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Appreciating the Poetry · Reformed Thinking

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Welcome back to Reform Thinking. I'm your host, and frankly, I am
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itching to get into this one. We have a stack of notes, a very
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specific book on the table, and a lot of ground to cover.
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It is good to be here and Reform thinking is, I think, the right
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banner for today's discussion because we are tackling the very
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machinery of how we read the Bible.
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It sounds technical, but for anyone who holds to the
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Westminster Confession or just loves the Scriptures, this is
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really where the rubber meets the road.
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We are looking at Interpreting the Psalms, An Exegetical
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Handbook by Mark de Futado. Now, I know the title sounds
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like something you'd find on a, you know, dusty shelf in a
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seminary basement, but this book is actually a master class in
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reading. It is.
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And before we even get into the weeds of Hebrew grammar and all
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that, we have to ask, what's the mission here?
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I mean, why does a regular person in the pews need an
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exegetical handbook? Because we want to know what God
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is actually saying, right? That's the bottom line.
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Right. If you believe, as we do, that
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the Bible is the inspired word of God, then you have a well a
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responsibility to interpret it correctly.
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Fitado makes this point very early on.
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For a long time, there was this one-size-fits-all approach to
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reading the Bible. Oh, for sure you'd.
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Read a Psalm exactly the same way you'd read a list of laws in
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Leviticus or a narrative in Acts.
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I think we've all been guilty of that.
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You know, you treat every verse like it's a fortune cookie.
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You pull it out, strip it of its context, and maybe stick it on a
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coffee mug. And that is dangerous.
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It really flattens the text. God didn't just give us a list
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of propositional truths. He gave U.S. history, law,
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prophecy, wisdom, and what we're talking about today, poetry.
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And each of those genres has its own set of rules.
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Its own rules. Exactly.
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If you try to read a poem like it's a legal contract, you're
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going to misinterpret the author's intent.
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And when the author is God, the stakes are pretty high.
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I noticed something in the preface.
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This series editor signed off with Sully.
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Day of glory. Glory to God alone.
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It just struck me because usually, you know, academic
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books are pretty dry, but this framed the whole intellectual
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exercise as an act of worship. That is the Reformed
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distinctiveness right there, isn't it?
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We don't study Hebrew poetry just to be smart or to
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appreciate the art of it. We do it to know God better.
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If He chose to reveal Himself through poetry, then
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understanding how that poetry works is a way of honoring Him.
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OK, so let's get into it. Section 1 for us is really about
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the distinct nature of Hebrew poetry.
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When I hear the word poetry, my brain immediately goes to rhyme.
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You know, roses are red, violets are blue.
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Which is completely natural for an English speaker, right?
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But Futado just stops his cold. He says basically forget about
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rhyme. He does.
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Rhyme is not a structural feature of Hebrew poetry.
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Now you will find scholars who argue about this, and they'll
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point to specific verses where the sounds seem to match up.
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Futado brings up Psalm 121.3 in Hebrew.
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The ends of the phrases are reglica and shomareka.
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To my ear, that sounds like a rhyme.
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Leica, Reika. It matches sonically, sure, but
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you have to look at the grammar. The little CA sound on the end
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is just the predominal suffix. It means yore.
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So Regleka is foot yore and Shomareka is keeper yore.
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So it's like writing two sentences in English that both
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just happened to end with the word you.
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I will not hurt you. I will help you.
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That isn't a rhyme scheme, it's just repeating a pronoun.
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If it happens in Hebrew, it is incidental.
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Not accidental, maybe, but certainly not the rule that
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governs the whole poem. OK, so if it's not rhyme then is
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it meter? I remember struggling through
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Shakespeare in high school trying to get the iambic
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pentameter down. That whole thing.
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Does Hebrew have a beat? That is the $1,000,000 question
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in Semitic studies, really. Some scholars have tried
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counting syllables, others have tried counting accents or
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stresses, but the reality is there's just no consensus.
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You can't really tap your foot to a Psalm the way you can to a
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nursery rhyme. It's irregular.
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So if there's no rhyme and there's no meter, why do we even
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call it poetry? I mean, what makes it different
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from just prose, from just talking?
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This is where Futado gives us a very helpful definition.
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He says Hebrew poetry is defined by terse lines employing
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parallelism and imagery in high frequency.
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OK, I want to drill down on that word terse.
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It means concise, short, punchy. Economic.
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Yes, that's a great word for it. The poet is trying to say as
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much as possible with as few words as possible.
