The Psalms

Of all the books of the Bible in which poetry plays a role, Psalms is the one set of texts whose poetic status has been most strongly felt throughout the generations—regardless of the vagaries of translation, typographical arrangement of verses or notions about biblical literary form. This unwavering perception that the psalms are formal poems—even in ages, for example, when most readers imagined that the prophets spoke nothing but emphatic figurative prose—was no doubt reinforced by the musical indications in the texts themselves. Many of the psalms are explicitly presented, in introductory notes, as liturgical songs to be intoned […]