The Poetical and Wisdom Books
Placement and Contents
The title “Poetical Books” for the canonical section comprised of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, is somewhat inaccurate; the canonical division of “Prophets” also contains much poetry, and not all of these “Poetical Works” are poetry. In Jewish tradition these five books are included in the Writings, the third division of the canon; their order there varies widely in different manuscripts and editions, and this section also includes prose works such as Chronicles. The earliest evidence for seeing Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon as a unit comes from the second century ce, though it took many centuries for these five books, in the arrangement found here, to be recognized as the third section of the Christian Bible. The order of these books was variable, and some traditions placed them at the end of the Christian Old Testament, while others put them following the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Its current placement in English Bibles follows some manuscript traditions, which most likely sought to organize the first section of the Christian Bible by placing the Torah first, followed by other works about the past (the Historical Books), books about the present (the Poetical Books), and books about the future (the Prophetic Books). This arrangement, which places the prophets last, would have also fostered the idea that the Old Testament is an introduction to the New Testament; the Prophetic Books would then immediately precede the Gospels as prophecy followed by fulfillment.
The five Poetical Books were written or edited at widely different times and consist of many different literary genres, such as love poetry (the Song of Solomon), Temple liturgy (most of Psalms), and wisdom literature (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes). It is likely that they entered the canon for quite different reasons: Psalms was used for prayers; the Song of Solomon was probably first canonized as an ancient love poem used in wedding ceremonies; while Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes may have been become canonical under the influence of a class of sages who wrote, preserved, and studied wisdom literature. These books thus do not form a unit sharing basic themes or vocabulary, unlike works assigned to other canonical divisions, such as the Historical Books or the Prophetic Books.
“Wisdom literature” has typically been described in terms of works that focus or reflect on universal human concerns, especially the understanding of individual experiences and the maintenance of ordered relationships that lead both to success on the human plane and to divine approval. Some scholars see such books as deriving from a particular group of ancient Israelite scribes. Books classified as “wisdom literature” are thus in some ways a departure from the concerns of most other biblical books. They do not focus primarily on the nation of Israel and on its great formative historical memories, such as the Exodus from Egypt, or on Jerusalem and the Temple. They do not mention covenant, the central theological notion that elsewhere in the Bible binds together God, the people of Israel, and the land of Israel.
In recent scholarship, the concept of “wisdom” has been criticized as too elastic and amorphous. Indeed, the three wisdom books in this collection are remarkably different from one another: Proverbs suggests that the righteous are rewarded and do not suffer; the book of Job profoundly challenges this view; while Ecclesiastes, in contrast to both Job and Proverbs, is deeply skeptical of the utility of wisdom. In addition, portions of many biblical books contain passages that are similar to Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, or include passages that also emphasize the importance of the divine order and are not centered on covenant. Nevertheless, “wisdom,” as a modern category deriving from the beginning of the twentieth century, remains useful.
Proverbs is representative of a type of ancient Near Eastern thought that looked for pattern and repetition in nature and in the moral life. In this tradition, the regular recurrence of natural phenomena could provide an analogy to guide human beings in their social interactions:
As charcoal is to hot embers and wood to fire,
so is a quarrelsome person for kindling strife (Prov 26.21).
The inevitability of the natural occurrence is mirrored in the inevitability of the social one. This kind of thinking then was extended to moral behavior, with the argument that good behavior, like good farming practice, will be rewarded:
Anyone who tends a fig tree will eat its fruit,
and anyone who takes care of a master will be honored (Prov 27.18).
Job and Ecclesiastes to some extent dispute this widespread ancient Near Eastern tradition. Job denies the inevitability of rewards for living an upright life and refutes the idea that human suffering is always deserved. Ecclesiastes treats the idea of inevitability in a different way: the natural repetitions of seasons, tasks, and occupations become an image of futility, in which people are “like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare” (9.12), powerless to understand their own destiny. The themes of the wisdom tradition are continued in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books of the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), both of which combine didactic themes and style familiar especially from the book of Proverbs with retrospective summaries of Israel’s history, thus extending the borders of wisdom literature.
Although Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon are loosely described as Poetical Books, they are not all poetry. Ecclesiastes contains some poetical sections, such as the poem of 3.1–8 (“For everything there is a season”), or quoted poetic proverbs (e.g., 7.1–6), but the book is predominantly prose. The first two chapters of Job and its final eleven verses are also prose. Additionally, the nature of the poetry in these books is very different, ranging from the highly structured, largely static poetry of Proverbs, to the intensely erotic, more free‐flowing poetry of Song of Solomon.