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Futado brought up some statistics that I found
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fascinating. He compared the prose account of
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creation in Genesis One with a poetic account of creation,
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Psalm 104. Now both describe the same
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event, God making the world. But the grammar is totally
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different. Totally different.
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In prose, your goal is clarity and flow.
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So you use a lot of what we might call glue words, the
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definite article. They relative pronouns.
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Who? Which of that you use direct
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object markers to tell the reader exactly what is happening
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to what? And the stats were just
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staggering. In Genesis 1, the word the
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appears 79 times. In Psalm one O 4 only 27 times.
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It's. Just stripped down, isn't?
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It and the relative pronouns like who or which they appear 9
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times in the prose and only twice in the poem.
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Now think about the effect that has on you as the reader in
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prose. The author is sort of holding
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your hand. God made the light, which was
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good. The syntax connects all the dots
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for you. But in poetry.
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In poetry, that glue is gone. It's more jagged, got light.
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Good now. I am oversimplifying of course,
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but the terseness creates gaps. It creates space.
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It forces you to slow down. You have to mentally supply the
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connections that the grammar left out.
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It engages your imagination in a way that prose doesn't.
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You could say prose informs you. Poetry arrests you.
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So it creates a fuzzy boundary between prose and poetry,
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doesn't it? It's not like a binary switch.
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It's a continuum. You'll find some prose that's
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very poetic and some poetry that's very prose like, but
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generally the more terse the text, the more poetic it feels.
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OK, so if we don't have of sentences and paragraphs in the
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traditional sense, how is a Psalm built?
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Futado breaks this down into three parts, the line, the
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strophy, and the stanza. Think of it as the anatomy of
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the poem. The basic cellular unit is the
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line and. We have to be really careful
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here because when we say line we don't mean verse, correct?
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The verse numbers in your Bible were added centuries later, I
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think in the 16th century for the Geneva Bible.
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They are helpful for finding your place for sure, but they
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are not part of the inspired structure.
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A line in poetry is a complete thought, and it's usually
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made-up of two or three parts. And if you title calls these
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parts cola. Yes, the singular is colon,
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plural cola. So the most common line is the
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bicolon. It has two halves.
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Right like Psalm 92 verse one, it is good to give thanks to the
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Lord, that is the first colon. Then to sing praises to your
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name almost high. That is the second cola.
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Together they form one line of poetry.
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And sometimes you get a trickle on three beats.
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Psalm 112.9 is the example he uses.
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He is distributed freely. He is given to the poor.
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His righteousness endures forever.
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You can feel the rhythm there, can't you?
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Boom boom boom. And then there is the Monoclon,
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the solo artist. The Anomaly A monoclon is a
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single phrase that stands alone. It doesn't have a partner, so to
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speak. And Futado points out that
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Hallelujah, praise the Lord, is often a monoclon.
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It's just an exclamation, really.
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It is. It stands at the beginning or
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the end of a poem. It's like the poet is so
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overwhelmed they just have to shout it out.
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It actually breaks the structure to emphasize the emotion.
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I love that. So it's structurally significant
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because it highlights the act of worship.
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Yeah. So you take these lines and you
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group them into strophies, Futado says.
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A strophy is basically a poetic paragraph.
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It's a group of lines that share a common theme or focus.
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Recognizing strophies is so critical for following the
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argument of the Psalm. If you miss the strophy breaks,
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the Psalm just looks like a jumbled list of sentences.
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So how do we spot them? How do we know where one ends
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and the next begins? Logic is the primary way.
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Look at Psalm 13. It is a textbook example.
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The first group of lines, the first strophy is dominated by
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questions. How long, O Lord?
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How long will you hide your face?
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How long must I wrestle with my thoughts?
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So that's strophy one the complaint.
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Then the logic shifts. The psalmist starts asking
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questions and starts asking for something.
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Look on me and answer. Give light to my eyes.
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That is Straifa 2, the petition. And then there's the final shift
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at the end. But I trust in your unfailing
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love, I will sing the Lord's praise.
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That's Strobe 3 the confession of trust.
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You know, if you read Psalm 13 without seeing those strokes,
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you might think the guy is schizophrenic.
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He's depressed, then he's demanding, then suddenly he's
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happy. But with the strophies, you see
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the movement, you see the prayer actually working on his heart.
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You see the logical progression of faith in the midst of
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suffering. It's a journey.
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Sometimes the poets made it easy for us, right?
