Life giving resources. Faithfully delivered.
FREE delivery on orders over £10
Serving over 2 million Christians in the UK
with Bibles, Books and Church Supplies
Our Buy-Now-Pay-Later accounts used
by over 4,000 UK Churches & Schools
Excellent 4.8 out of 5

Trustpilot

You now have 0 of this item in your basket

Idea Of Biblical Poetry

Parallelism and Its History [Paperback]

by L. Kugel James

Book Format
Paperback
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Published
August 1998
Weight
495g

Bible Studies and Commentaries

Read full description

Click to expand

Today's Price

£17.80

Save 23%

Free UK Delivery

Available - Usually dispatched within 4 days

Buying for a school or church? Upgrade to a FREE Eden Advance Account

Enter the product quantity

Idea Of Biblical Poetry

Today's Price £17.80

Frequently Bought Together

Idea Of Biblical Poetry

by L. Kugel James

Paperback

Cover to Cover: 1, 2 & 3 John

by Claire Musters

Add both to basket for £24.28 and save £5.71

Product Description

This text reviews the history of conventional critical literary methods of studying and teaching the Old Testament. Challenging the received wisdom of recent centuries, it focuses on two literary approaches to the Old Testament - parallelism and metrics - seeking to expose their failings. The author postulates that when the Old Testament began to be studied as poetry it ceased to be understood. In this text he reviews the process whereby literary scholars differentiated parts of the Old Testament as prose or poetry, and finds it mistaken. He focuses his attention on two fixtures in literary approaches to the Old Testament - "parallelism" and metrics. An example of "parallelism" is cited as "The righteous man flourishes like a palm tree/Like a cedar in Lebanon he grows great", from Psalm 92:13. Kugel argues that this example is not necessarily a sign of poetry, nor is metre, even in those cases where the metre is unambiguous. As long ago as the 12th century, Rabbi Sa'adya Ga'on, himself a poet, dismissed the idea that anything in the Bible could be regarded as poetry.This controversial work should be of interest to scholars who have applied conventional literary critical methods to study and teach the Old Testament.