Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 21:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

Book Reviews

An Invitation to Biblical Poetry. By Elaine James. In Essentials of Biblical Studies, edited by Patricia Tull. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 202 Pages. Paperback, $26.99.

Elaine James’ An Invitation to Biblical Poetry is among the newest additions to the Oxford University Press Essentials of Biblical Studies series. Essentials of Biblical Studies provides accessible and affordable introductions to various topics in the ever-expanding field of biblical studies. Biblical poetry can be a challenging topic for scholarly inquiry. At the same time, poetic passages are often a refuge for those who pick up the Bible searching for comfort or encouragement. James, professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, invites students and general readers alike to approach biblical poetry with the expectation that reading poetry creates meaningful experiences. One of James’ primary goals is to demonstrate that biblical poems “do intellectual work” (5). “Rather, the poems are creating experiences that invite our deep consideration and participation” (5).

An Invitation to Biblical Poetry consists of 5 chapters. In the first chapter, James deals with the quality of voices. She has intentionally placed voices as the first chapter of this book to emphasize the importance of this poetic feature which has often been relegated to secondary significance. For James, voice is important because “a distinct quality of biblical poems [is] that they appear to be spoken by someone” (16). She goes on to describe various voices encountered in biblical poems and the effects those voices create.

In chapter 2, James turns her attention to the most commonly discussed aspect of biblical poetry, lines. However, James is not content to rehearse another explanation of parallelism. Instead, she looks at lines from an aesthetic dimension, asking how the shape of the text might impact its meaning. James argues that biblical poetry is not a metrical tradition. Biblical poetry “is a fairly free rhythm, though more constrained than contemporary free verse” (54). James demonstrates how biblical poetry uses rhythm through repetition, parallelism, and enjambment to create meaning in the text.

JBTM 21:1 (Spring 2024) 152

In chapter 3, she focuses on form as the larger literary patterns that biblical poems fit within. Although James’ concern is not to explore social and historical context through form criticism, she maintains the term form. For James, form is a way to speak about “shared literary structures and common features…and the term helpfully retains the important sense that the shape of a text is not separable from its content” (81). James argues that form is important because “[p]art of under...