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They used acrostics. Oh yeah, Psalm 119 is the famous
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giant, an 8 fold acrostic. So 8 lines start with the letter
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LF, the next eight start with Beth, and so on through the
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whole Hebrew alphabet. I mean talk about structure that
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is rigorous. It communicates a sense of
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perfection, of completeness. It says I'm going to praise
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God's law from A-Z or I guess from LF to Taf.
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There was another structural trick Futado mentioned called
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head linkage. Use Psalm 148.
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Right. This is where grammar itself
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marks the strophy. Psalm 148 is this big call to
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worship for the whole universe. The first trophy begins with
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praise the Lord from the heavens.
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Then it lists the sun, moon, stars, angels.
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That's everything up there. Everything up there.
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Then the next section starts with Praise the Lord from the
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Earth and then it lists sea monsters, lightning, mountains,
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kings. It's a map.
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It is a cosmological map drawn by grammar.
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The head linkage. That repeated command to praise
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tells you exactly where the new section begins.
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So we have lines, we have strophies and then the biggest
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unit is the stanza. A stanza is just a group of
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related strophies. It's like a chapter in a book.
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We looked at Psalm 139 for this one, the search me, O God,
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Psalm. A beautiful, complex poem,
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Futado divides it into two main stanzas.
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Stanza 1 is theological. It focuses on God's attributes.
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You have searched me and known me.
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Where can I go from your spirit? It's all about God's omniscience
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and omnipresence. It's.
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The God is big section. It is then stanza 2 shifts.
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It becomes relational and ethical.
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If only you would slay the wicked, oh God, and then search
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me, oh God, and know my heart. And Futano points out a
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technique here called inclusion. It's a bookend.
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The poem starts with You have searched me and known me, and it
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ends with search me and know my heart.
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It comes full circle. It does, and structurally that
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tells us something profound. The Psalm isn't just a lecture
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on God's attributes, and it isn't just a rant against the
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wicked. The structure holds it all
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together to say, because God is this big and because the world
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is this wicked, I need God to examine my heart.
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The structure serves the devotional point.
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That is the key, isn't it? We aren't doing this anatomy
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class just to label parts of a poem.
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We're doing it to get the point. We dissect the text so the text
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can dissect us. I will move on to what I think
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is maybe the most important section of the book, or at least
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the one that corrected the biggest misunderstanding for me.
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Section 3. Parallelism.
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This is the absolute heartbeat of Hebrew poetry.
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Yeah, you cannot understand the Psalms without understanding
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parallelism. Now, I grew up in the church,
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I've read the Psalms my whole life, and somewhere along the
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way I was taught, or maybe I just assumed that parallelism
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meant saying the same thing twice.
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That is the old view. You know, the Lord is my rock.
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He's my fortress of the rock equals fortress.
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Got it. Move on.
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That view has a long history. It goes back to a scholar named
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Robert Loth. In the 1700s, he categorized
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parallelism into three types, synonymous, antithetic, and
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synthetic. Synonymous means the second line
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repeats the first. Antithetic means the second line
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is the opposite. And synthetic was kind of a
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catch all category for everything else.
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This view was really popularized by CS Lewis in his book on the
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Psalms. Lewis basically said parallelism
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is like saying something once and then saying it again in
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different words just to make sure you got it.
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Like you're just using a thesaurus.
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Exactly, and the problem with that old view is that it makes
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for a really boring reading of the Psalms.
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If you assume the second line is just a restatement on the first,
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you stop listening. You read line A, you get the
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info, and you mentally just skip line B because you think it's
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just filler. It totally flattens the text.
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It creates a static reading. There's no energy.
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So what is the new view? The new view, championed by
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scholars like James Kugel and Robert Alters, says parallelism
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is not about sameness, it is about movement.
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A and what's more, B. Yes, that's a perfect way to put
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it. The second line typically echoes
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the first, but it adds something.
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It specifies, it intensifies, it dramatically expands the
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thought. There is always a progression.
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Let's look at the examples because this is where the lights
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really turned on for me. Psalm 29.1 OK.
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Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings, that is line A.
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Line B. Ascribe to the Lord glory and
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strength. Now under the old view you'd
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say, OK, the angels are praising God twice, got it.
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But the near view asks what did the second line add?
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Well, the first line tells us who is praising the.
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Heavenly beings the. Second line tells us what they
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are ascribing. Glory and strength.
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So the movement is from the subject of the action to the
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object of the action. It completes the thought, it
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doesn't just repeat it. Or Psalm 29.5.
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This one is great for the intensification idea.
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Line A The voice of the Lord breaks the Cedars.
