How to Read the Bible as Literature: . . . and Get More Out of It

by Leland Ryken

  TYPES OF PSALMS

  Let me say at the outset that biblical scholars have identified so many types of psalms, and made so many arbitrary and subtle distinctions, that the whole enterprise is in danger of collapsing under its own weight.2 I say this because sooner or later it may be liberating to realize that we are under no obligation to use a complicated system of classification. All of the Psalms are lyrics, and we can do an excellent job with any psalm by using what we know about poetic language and lyric form. We should also note that classification of the Psalms rests largely on elements of content or subject matter, not on literary form as such.

  Lament Psalms

  The largest category of psalms is the lament psalm, which can be either private or communal. A lament psalm consists of the following five elements, which (note well) may appear in any order and which can occur more than once in a given psalm.

  An invocation or introductory cry to God, which is sometimes expanded by the addition of epithets (titles) and often already includes an element of petition.

  The lament or complaint: a definition of the distress; a description of the crisis; the stimulus that accounts for the entire lament. Most lament poems are “occasional poems,” arising from a particular occasion in the poet’s life, which is usually hinted at in the complaint section.

  Petition or supplication.

  Statement of confidence in God.

  Vow to praise God, or simply praise of God.

  Psalms 10, 35, 38, 51, 74, and 77 are typical lament psalms.3

  Psalm 54 as a Lament Psalm

  Psalm 54 (RSV) illustrates the form of the lament psalm in succinct fashion. It reverses the normal order of events by beginning with the petition or supplication:

  Save me, O God, by thy name,

  and vindicate me by thy might.

  This is followed by the cry to God to hear the prayer (the element that usually comes first):

  Hear my prayer, O God;

  give ear to the words of my mouth.

  The lament or complaint, as so often in the Psalms, defines the crisis in terms of threat from personal enemies:

  For insolent men have risen against me,

  ruthless men seek my life;

  they do not set God before them.

  The poet then asserts his confidence in God:

  Behold, God is my helper;

  the LORD is the upholder of my life.

  He will requite my enemies with evil;

  in thy faithfulness put an end to them.

  The poet ends with a vow to praise God:

  With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to thee;

  I will give thanks to thy name, O LORD, for

  it is good.

  For thou hast delivered me from every trouble,

  and my eye has looked in triumph on my

  enemies.

  Praise Psalms

  The second major grouping of psalms is the psalms of praise. The English word “to praise” originally meant “to appraise; to set a price on.” From this came the idea that to praise means “to commend the worth of.” The psalms of praise, theocentric in emphasis, direct praise to God. Such poems are the voice of response to the worthiness of God.

  Elements of Praise

  The elements of praise (not to be confused with the form of praise psalms discussed below) are what give these poems their distinctive traits. One of these elements is the elevation and exaltation of the person being praised. A second one is the directing of the speaker’s whole being away from himself or herself toward the object of praise. Psalms of praise are filled with the speaker’s feelings, but we do not look at the speaker. Instead, we share his feelings as a way of experiencing the worthiness of God. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points.’ ”4 Another ingredient of much praise is testimony. Praise, in other words, has a communal dimension to it, and it often occurs in a worship setting.

  Declarative and Descriptive Praise

  There are two main types of praise in the Psalms. Declarative or narrative praise extols God’s activity on a particular occasion. Its main thrust is that God has done such and such on a specific occasion. Descriptive praise describes God’s qualities or the acts that he does perpetually. Its thrust is that God is this or that, or that he habitually does these things. Descriptive praise, in other words, is not occasional in the way that declarative praise is. Both types can be either private or communal.

  The Form of the Praise Psalm

  The psalm of praise has a fixed form, just as the lament has. There are three parts.

  The introduction to praise regularly consists of one or more of the following elements: (a) a call or exhortation to sing to the Lord, to praise, to exalt; (b) the naming of the person or group to whom the exhortation is directed; (c) mention of the mode of praise. Psalm 149:1–3 is an introduction possessing all three elements.

  Development of the praise ordinarily begins with a motivational section or phrase in which the poet gives the reason for the call to praise. The most important part of any psalm of praise is what follows, namely, the catalog (listing) of the praiseworthy acts or qualities of God.

  The conclusion or resolution of the praise ends the poem on a note of finality. It often takes the form of a brief prayer or wish.

  This three-part structure is obviously a specific manifestation of the three-part lyric structure noted earlier in this chapter.

