Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 147:587 (Jul 1990)
Article: The Bible as Literature Part 3: “I Have Used Similitudes”: The Poetry of the Bible
Author: Leland Ryken

BSac 147:587 (Jul 90) p. 259

The Bible as Literature
Part 3:
“I Have Used Similitudes”: The Poetry of the Bible

Leland Ryken

Professor of English
Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois

[Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of four articles delivered by the author as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, November 7–10, 1989.]

This article explores some of the dynamics of biblical poetry and inquires into implications of the prevalence of poetry in the Bible for Bible teaching and preaching. Before launching into that inquiry, however, the high proportion of poetry in the Bible should be noted.

Poetry is identifiable chiefly by its being written in verse form rather than prose, and by its use of a poetic idiom. Whereas English verse depends on regular meter and rhyme, the verse form of biblical poetry is parallelism—two or more lines in which the thought and usually the grammatic structure as well are at least partly parallel. It has often been observed that this verse form survives in translation, while meter and rhyme do not.

The importance of parallelism has been overemphasized in recent scholarship on the poetry of the Bible. Verse is not the primary touchstone of poetry. If a poet has not expressed his or her content in a poetic idiom, the result is versified prose, not poetry. The essence of poetry is a reliance on concrete imagery, metaphor, simile, and other figures of speech. These can characterize prose writing as well, but the higher the incidence of such an idiom, the more claim a piece of writing has to be called poetry. Literary people sometimes speak of poetic prose—discourse that is not written in verse form but employs a high concentration of the techniques of poetic language.

Given the combined presence of parallelism and a heavy reliance on figurative language, how much of the Bible ranks as poetry? One-third of the Bible is not too high an estimate. Whole

BSac 147:587 (Jul 90) p. 260

books of the Bible are poetic: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon. A majority of Old Testament prophecy is poetic in form. Jesus is one of the most famous poets of the world. Beyond these predominantly poetic parts of the Bible, figurative language appears throughout the Bible, and whenever it does, it requires the same type of analysis given to poetry.

It is obvious then that when in Hosea 12:10 God stated, “I have…used similitudes” (AV), the statement expresses a principle that extends to the whole Bible. Equally obvious, biblical expositors and readers must learn to feel comfortable with handling biblical poetry. But this is not general...