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Line B. The Lord breaks in pieces the
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Cedars of Lebanon. What's the difference between a
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cedar and a cedar of Lebanon? A whole lot.
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A cedar is just a tree. The Cedars of Lebanon were the
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redwoods of the ancient Near East.
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They were massive, famous, prized for their strength.
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They were the symbols of national pride and durability.
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So the first line says God breaks trees.
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The second line says God snaps the mightiest, most unshakable
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giants in the world like they are toothpicks.
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The specificity intensifies the image of God's power.
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If you read that as same thing twice, you missed the awe.
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There was one example that had a massive theological implication,
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Psalm 150.1. This is where grammar and
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structure really shape our theology.
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Praise God in his sanctuary. That's the first colon.
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Praise him in his mighty heaven. That's the second.
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Now listen closely. If you use the old view
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synonymous parallelism, you assume sanctuary and mighty
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heaven are synonyms. You assume they refer to the
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exact same place. So you'd conclude that sanctuary
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is just a metaphor for heaven? Right, you spiritualize the
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first line to make it match the second.
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What if we use the new view? If we look for a movement or
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expansion, we see something completely different.
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Sanctuary refers to the earthly temple in Jerusalem.
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That is where the praise starts. Mighty Heaven.
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Refers to the cosmos, the firmament, the whole created
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order. So it's not saying praise God in
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heaven twice, it's saying let the praise begin here on earth
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in the gathered assembly, and let it expand until it fills the
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entire universe. It connects heaven and earth.
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It tells us that our worship in the church on Sunday morning is
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joined by the chorus of the cosmos.
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That is a much richer reading, isn't it?
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And we only get there if we understand the structure.
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That is just beautiful. It makes you realize how much we
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miss when we just skim the surface.
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We miss the depth. Speaking of depth, let's talk
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about Section 4 imagery, seeing the pictures.
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Imagery is how poetry communicates emotion.
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Futado quotes John Calvin, who called the Psalms an anatomy of
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all the parts of the soul. And Ethanasia said the songs are
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like a mirror where you see yourself.
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Because images bypass the intellect.
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If I tell you God is omnipotent, your brain processes that as a
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fact. But if I tell you the Lord is my
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rock, you feel something. You feel stability, you feel
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weight, you feel protection. But there's a huge hurdle here.
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Furtado calls it distance. We are separated from the
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psalmist by thousands of years, thousands of miles and a
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completely different culture. The images they used were drawn
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from their world Sheep oil Shields, dry riverbeds.
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We call that the source domain, the real world object the poet
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uses to make his point. The target domain is the
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spiritual truth they're pointing to.
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The problem is, if we don't understand the source domain the
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way they did, we miss the point of the target domain.
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The Norah Jones analogy in the book was just brilliant for
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this. It really clarifies the issue,
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doesn't? It she has a song where she
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sings about waiting for her lover like a school kid waiting
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for spring. Now think about that image.
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If you grew up in New England or the Midwest, you know exactly
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what that means. You know the Gray skies of
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February. You know the slush on the
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ground. You know the feeling of being
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trapped indoors, and you know the explosive joy of that first
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warm day in May. The release, the relief.
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But imagine a listener in Central Florida or San Diego.
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We're at 70° in January. The phrase waiting for spring
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doesn't mean anything to them emotionally.
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They might understand it intellectually, but they don't
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feel the pathos. The SIRST domain is foreign to
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their experience. And we are the Floridians.
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When we read the Psalms, we. Are take Psalm 23.
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He makes me lie down in green pastures.
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We see a picnic, we see a lush, rolling Irish hillside.
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It's peaceful, it's lovely. But the ancient Israelite lived
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in a semi arid land. Green pastures were rare.
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They only appeared after the winter rains.
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For a shepherd, finding a green pasture wasn't just nice, it was
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survival. It meant the flock wouldn't
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star. It meant the dry season was
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over. So the emotion isn't and just
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peace, it's relief. It's salvation.
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It's the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
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Why? Because he found the grass.
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It is a life or death image. What about the oil?
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You anoint my head with oil. I'll be honest, as a modern
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westerner, the idea is someone pouring oil on my head sounds,
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well, gross. I think of 10 W 40 or salad
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dressing. It feels messy.
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That is our cultural distance talking.
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In the ancient world, you walked everywhere.
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It was hot. It was dusty.
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Your skin would crack. When you arrived at a host home
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for a feast, the greatest honor they could show you was to
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provide olive oil, often mixed with perfume to soothe your
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skin. So it was like a lotion.
