Poetry In The Bible
POETRY IN THE BIBLE
The Bible contains a wide range of literary types. Its many pages include historical narratives, personal letters, official documents, proverbs, and poems. The question of how poetry was to be represented in biblical translations became a matter of some debate in the sixteenth century. It was clear, for example, that the Psalms were examples of religious poetry. Should they not be identified as such typographically, by laying them out in the same manner as normal poetry?
An example of the point at issue can be seen from Paul's first letter to Timothy, in which Paul quotes from what is clearly an early Christian hymn, which he expects Timothy to know. Modern versions of the Bible mark the transition from prose to poetry and back again by displaying the material in a manner appropriate to its literary character. Thus the Revised Standard Version presents 1 Timothy 3:14–4:3 as follows:
I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion:
He was manifested in the flesh,
vindicated in the Spirit,
seen by angels,
preached among the nations,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, through the pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.
Poetry and prose are thus displayed in a conventional manner, with the transition from one to the other being clearly indicated by the layout of the text.
Similar issues arise in relation to many sections of the Bible, especially the Old Testament. The Psalter consists entirely of verse; many other works include both prose and poetry. The issue of how the poetic sections of the Bible should be presented was thus a live issue for the King James translators. The sixteenth century had seen a number of attempts to preserve the poetic character of the Psalms in English translations, both in terms of the typographical display and the meter of the verse. In his Apology for Poetry (1580), the great Elizabethan man of letters Sir Philip Sidney argued that the presence of poetry in the Bible itself was a more than adequate reason for encouraging this form of literature:
May I not presume a little farther… and say that the holy David's Psalms are a divine poem? If I do, I shall not do it without the testimony of great learned men, both ancient and modern. But even the name Psalms will speak for me which, being interpreted, is nothing but songs; then, that it is fully written in metre, as all learned Hebricians agree, although the rules be not yet fully found.
Sidney, emboldened by such thoughts, offered a metrical translation of the Psalms, which remained unpublished until 1828. Sidney's verse translation of Psalm 8:4—“what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?”—runs as follows:
Then think I: Ah, what is this man
Whom that great God remember can?
And what the race, of him descended,
It should be of God attended?
Other versifications were perhaps more successful, most notably the famous Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, the first edition of which appeared in 1549.
Our concern here, however, is to note the awareness of the poetic nature of parts of the biblical text, and the debate over how best to translate and present such verse. Tyndale's New Testament often presented the text with considerable sensitivity to the literary issues involved. Thus in the printing of his translation of Luke 1, Tyndale lays his text out as prose in paragraphs where appropriate, then as lines of poetry when presenting the Magnificat—the Song of Mary.
This was an issue that the King James translators could not overlook. In the event, the translators used an identical textual presentation for all literary genres within the Bible, irrespective of whether it was poetry or prose. Every biblical verse was printed out as an individual paragraph, with the verse number in a type identical in size to the text itself. To give an idea of how this completely obliterates the poetic nature of a text, we shall present Psalm 23 as it is laid out in the King James Bible:
A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
This may be compared with a purely prose section—the opening of Paul's letter to the Romans—which is not distinguished typographically from the very different literary style of Psalm 23:
To all that be in Rome, beloved of God who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.
First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of through out the whole world.
For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers;
Making request, if by any means now at length, I might have a prosperous journey by the will of God to come unto you.
For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift to the end ye may be established;
That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.
It was thus impossible for the reader of the King James Bible to determine whether he or she was reading prose or poetry. It is clear that the decision was taken to follow the Geneva Bible's practice of imposing verse divisions—which, it must be stressed, often failed to take into account literary issues—and thus destroying any visual or presentational distinction between verse and prose. The typographical convention thus forced upon the translators gave them little freedom in this matter, and they cannot be censured for this action. Nevertheless, it remains a serious difficulty, which has been intensified since the eighteenth century, when the poetic nature of large parts of the Old Testament began to be appreciated and praised. One of the pressures for revision of the King James Bible in the nineteenth century was precisely this recognition of the need to treat poetry as poetry.