1:1) and has him say "I have been king over Israel in Jerusalem" (1:12),¹ which is a Solomonic voice; most scholars read that as a persona adopted by a later writer, partly because the book's Hebrew carries Persian loanwords, and date it to the Persian or Hellenistic period. The traditional attribution to Solomon himself has its defenders. Lesson 10 is where the course takes up questions of authorship properly.

His key word is hebel. The NET gives it as "futile", the King James as "vanity", the NIV as "meaningless". Literally it means vapour, or breath. Fee and Stuart count it thirty-seven times in this one book out of seventy-three in the whole Old Testament, and some commentaries count thirty-eight.¹⁰

"Futile! Futile!" laments the Teacher.
"Absolutely futile! Everything is futile!"

Ecclesiastes 1:2 (NET)¹

What the Teacher means by it is a real scholarly disagreement, and I want you to see one, because it runs through the middle of the textbook this course uses. Fee and Stuart report that their two recommended commentators, Tremper Longman and Iain Provan, "happen to be close friends" and read the book in opposite ways. Longman takes most of it as "cynical wisdom" set up as a foil, an outlook to be avoided. Provan takes it positively, as a guide to enjoying life under God in a world where everyone dies. And the two authors add that they themselves are split, one with each commentator.¹⁰

That's what honest reading of a hard book looks like. Notice what the disagreement is actually about: not whether the book has a frame, which nobody disputes, but what the frame does with the voice inside it. On Longman's reading the epilogue's closing "Fear God and keep his commandments" (12:13, NET) is the perspective that corrects the Teacher.¹ On Provan's, and on Michael Fox's, the frame narrator is presenting the Teacher approvingly, and the closing words gather up his argument rather than fencing it. We read the frame as governing, and you should know we hold that rather than found it. What both readings do agree on is narrower than it's often made to sound: that the book is framed, so whose voice you're reading is the first question at any verse in it.

A word for the Jewish reader, whose book this also is. Kohelet, as the tradition calls it, is one of the five Megillot, and it's read publicly in Ashkenazi synagogues on the Shabbat of Sukkot's intermediate days, and on Shemini Atzeret, the festival that follows, in years when no Shabbat falls there and in several other rites.¹¹ Sukkot is the festival of rejoicing. Here is its first line in the translation Jewish readers of English have used longest (Ecclesiastes 1:2, JPS 1917):⁷

Vanity of vanities, saith Koheleth; vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

A community that reads that at its feast of joy has been living with the book's frame for a very long time. It's worth adding that the rabbis argued about whether Kohelet belonged in the canon at all: the Mishnah records the dispute over whether it "defiles the hands", which is their idiom for being Scripture, and the decision was that it does.¹² So "it's in the Bible on purpose" is true, and it's a conclusion someone reached, not an obvious fact.

The one thing that doesn't survive translation

Almost everything in this lesson crosses languages, and that's a real feature of Hebrew poetry: thought-rhyme travels where sound-rhyme doesn't, which is why an English reader can see parallelism without knowing a word of Hebrew.

Not all of it crosses. Several psalms are alphabetic acrostics, where each line or stanza begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet: Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145, and all of Lamentations. Psalm 119 is twenty-two stanzas of eight verses, one stanza per letter, and its shape is an argument in itself, that there's a way to say everything about God's law from A to Z. In English you see none of it. Lesson 1 showed you the sharpest case: Psalms 9 and 10 are one broken acrostic, which is part of why the Greek Bible counts them as a single psalm and your Bible doesn't.

So the honest version is: parallelism survives translation, the acrostic doesn't, and knowing which is which tells you what to look for in a footnote.

What people get wrong

"A proverb is a promise." The most common misreading of any Old Testament genre, and the one with the most pastoral damage. A proverb is a generalisation, by design; Proverbs 26:4 and 5 prove it, and Job 42:7 is God's verdict on the people who forgot.

"The Psalms teach doctrine directly." They're full of doctrine, but they teach it through prayer, which is different. Read a psalm for what it says and miss its shape, and you'll find "contradictions" that are movements.

"Job's friends are quoting Scripture, so their speeches are what the Bible teaches." They're in the Bible and they're accurately reported, which isn't the same thing. Ask who's speaking, every time. It's the single most useful habit this lesson can give you for the wisdom books, and it's why Job 15:20 sounds so much like a proverb.

"Hebrew poetry rhymes in the original." Not in the sense of matching sounds at line ends. It rhymes thoughts, which is why so much of it survives translation. The acrostics don't.

"Ecclesiastes is a cynic who got in by mistake." The book has a frame. What the frame does with the Teacher's voice is argued by scholars who are friends; that the book belongs is a decision the tradition reached and recorded, not an accident.