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It was refreshment. It was the ancient equivalent of
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a hot shower and a plush robe after a long, dusty flight.
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It signaled you are welcome here.
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You are honored. Wash off the road and rejoice
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with me. So when David says God anoints
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his head, he's saying God treats him like an honored guest.
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Even in the presence of his enemies, it's a defiant act of
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hospitality. So how do we decode these
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images? We can't all move to Israel and
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become shepherds. Futado gives us a method.
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Three steps. First, identify the target.
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What is the poet talking about? Usually it is God or the enemy,
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or the psalmist himself. Second, study the source.
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This is where you have to do your homework.
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Open a Bible dictionary. Look up horn.
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Look up right hand. Look up shield.
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Don't assume you know what it means.
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Understand the topography, the climate.
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And 3rd. Identify the aspect of
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association. What specific characteristic of
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the source is being applied to the target?
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Because images can have multiple meanings depending on the
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context. Absolutely.
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Take the right hand. In Psalm 110, God says to the
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Messiah, sit at my right hand. That means honor, authority, the
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position of the Vice Regent. But in Exodus 15 or Psalm 138 it
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says your right hand will save me or your right hand shattered
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the enemy. That means power, a warrior,
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strength. Or take the sun in Psalm 121.
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The sun shall not strike you by day.
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There the sun is a threat. It's a heat lamp that can kill
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you. But in Psalm 84, the Lord guide
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is a sun and shield. There the sun is a source of
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life, light and benevolence. You cannot have a flat
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mechanical definition for every image.
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You have to to read the room. You have to let the context
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determine meaning. Sounds like work.
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It is work, but it is the work of digging for gold.
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Let's pull back and look at the macro structure again.
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Section 5 Patterns. We talked about strophies, but
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how did the strophies hang together?
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Furtado outlines 3 main patterns, linear, parallel and
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symmetrical. This is the architecture of the
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poem. A linear pattern is the
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simplest. It's A leads to BB, leads to CC
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leads to D. Psalm 150 is the example.
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It moves straight ahead. Call to praise Baba, where to
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praise BA? How to praise bees who should
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praise it just builds to this massive climax.
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Then there is the parallel pattern.
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This is where the the whole poem has a kind of rhythm of
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repetition. Psalm 100 is a classic ABAB
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structure. Stroff one shout for joy.
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That's the call to praise Stroff 2 For the Lord is God.
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That's the reason three enter his gates.
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Another call to praise stroke 4 for the Lord is good.
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Another reason. So it reinforces the theology by
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cycling through it. It links our duty to praise with
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God's goodness. But the one that really gets me
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excited is the symmetrical pattern, the chiasm.
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Named after the Greek letter chi, which looks like an X, it
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is a structure that folds in on itself ABCCBA.
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Psalm 70 was the case study. I want to walk through this
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because it's so cool visually. OK, it starts with a hurry to
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help me, O God. Then B let those who seek my
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life be put to shame. That's the wicked.
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Then C let them turn back. It's the center or close to it.
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Then you get C. Let those who seek you rejoice.
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The righteous, then BI, am poor and needy and finally a oh Lord,
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do not delay. So the A lines match hurry, do
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not delay, and the middle sections contrast the wicked and
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the righteous. The visual effect is 1 of
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closure. It wraps the prayer up tight.
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But theologically, chiasms are important because they point you
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to the center. In Western literature, the main
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point is usually at the end, the conclusion.
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But in Hebrew poetry. The main point is off in the
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middle, the turning point, the fulcrum of the whole thing.
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So if you find the center of the X, you find the heart of the
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Psalm. That is often the case.
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It changes how you read. You aren't just rushing to the
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finish line, you are looking for the center of gravity.
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We have one final section to cover and this one requires us
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to put on our big boy theological pants.
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Section 6. Mythopoic imagery.
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This is where things get really interesting and where a robust
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reformed worldview is absolutely essential.
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Futado uses this term mythopoeican.
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Now when I hear a myth, I get nervous.
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Are we saying the Bible contains myths?
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Because that sounds like something a liberal theologian
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would say to dismiss the text. And we need to be very, very
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clear here. We are not saying the Bible
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teaches myth as history. We're not saying the events are
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made-up. So what does mythopoic mean
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then? It means the biblical authors
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borrowed the language and the imagery of ancient mythology to
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make a theological point. It's a literary device.
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Exactly, and specifically, it's a polemic.
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A war of words. Yes, a polemic is an argument.
