Even if we need to ask how it is so (and we do), the Old Testament is fundamentally for Christians. We pray these pages help open this part of God's word to you, and equip you with the knowledge to explore the treasures of the Old Testament yourself.
Unlike other books of the Bible, Psalms and Proverbs are overtly and easily recognisable as compilations of material. Even if Proverbs is loosely 'of Solomon' and Psalms is 'of David', each book is clear that there are several - or, indeed, many - authors.
As we read Psalms, we've been growing in our understanding of the Messiah: Jesus. In doing so, we’ve jumped quickly from the Psalm to the Psalm-as-about-Jesus. Strictly speaking, however, these Psalms come to us not independent of but through history.
In any text of the Bible one of the foundational questions we have to ask is ‘who is speaking?’ and ‘who is being spoken to?’ Identifying who the pronouns of a text belong to - and where we belong in that, if anywhere at all - is a key aspect to faithful reading.
Hebrew poetry leaves verbs behind. It still has them, but it has them far less frequently than it does in prose. In fact, there was a period of time where some scholars resorted to a statistical analysis of verbs in ratio to nouns to identify poetry vs prose!
What is poetry? While it’s generally an easy genre to identify, and we tend to know it when we see it, on the other hand, poetry can be a really difficult genre to define even if we can describe the various elements of poetry with relative ease.
I suspect the title has already polarised you - or at least evoked something of a gut response for you. The issues of creation and science tend to do that for people! But this is not a discussion about science and creation, or (oddly) historicity.