  The Catalog of Praise

  The most crucial element in a praise psalm is the catalog of praiseworthy acts or qualities of God. Accordingly, a necessary part of explicating such a poem is to divide the catalog into its topical units. Such a division will show the remarkable range in most psalms of praise. It might also uncover the presence of declarative praise and descriptive praise in the same catalog. Typical psalms of praise include Psalms 18, 30, 65, 66, 96, 97, 103, 107, 124, 136, and 139.5

  Worship Psalms

  Worship psalms, also known as songs of Zion, are an important category. They do not have a fixed form like lament and praise psalms, but they are readily identified by the presence of references to worship in Jerusalem. Many of these poems also allude to the pilgrimages that were a regular part of Old Testament religious experience (in fact, the heading “A Song of Ascents” for Psalms 120–134 shows that these pilgrim songs were sung or recited on the trips to Jerusalem). Worship psalms are among the most beautiful in the Psalter and are well represented by Psalms 27, 42–43, 48, 84, 121, 122, 125, 137.

  Nature Poems

  Nature poems are also a high point of the Psalms. Although nature finds its way indirectly into dozens of psalms, there are five psalms that we can call nature poems—Psalms 8, 19, 29, 104, and 148. They all share common traits: they take some aspect of nature as their subject; they praise nature for its beauty, power, provision, and so forth; and they describe nature in evocative word-pictures that awaken our own experiences of nature. Needless to say, the poet in each of these poems does not treat nature as the highest good but allows nature to become the occasion for praising God, the creator of nature.

  SUMMARY

  The psalms of lament and the psalms of praise are the two primary lyric types in the Psalter. A host of smaller categories fill out the Psalms. In addition to the categories of worship psalms and nature poems discussed above, there are descriptive-meditative poems (such as Psalm 1 on the godly person or Psalm 119 on the law of God), royal psalms that deal with the king, penitential psalms (prayers for forgiveness), and imprecatory psalms (psalms calling misfortune on one’s enemies). Psalms such as 23 lack the opening call to praise of the praise psalms, but in every other way belong to that type.

  LOVE LYRICS

  The Bible contains some of the most beautiful love poetry in the world. It appears mainly in the Song of Solomon. The best way to understand this frequently misinterpreted book is simply to compare it with the love poetry that one can find in a standard anthology of English
poetry.

  Types of Love Poems in the Song of Solomon

  My present purpose will be served by simply categorizing the types of love poems in the Song of Solomon. The largest category is pastoral love poems, in which the setting is an idealized rural world and the characters are described metaphorically as shepherds and shepherdesses. Such poetry describes in rural images and metaphors the delights of the love relationship. In the pastoral invitation to love the lover invites the beloved to share the life of happy, fulfilled love by metaphorically picturing that life of shared love as a walk in nature (Song of Sol. 2:10–15; 7:10–13).

  A blazon is a love poem that praises the beauty and virtue of the beloved, usually by comparing features of the beloved to objects of nature (e.g., 2:3). In an emblematic blazon, the lover lists the features of the beloved and compares them to objects or emblems in nature (4:1–7; 5:10–16; 6:4–10; 7:1–9). The key to interpreting such poems is to realize that they are symbolic rather than pictorial; literally pictured, these comparisons are ludicrous. An epithalamion is a poem celebrating a wedding (Song of Sol. 2:3–5:1; and Ps. 45).6

  ENCOMIUM

  Definition of an Encomium

  One of the most appealing of all lyric forms in the Bible is the encomium. An encomium is a lyric (whether in poetry or prose) that praises either an abstract quality or a general character type. The conventional formulas in an encomium are these:

  An introduction to the topic that will be praised.

  The distinguished and ancient ancestry of the subject.

  The praiseworthy acts and/or attributes of the subject.

  The indispensable or superior nature of the subject.

  A conclusion urging the reader to emulate the subject.

  Encomia in the Bible

  A few biblical encomia are in prose rather than poetry, but the prose is so tightly packed with imagery and so highly patterned that it is virtually poetic in effect. Psalms 1, 15, 112, and 128 all praise the godly person (a general character type). Proverbs 31:10–31 is an acrostic poem that paints a composite portrait of the ideal wife. John 1:1–18 and Colossians 1:15–20 praise Christ with the conventional encomiastic motifs. Hebrews 11 (and 12:1–2) and 1 Corinthians 13 (and 14:1) praise the abstract qualities of faith and love respectively. The portrait of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 52:13–53:12 is a reversal or parody of the conventional formulas.7

  Further Reading

  Hermann Gunkel’s seminal monograph The Psalms: A Form-Critical Introduction, trans. Thomas M. Homer (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967), remains a good brief introduction to types of Psalms. Arthur Weiser, The Psalms: A Commentary, trans. Herbert Hartwell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), written from a liberal theological perspective, is particularly thorough on analyzing the types of Psalms.

  Full explications of specimens of all the types discussed in this chapter appear in my book The Literature of the Bible, pp. 121–230. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Macmillan, 1958), is a thematic study of the Psalms that shows great sensitivity to the lyric and poetic form in which those themes are presented.

  1Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958), 3.