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It's a fight. The biblical authors were living
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surrounded by Pagan nations who believed in Pagan gods.
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And sometimes the best way to defeat a false God is to steal
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his vocabulary and use it against him.
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The example Futado gives is Psalm 74 versus the Ugaritic
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texts. So back in the 1920s,
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archaeologists dug up an ancient city called Ugarit, and in it
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they found these libraries of clay tablets explaining the
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Canaanite religion, the religion of the people Israel was
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supposed to drive out of the land.
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And what did these tablets say? They told the story of their
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storm God Bale and his sister and at in their myth they fight
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against the forces of Chaos. They fight Yam, who is the sea,
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they fight Tannen who is the dragon, and they fight Luton,
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who is Leviathan. And in their story, Bale wins.
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Yes, Bale crushes the heads of the dragon and asserts dominion
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over the world. Now we open our Bibles to Psalm
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74. And we read it was you, O God,
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who split open the Sea Yam. By your power you broke the
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heads of the monster Tannin in the waters.
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It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan.
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It's the same cast of characters.
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See Monster Leviathan. It is the exact same imagery.
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Now a critical scholar might look at that and say, see, the
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Israelites were just copying their neighbors.
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They believed in the same chaos monsters.
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But the reformed view says the. Reformed view says look closer
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Who is doing the crushing? It was you, O God, Yahweh.
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The psalmist is engaging the world view of his neighbors.
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He's looking at the Canaanite who says Ball is the king
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because he defeated the dragon. And the psalmist is saying no,
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you are wrong. You fear chaos.
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You think Ball can stop it. Let me tell you who the real
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victor is. Yahweh, the God of Israel.
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He is the one who split the sea, literally at the Exodus and
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creatively at the foundation of the world.
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It's like taking the enemies flag and waving it in his face.
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It is Co opting their imagery to assert God's absolute
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sovereignty. He is not saying that Leviathan
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is a literal 7 headed dinosaur living in the Mediterranean Sea.
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He is using their symbol of ultimate evil to say that our
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God has crushed ultimate evil. It's.
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Creation theology is warfare. Genesis 1 presents creation as
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manufacturing. God is building a house.
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Psalm 74 presents creation as conquering.
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God is taming the chaos. And both are true.
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That is incredibly helpful because I've read those verses
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about crushing the heads of Leviathan and thought what in
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the world is going on here it. Keeps us from falling into
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literal nonsense. You know, looking for dinosaur
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bones. But it also protects us from
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liberal skepticism. We don't have to be afraid of
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the cultural context. We can see it as the Bible
25:35
engaging in a wrestling match with the culture and winning
25:38
decisively. Rightly dividing the word of
25:40
truth. Indeed.
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We have covered a massive amount of ground today.
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We've looked at the nature of Hebrew poetry, its terseness,
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its lack of rhyme. We've dissected the anatomy,
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lines, trophies, stanzas. We've revolutionized our view of
25:52
parallelism. It's movement, not repetition.
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We've learned to decode the imagery by looking at the
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source. We've seen the patterns, and
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we've seen how the poets used mythopoeic language to declare
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war on false gods. It is a comprehensive toolkit
26:05
really. If you had to boil this all down
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for the listener, the person who is going to open their Bible
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tomorrow morning before work, what is the one thing they
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should take away from all this? I would say this form serves
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function. The way the Bible is written is
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not an accident. God didn't just dump data on us,
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He gave us poetry to shape us. So if you respect the genre, you
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will see the beauty, and if you see the beauty, you will worship
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the author. Which brings me to my final
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thought. Why poetry?
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I mean, why did God choose this medium?
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He could have given us a systematic theology textbook.
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He could have given us a bullet point list.
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I am omnipotent. I am good.
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I am holy. But he gave us songs.
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He gave us terse, imagistic, emotional language.
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He chose a medium that, you know, it bypasses our
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intellectual defenses and it strikes directly at the heart.
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Because we are not just brains on a stick.
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We are whole beings. We have emotions, we have fears,
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we have imaginations. And God wants to redeem all of
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it. The songs teach us how to feel.
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They don't just tell us what to think.
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They show us how to process joy, joy and grief and anger and
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trust in the presence of God. And that is why we study them,
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not just to be smarter, but to be holier.
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Amen to that. Well friends, that is all the
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time we have for this deep dive. I hope this helps you.
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The next time you open the Psalms, go read Psalm 29 or
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Psalm 139. With these tools in hand, I
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think you'll see things you never saw before.
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This has been Reformed thinking. Thanks for listening.