Post by Josh on Sept 12, 2011 18:11:51 GMT -8
“Most emphatically, the Psalms must be read as poems; as lyrics, with all the licenses and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry”
-C.S. Lewis Reflections on the Psalms
Here's the link to the audio teaching: Intro to the Psalms Audio
but I thought I'd most the most important nuggets in text form here.
One of the major points we discussed is Hebrew poetry's use of "parallelism"- saying the same thing two times (or more) with different words. We talked about the dangers of not understanding this and therefore reading into the passage too many dogmatic subtleties. That said, poetry is in its very nature full of wonderful ambiguity and fluid application. It's just that we need to remember it is primarily a work of art not a didactic treatise.
But we also discussed how fortunate it is that unlike rhyme and meter, parallelism can easily be translated from language to language and that it may be, in God's wisdom, He prepared the Psalms to be able to transcend their original culture and become a heritage to all believers of all times.
-C.S. Lewis Reflections on the Psalms
Here's the link to the audio teaching: Intro to the Psalms Audio
but I thought I'd most the most important nuggets in text form here.
One of the major points we discussed is Hebrew poetry's use of "parallelism"- saying the same thing two times (or more) with different words. We talked about the dangers of not understanding this and therefore reading into the passage too many dogmatic subtleties. That said, poetry is in its very nature full of wonderful ambiguity and fluid application. It's just that we need to remember it is primarily a work of art not a didactic treatise.
But we also discussed how fortunate it is that unlike rhyme and meter, parallelism can easily be translated from language to language and that it may be, in God's wisdom, He prepared the Psalms to be able to transcend their original culture and become a heritage to all believers of all times.