Rules for Interpreting Hebrew Poetry, Part 1 | Rapp Report Daily 0061 | Striving for Eternity

Welcome to The Rapid Bull, daily edition, where we provide a quick biblical interpretations and applications. This is a ministry of striving for eternity.

Interpreting Scripture by Genre

As we continue looking from last week on the rules of interpretation, we said that the first and important lesson when you want to interpret the Bible is to identify the type of genre or literature you're dealing with.

Because each of these types of genres have different rules. Last week we focused almost exclusively on one style, historical narrative. This week, however, we want to address another one, and it is poetic literature.

Hebrew Poetry and Parallelism

This one is a little bit different. You're going to see the Psalms, Song of Solomon, books like this that are going to be poetic. And Hebrew poetry is different than, well, English poetry. It doesn't have rhyme, which kind of says something, because the God who knew that the Bible was going to be translated in different languages, yeah, maybe rhyming wouldn't work well, because if you take something in English that rhymes, translate it to another language, it doesn't rhyme anymore.

So how is it that we interpret poetic literature in Hebrew poetry? It's not based on rhyming. It is based on parallelism. You're going to find parallels between one thought and another, or one line and another.

Reading the Psalms as Poetry

We're going to give you some examples this week of those different types of poetry and those different types of parallelisms to look for. And so check those out. We're going to be going into this a little bit so you can start to identify when you're dealing with the book of Psalms how to interpret the book of Psalms, how to interpret poetic literature in Hebrew.

Hope you listen to this and the other podcasts on the Christian Podcast Community.

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.