The story of how each age understood the nature biblical poetry, Kugel concludes, is a key to understanding the Bible's place in the history of Western thought.

A fresh, provocative look at the link between poetry and Christianity, both as it relates to the Bible itself as well as to Christian and religious life, by an accomplished scholar. The Bible is full of poems. In the Old Testament, there are the Psalms and the Song of Songs, the great exhortations and lamentations of the Prophets, and passages of poetry woven in throughout. In the New Testament, Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven with poetic epithets such as “a treasure hid in a field,” calling the Son of God “the true vine,” “the light of the world,” “the good shepherd,” and “the way, the truth, and the life.” The Gospels reverberate with allusions to the poetry of the Old Testament; the last book of all is Revelation, a visionary poem. The Bible, in other words, asks to be read poetically from start to end, and yet readers have rarely considered what that might mean, much less heeded that call. In The Bible and Poetry, the poet and scholar Michael Edwards reshapes our understanding of the Bible and religious belief, arguing that poetry is not an ornamental or accidental feature but is central to both. He speaks personally of his early, unanticipated, transformative encounters with scripture. He offers close, insightful, and resonant readings of biblical passages. Poetry, as he sees it, is the vital and necessary medium of the Creator’s word, and the truth of the Bible is not a question of precepts and propositions but of a direct experience of its poetry, its power.

Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alter radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as not only a human creation but a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In The Art of Biblical Poetry, his companion to the seminal The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter takes his analysis beyond narrative craft to investigate the use of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. Updated with a new preface, myriad revisions, and passages from Alter's own critically acclaimed biblical translations, The Art of Biblical Poetry is an indispensable tool for understanding the Bible and its poetry.

Uniquely considering the characteristics of biblical Hebrew poetry beyond its currently best known feature, parallelism,On Biblical Poetry demonstrates the many interesting and valuable interpretations that yield from analyses of major facets of biblical verse, as well as careful attention to prosody--rhythm, lineation, and the like--and close reading. Through a series of programmatic essays, F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp argues that biblical poetry is, in most respects, just like any other verse tradition--and thus biblical poems should be read and interpreted like other poems. Using the same critical tools and kinds of guiding assumptions as traditional verse scholarship, this book also considers the historicity and cultural specificity that distinguishes the verse of the Bible. The literary and the historical, then, are in view throughout. Issues of orality, textuality, and literacy at the site of biblical poems are also probed extensively and there is a strong comparative orientation to much of the thinking in the volume.

Presents a modern translation of the books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, providing an annotation and commentary for each verse.

In this Festschrift, James Kugel's creative scholarship in biblical interpretation provides the inspiration for a wide-ranging collection of essays that treat the history of Jewish and Christian scriptural interpretation from antiquity to the present