"David wrote the Psalms and they're his diary." Some psalms carry "of David" in their superscription, and the Hebrew phrase can mean by him, for him, or belonging to a collection associated with him. Others name Asaph, the sons of Korah, Heman the Ezrahite, Moses, or nobody. A psalm's power doesn't rest on knowing who held the pen.

"The violent psalms should be skipped." This one isn't simply a mistake, and the section on Psalm 137 above says why: the Catholic Liturgy of the Hours omits several of them on pastoral grounds. Our position is that the imprecations are prayers that hand vengeance to God instead of taking it, and that removing them removes the Psalter's honesty about rage and the model for what to do with it. Know that serious Christians differ.

"Synonymous lines just repeat, so you can skim the second one." The second line is where the emphasis lands. Kugel's "what's more" is the corrective; read pairs of lines for what B adds to A.

Now do it yourself, on Psalm 22, Ecclesiastes, Psalm 1, and four passages out of order

Before you start, close the page and write down, from memory: the six elements of a lament in order; the test that tells a lament from a thanksgiving; as many of the seven psalm types as you can, with one psalm number each; and the proverb rule in one sentence. Then check against the lesson.

Connections

Lesson 3 gave you the reflex: what kind of writing is this, and what are its rules? This lesson applied it to compressed writing, where the rules are that the second line adds, the picture argues, the prayer moves, and the saying generalises. Lesson 2's covenant came back twice, as the hesed Psalm 13 stands on and the curses Psalm 137 invokes, and lesson 4's exile is the setting of the hardest psalm. Lesson 4's three-way sort came back in the Psalm 22 model answer.

Lesson 6 uses the same reflex on the parables, which compress the way a proverb does and spring the way a psalm turns. Lesson 7 will need imagery again for Revelation, where readers who decode pictures into events make the mistake this lesson warned about. Lesson 8 takes up why Catholic and Orthodox Bibles have wisdom books this one doesn't. Lesson 10 handles authorship, including the Solomon question. And in lesson 11, Psalm 1:1 comes back as a worked example of how translators handle a poem's opening.

Go deeper

• Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed., chapters 11 and 12. The two chapters this lesson is built from: the seven types with their psalm numbers, the six elements of a lament worked through Psalm 3, the five elements of a thanksgiving worked through Psalm 138, and the four guidelines for Proverbs with examples.
• Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, revised ed. (Basic Books, 2011). The companion to the Art of Biblical Narrative that lesson 3 uses. Alter's account of how the second line intensifies the first is the best literary treatment in English, and he writes from outside the Christian tradition, which is part of why he's worth reading.
• Christine Hayes, Open Yale Courses RLST 145, lecture 20 and lecture 21. "Responses to Suffering and Evil: Lamentations and Wisdom Literature" and "Biblical Poetry: Psalms and Song of Songs", free with transcripts. The historical-critical reading of the same books, including the Gunkel and Mowinckel material this lesson only summarises.
• Longman and Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Zondervan, 2006), the chapters on Psalms, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. If this lesson sent you into books you don't know, this is where you get your bearings in each: who is speaking, when, and what the arguments about the book are. Longman is also one of the two commentators whose disagreement about Ecclesiastes is described above.