The Characteristics of Biblical Poetry
Poetry is a cross‐cultural phenomenon: most cultures distinguish between an everyday type of discourse (prose), and heightened discourse (poetry). This heightening may be accomplished in a number of different ways, including the use of figuration (e.g., metaphor, simile), meter, and certain types of sound patterning, such as alliteration and rhyme. Some of these features are broadly shared between the poetry of different peoples, while other are highly specific to particular cultures. Thus Hebrew poetry, unlike its classical English counterpart, has neither (true) rhythm nor rhyme; nevertheless, it is poetic in that it uses certain devices in significant enough concentration to distinguish it from everyday speech or prose. The prose‐poetry distinction is relative rather than absolute; as in English, we may speak of poetic prose and prosaic poetry. Thus, “pure prose” and “pure poetry” should be seen as opposites on a continuum, within which a large variety of possibilities occur in the Bible as in other literary traditions.
The main shared characteristic between typical English poetry and biblical poetry is the use of figuration. This may be seen, for example, in the central image of Psalm 23, which is introduced by the metaphor, “The Lord is my shepherd” (v. 1). The following verses unpack or detail the meaning of this metaphor, noting in vv. 2–3 how God, the ideal shepherd, tends his people/sheep:
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.
Psalm 1 is characterized by a set of two contrasting similes: the righteous
are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither (v. 3),
while the wicked “are like chaff that the wind drives away” (v. 4). The Song of Solomon is especially rich in similes and metaphors, as in the beginning of ch 2:
I am a rose of Sharon,
a lily of the valleys.
As a lily among brambles,
so is my love among maidens.
As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among young men.
With great delight I sat in his shadow,
and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
The main characteristic of biblical poetry, nevertheless, is not figuration but parallelism, in which most poetic lines may be divided into two (or sometimes three) parts; the second part of the line is intimately connected to the first part through a variety of means, such as semantics and/or syntax and/or sound‐play, and typically seconds it in some way. For example, Ps 6.2 reads:
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing;
O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror.
The verse clearly divides into two more or less equal sections, and each element in the first part is mirrored, seconded, or paralleled in the second. Parallelism, which is not typical of biblical prose, serves as the backbone of biblical poetry.
Since the eighteenth century, it has been customary to see three main types of parallelism in the Bible: synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic. The earlier quotation from Ps 6.2 is an example of synonymous parallelism—the second part of the verse more or less repeats the first. Antithetical parallelism can be seen in Prov 10.1:
A wise child makes a glad father,
but a foolish child is a mother’s grief.
In this balanced, two‐part line, the elements in the first line are antithetical, or opposite, to those in the second. In synthetic parallelism, the second part of the line completes the thought of the first part, and is neither the same nor the opposite—both parts are needed to complete the thought. For example, after the superscription “A psalm of David,” Ps 23.1 continues:
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
Here the second part concludes the idea of the first; the verse may be converted into prose by adding the word “because”: “Because the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”
The appropriateness of the three labels—synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic—which were accepted by biblical scholars for two centuries, has been called into question on several grounds. First, languages have no true synonyms; thus “synonymous parallelism” is a misleading term. Furthermore, very often two parallel words can be similar but are not the same, as may be seen in the example from Ps 6.2: “I am languishing” || “my bones are shaking with terror.” The term antithetical parallelism has been questioned because not all elements of part B are the antithesis of part A. This may be seen in the example from Prov 10.1, where “child” is used in both parts A and B; a complete antithesis might contrast a “wise child” with a “foolish parent.” Finally, “synthetic” has been criticized as too vague. Although these criticisms are fair, the three terms, if understood as ideal types from which actual lines may deviate to a greater or lesser extent, remain useful.
A much more serious criticism of the classical model emerged in the mid‐1980s. Before that, many interpreters thought that parallelism is formulaic, and the second half of the poetic line typically adds little to the line, but merely seconds it. This was substantiated, many scholars thought, by the study of modes of oral composition of traditional poetry, where formulae filled in the line, allowing the poet to concentrate on the following line. Several scholars have since suggested just the opposite, that the second part heightens or extends the first, and according to them, the typical biblical verse should be read “A, and even more so, B.” This model, which has gained substantial support, would suggest that Ps 6.2b, “O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror” is not a type of filler that merely restates “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing.” Rather we would understand the verse as a whole as: “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing,” and moreover, “O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror,” where the claim “for my bones are shaking with terror” is a more vivid description that intensifies the verse’s opening “for I am languishing.”