  2The strengths and limitations of these classifications are well represented by the books of Claus Westermann, including the following: The Praise of God in the Psalms, trans. Keith R. Crim (Richmond: John Knox, 1965); and The Psalms: Structure, Content, and Message, trans. Ralph D. Gehrke (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1980).

  3They are explicated in my book The Literature of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), 138–44.

  4E. M. W. Tillyard and C. S. Lewis, The Personal Heresy (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 11.

  5They are explicated in Ryken, Literature of the Bible, 146–64.

  6For explications of the poems in the Song of Solomon, see Ryken, Literature of the Bible, 217–30 and 234–35.

  7Detailed explications of these passages appear in Ryken, Literature of the Bible, 201–14.

  Chapter Six

  The Proverb as a Literary Form

  The Bible: An Aphoristic Book

  A PROVERB OR APHORISM (I will use the terms interchangeably) is a concise, memorable statement of truth. It is one of the dominant literary forms in the Bible and is not confined to what is called Old Testament wisdom literature. The Bible as a whole is the most aphoristic book in the world. The English poet Francis Thompson, commenting on how the Bible influenced his writing, called the Bible “a treasury of gnomic wisdom. I mean its richness in utterances of which one could, as it were, chew the cud. This, of course, has long been recognised, and Biblical sentences have passed into the proverbial wisdom of our country.”1

  Examples of Proverbs

  In seeking to gain an understanding of the proverb as a literary form, we can best begin by noting the characteristics of an individual proverb. I will generalize about the form on the basis of the following five specimens, deliberately chosen from diverse parts of the Bible to show how widely the form appears in the Bible.

  “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money; / nor he who loves wealth, with gain” (Eccl. 5:10 RSV).

  “The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, / shining ever brighter till the full light of day” (Prov. 4:18).

  “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30).

  “A man reaps what he sows” (Gal. 6:7).

  “The tongue. . .is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body”(James 3:6).

  Proverbs Are Striking and Memorable

  The first thing that we notice about these specimens is that they are memorable. When we first hear or read a proverb, we obviously do not know if we will remember it, but it has a striking effect on us at once, and we recognize that it is worthy of memorization. The aim of a proverb is to make an insight permanent. A literary scholar has theorized that

  to epigrammatize an experience is to strip it down, to cut away irrelevance, to eliminate local, specific, and descriptive detail, to reduce it to and fix it in its most permanent and stable aspect, to sew it up for eternity.2

  The proverb shares with other literary forms the desire to overcome by means of arresting strangeness the cliché effect of ordinary discourse. To create an aphorism requires a skill with language that most people lack. It is, in short, a literary gift, a way with words.

  Proverbs Are Both Simple and Profound

  A second excellence of proverbs is that they are both simple and profound. On the one hand, they are glorious proof that the simple can be a form of beauty. Proverbs are short and easily grasped. They strip down an experience to its essence and omit everything extraneous. Yet they can penetrate life to its most profound level, and we never get to the end of their application. For example, the observation that “he who loves money will not be satisfied with money” is a deceptively simple statement. It is actually a double comment about money: a person is unsatisfied by money because (a) the appetite for money grows by indulgence and is therefore insatiable, and (b) material things do not satisfy permanently and at the deepest level.

  Proverbs Are Both Specific and General

  Another paradoxical quality of proverbs is that they are both specific and general, both particularized and universal. Notice all the particulars in the proverbs cited above. They talk about money and path and light and yoke and sowing and reaping and fire. Yet each of these proverbs covers a whole host of similar events. Proverbs always express an observation about a general tendency in life, not about a unique occurrence. Furthermore, a specific proverb often covers a whole cluster of related experiences. The aphorism “What a person sows, that he will also reap” applies to many areas of life. Proverbs thus follow a very basic literary principle: their way of getting at the universal is through the particular.

  Proverbs Are Often Poetic in Form

  Another crucial fact about proverbs is that they are often poetic in form. Much of the wisdom literature in the Bible is expressed in the form of pa
rallelism. But regardless of whether proverbs are in verse or prose, they frequently use the resources of figurative language. Everything that I said about the poetic idiom in the chapter on poetry applies to proverbs; indeed, proverbs could legitimately be included among the types of biblical poetry.

  Simile and metaphor are especially abundant in proverbs, as the specimens cited above demonstrate. Whole chapters in the Book of Proverbs consist of comparisons. Makers of proverbs love to use one area of human experience or external reality to cast light on another area. For example, all that is beautiful and positive about the godly life is pictured as the rising sun. The destructiveness of speech is rendered metaphorically as a fire. Jesus’ great aphorism that his yoke is easy and his burden light combines metaphor and paradox. All of this means that the rules for interpreting figures of speech are a necessary part of interpreting proverbs.