Sources

1. NET Bible, 2nd ed. (Biblical Studies Press, 2019), netbible.org. Quoted as printed: Proverbs 26:4 to 5; 10:1; 15:1; 22:6; 16:3; 3:9 to 10; Psalm 19:1 to 2; 18:2; 51:5; 57:4; 114:4; 13; 42:5, 11 and 43:5; 137:1 and 8 to 9; 22:1; 1:1 to 3; 30:5; Isaiah 44:22; Hosea 7:14; Obadiah 21; Job 42:7; 15:20; Ecclesiastes 1:1, 1:2, 1:12, 12:13; Romans 12:19; Deuteronomy 32:35; Amos 5:24 (quiz 1); Proverbs 10:4 (quiz 2); Isaiah 55:12 (quiz 3); Ecclesiastes 9:5 (quiz 4); Psalm 109:8 to 9 (quiz 5); Psalm 6 (quiz 6). Superscriptions are omitted from the psalm quotations; see the callout above on what they are and how they affect Hebrew verse numbering. Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NET) are from the NET Bible® copyright ©1996, 2019 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved. See Editorial Standards 4.7 for why this course uses the NET.
2. Fee & Stuart 2014, ch. 5, for the proportion of the Old Testament that is narrative (more than forty percent), which lesson 3 charts. The remainder is mostly poetry, which is the claim made here; no exact figure for the poetry is given in this course's sources, and none is asserted.
3. Fee, G. D. & Stuart, D., How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014), ch. 11, "The Psalms: Israel's Prayers and Ours". Psalm 19 as synonymous parallelism ("not trying to say four different things"; "totally colorless"); poetry's vocabulary "purposefully metaphorical"; Psalm 51:5 as hyperbole; "a unique problem of hermeneutics", "words spoken to God"; the answer, "precisely in the ways they functioned for Israel in the first place"; the seven types with psalm numbers and counts ("more than sixty" laments; six community and ten individual thanksgiving psalms with the five thanksgiving elements worked on Psalm 138; nine royal; eight wisdom; ten songs of trust; "probably says something about our common humanity"); the six elements of a lament "in one way or another in virtually all of them" and "our discovery, not a rigid form"; Psalm 137 as a corporate lament, "hyperbolic language of the same extreme sort found in the covenant curses", "calls for judgment according to the covenant curses", "guide or channel our anger to and through God verbally rather than to or at anyone else", "it is God who is the actual hearer of these angry words", and the imprecatory psalms not contradicting Jesus' command to love enemies.
4. Lowth, R., De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum Praelectiones Academicae (Oxford, 1753); English translation by G. Gregory, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787). Lecture 19 sets out parallelism in three forms. Lowth was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1741 and later Bishop of London. Dates and the three forms verified against standard reference accounts at draft time; the Praelectiones itself was not consulted.
5. Fee & Stuart 2014, ch. 10, section "The Prophets as Poets": the three forms of parallelism defined, with Isaiah 44:22, Hosea 7:14 and Obadiah 21 as the examples quoted above.
6. Kugel, J. L., The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (Yale University Press, 1981), 339 pp. The second line "seconds" the first; the formula "A, and what's more, B". The book was not opened; publication details are verified against the AJS Review and Theology Today reviews (1982), the formula is quoted as it is universally reported, and the account of how B seconds A is taken from standard summaries rather than from Kugel's own words.
7. The Holy Scriptures: A New Translation (Jewish Publication Society, 1917), Psalm 19:8 and Ecclesiastes 1:2, read at Sefaria. The 1917 JPS is in the public domain and is the edition Editorial Standards 4.7 requires when quoting the Tanakh as the Tanakh or describing how Jews read a passage; the 1985 and 2023 JPS translations are copyrighted and are not used. Note that JPS numbers Psalm 19:8 where an English Christian Bible has 19:7, because the superscription is verse 1 in Hebrew.
8. Gunkel, H., with Begrich, J., Einleitung in die Psalmen (1933). The classification of the psalms by form and by Sitz im Leben; Gunkel died in 1932 leaving the work to Begrich. Sigmund Mowinckel's development of the cultic setting, and his reading of the enthronement psalms as the liturgy of an annual festival, is the standing counter-position to reading a psalm first as private prayer. Neither volume was opened; both are described from standard reference accounts and from Hayes's lecture 21.
9. Hayes, C., Open Yale Courses RLST 145, lecture 21, "Biblical Poetry: Psalms and Song of Songs" (2006), transcript: form criticism from Gunkel and Mowinckel; "the very serious form critics will give you upwards of 13, 14, 15 or more different forms for the psalms"; Psalm 137 "clearly from the perspective of the exile". Hayes retired in 2023 and is Sterling Professor Emerita.
10. Fee & Stuart 2014, ch. 12, "Wisdom: Then and Now". The wisdom books; mashal as "figures of speech", "parables", "specially contrived sayings"; "The briefer a statement is, the less likely it is to be totally precise and universally applicable"; "Look before you leap"; Guideline 1, "Proverbs Are Not Legal Guarantees from God", "likely to follow", "nowhere does Proverbs teach automatic success"; Proverbs 16:3 as "the sort of proverb that is most often misinterpreted", quoted by them in the NIV, and "not a categorical, always applicable, ironclad promise, but a more general truth"; "Do not engage in the kind of wisdom Job's friends did"; Job 15:20 as Eliphaz; Job's prologue, epilogue and double verdict ("it is not"); Ecclesiastes' prologue and epilogue, the Teacher in the first person and the frame in the third; hebel thirty-seven times of seventy-three; Longman and Provan as "close friends" with opposite readings and the authors themselves divided; 12:13 to 14 as the final perspective. The wording of the four guidelines beyond the first is summarised rather than quoted, since only the first is recorded verbatim in this course's research.
11. Kohelet in the Sukkot liturgy: read on the Shabbat of the intermediate days by Ashkenazim, and on Shemini Atzeret in years when no Shabbat falls there and in several other rites (Yemenite, Italian, some Sephardi, and the mediaeval French rite). This is a claim about current practice and it varies by community; it is given here from reference accounts rather than from a rite's own rubric, and a reader in any particular community should take their own community's practice over this sentence.
12. Mishnah Yadayim 3:5 records the dispute over whether Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs "defile the hands", the rabbinic idiom for canonical status, and the ruling that they do. Cited in this course's SOURCES.md and used in lesson 1 for the same point about the Jewish canon's edges.