To complicate matters, sometimes, as in the previous example, it is clear that the second part of the verse does go beyond the first part in some significant fashion, and thus justifies this newer model. Yet in other cases the second part seems to be a filler, carrying little if any semantic weight, let alone intensifying the first. For example, the major image of Ps 121 is the ability of God to protect the individual. This is expressed at the psalm’s center, where God is imagined metaphorically as a “shade” (v. 5) from the intense Mediterranean sun. The psalm continues (v. 6): “The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.” The second part, “nor the moon by night” is not an intensification; in fact, it makes no sense, since no one in ancient Israel was afflicted with moonburn or moonstroke. The second part here is a(n antithetical) filler and carries no semantic weight. It should thus be seen as part of an ancient Near Eastern and biblical pattern of word pairs, where a particular word (e.g., “sun” or “father”) automatically evokes a related (“antithetical” or “synonymous”) word (e.g., “moon” or “mother”).
Thus, parallelism is much more complicated than would appear on the surface. Clearly it is characterized by sets of lines, each of which may be divided into two (or less often, three) parts, typically of the same length and mirroring each other on semantic, syntactic, and phonological levels. It is sometimes unclear if the second should typically be read as an intensification of the first, or as a filler that carries little or no semantic value. This uncertainty is extremely frustrating not only because it leaves us unsure how to read much of biblical poetry, especially the extent to which we do or do not need to pay close attention to the second half of the line, but also because our understanding of this aspect of biblical poetry will affect our reconstruction of many Israelite institutions. To return to Prov 10.1—“A wise child makes a glad father, but a foolish child is a mother’s grief”—if we follow the older understanding of parallelism, the second half is largely a filler, indicating that the father had the major role in the child’s upbringing in ancient Israel, while if we follow the newer understanding, where the second intensifies the first, the mother was primarily responsible for the child.
Another area that has engendered significant controversy concerns the extent to which meter or rhythm existed in biblical poetry. Much of this debate concerns the definition of meter. In the Western poetic tradition, meter is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables; biblical poetic texts in their current form lack meter or rhythm. Extensive metrical patterns can be found in some biblical texts only if they are emended or reconstructed extensively. Biblical lines in most poetic works, however, are approximately the same length. There is some possibility that this reflects the remnant of some metrical system, and that at an earlier time, each part had the same pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables as well as the same length, but this pattern has been lost as a result of changes in the pronunciation of ancient Hebrew over time. More likely, Hebrew always lacked true meter, and the similarity of length is part of the larger system of parallelism, which encouraged each part to mirror its counterpart in length, as well as in semantic, syntactic, and phonological structure.
Scholars have until recently been primarily concerned with the line as the main unit of biblical poetry. This is not really surprising, given how foreign biblical parallelism is to the modern Western (but not the ancient Near Eastern) ear. This interest in the line has obscured the significance of the strophe or stanza and of the poem as a whole. But recent scholarship has seen a legitimate return to these larger units. For example, when studying passages like Job 3, most earlier scholars concentrated on the parallelism of lines like v. 5:
Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.
Let clouds settle upon it;
let the blackness of the day terrify it.
Now, in addition to this type of analysis, interpreters study how the poet creates this exquisite poem by using images of day and night, light and darkness, throughout the entire chapter. This is not, however, an either/or proposition: Looking at how the individual line functions as poetry and how these lines sometimes join together to form complete poems, offers a much fuller appreciation and understanding of these Poetical Books; this includes appreciating other large‐scale structures of poems, such as acrostics and chiasm (e.g., ABBA) units.
Authorship
At least four of the five Poetical Books, according to their traditional authorship, derive from the kings of the United Monarchy, David and Solomon. Approximately half of the Psalms contain superscriptions or titles incorporating “of David,” and many early Jewish and Christian traditions attribute all 150 of the Psalms to David. Proverbs 1.1 (“The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel”), 10.1, and 25.1 explicitly attribute (sections of) that book to Solomon. Ecclesiastes, in its opening chapter, presents itself as “the words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem” (1.1; cf. 1.12); premodern Jewish and Christian tradition understood this royal teacher to be Solomon, who is described in 1 Kings as exceedingly rich, just like the protagonist of Ecclesiastes. Finally, the Song of Solomon opens with an explicit (but secondary; see Song 1.1n.) note: “the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.” Given the association of Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon with David and Solomon, it is not surprising that some early Christian interpreters connected Job as well to the period of Solomon. This canonical division of five books thus likely came into being not because they were poetic, but as the compilations connected to David and his son Solomon; only secondarily was it labeled the “Poetical Books.” This traditional attributions of authorship, however, have been rejected by modern scholars; see the Introduction to each book for a detailed discussion.