LeQuita: What if we've been missing an opportunity when we read biblical poetry to become co-creators or collaborators in the poetic journey? And what if we don't start reading the poem trying to determine what it means, but instead engage in an open and expansive inquiry into discovering how biblical poetry can speak to us today. We will discuss these questions and more in this exciting exploration of biblical poetry in the book An Invitation to Biblical Poetry, written by Dr. Elaine T. James. Elaine T. James is the associate professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her research interests are in biblical Hebrew poetry, ideas of art in the ancient world, and issues of land, ecology and gender.

She is the author of Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place, published in 2017, An Invitation to Biblical Poetry, published in 2021, co-editor of Biblical Poetry and the Art of Close Reading with J. Blake Couey, published in 2018, and Reading the Song of Songs in a #MeToo Era with Simeon Chavel, published in 2023. Her articles have been published in journals such as Biblica, Biblical Interpretation, Journal of Biblical Literature, Journal of the Study of the Old Testament, Prooftexts and Vetus Testamentum. She holds the PhD in Old Testament from Princeton Theological Seminary. And she enjoys gardening and hiking with her family. Let's dive into the conversation.

In your acknowledgments for this book you speak to the many poets and scholars, which includes your mom, whose work you've gleaned from. And you also mentioned your first memories of your dad reading you countless nursery rhymes as a child. Can you say more about how all of this shaped you and your writing?

Elaine: Yes, of course. I mentioned those things in my acknowledgments in part to gesture to the fact that literature and poetry are everywhere. They're all around us. And I do have these early memories, as a lot of folks do, I hope, of these chants and nursery rhymes. These songs that informed my young imagination. And as I grew older I discovered this world of poetry and I loved it. And for me I do remember actually reading psalms as a child and thinking they were just so beautiful. And one of the things I loved about the Psalms actually was, in addition to being beautiful, also their real honest vulnerability. There's a lot of lament in the Psalms, a lot of negative emotions. And I remember thinking, "Gosh, this is the whole picture. These are voices that I relate to." When you read a really beautiful poem that you resonate with, it really is this kind of miraculous thing that happens, which is that your voice becomes the voice of the poem, or the poem's voice becomes your voice. It gives you words.

And for me, that was a really profound experience as a young person. And I went on to study literature in college. I taught high school English actually before I went to graduate school. And so my background is really quite steeped in literature and literariness. So when I came to do a PhD, that was in Hebrew Bible, that was what my primary angle was in terms of interpretation. And I found that when I would read scholarship, and I want to give all respect to Bible scholars by the way, but when I would read Bible scholars writing about poetry, I felt like they were writing about this alien thing that I didn't understand.

And so I really wanted to write a book that was an invitation to this very different, very foreign corpus of ancient poems that I found so beautiful. But also to kind of demystify them in a way or perhaps re-mystify them for people who've read them so often and they're so familiar, but really to put them in the context of literature. What it is that we're doing when we're writing literature, when we're reading literature, when we're chanting poems, when we're saying nursery rhymes, is evoking this verbal artistry.

And so I wanted people to have an opportunity to think about the biblical texts, which are so ancient and so distant from us in time and culture, as part of this continuum of the verbal arts, something that we all have contact with in a variety of ways. And to understand those as continuous art forms, in a sense. Both very foreign but also very present. And so my hope was to write a book about biblical poetry that really offered people avenues for understanding them and appreciating them in that way.

LeQuita: Well, it certainly says a lot for the literature that we share with our children as parents, right? Because you were able to identify early with these poems and these psalms that your dad and mom read to you.

Elaine: Yes, absolutely. That's true. I'm a parent myself and I think about this. The things that we share with our loved ones can be so deeply formative even more than we really imagine them to be, perhaps. And so even the reading of poems out loud is something that I hope is not altogether a lost art. I know that the literary arts in general can feel a bit threatened or fraught in our current very visual climate. Our cultural literacy rates we know are dropping. And so reading ancient texts is a hard task. And for many people, I wonder especially for young people, if it will feel like too distant or too difficult of a task. So my hope is to continue to open those pathways of understanding.

LeQuita: So you've shared why this is a timely book now and why it is you chose to write it and some of the contributions of it. Can you say more about how you see this book specifically contributing to I guess a more in-depth reading of biblical poetry?

Elaine: Yes. Well, when people think about the Bible, my impression is from my years of teaching now that they often think about it, especially the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, they think about it as law. Or they tend to think about it as narrative. And both of those things are prevalent in the Old Testament, but they aren't actually the primary mode of engagement. So the majority of our texts are actually poems. And there is this sense that what the Bible offers...I mean, this is sort of a cultural myth, I think, that what the Bible offers is rules. Either rules for how to live, so that would be law. Or kind of rhetorical norms. You read these things and they're trying to tell you what to do in some respects.

And it really is my conviction that most of the Bible isn't doing that at all. And the poetic form is sort of one clue as to that. Actually what we encounter when we encounter these ancient poems is human voices who are doing the same kinds of work, asking the same kinds of questions that we too are asking. Which is, "What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live in relationship to God? What does it mean to worship? What does it mean to critique our leaders? What does it mean to really despair?" And the mode that the ancients are using is often poetry, right? It's the verbal arts. And to me, this is a profound reorientation to what we think the Bible is and does and to how we use it.

And indeed, there's long histories of interpretation. I know the Psalms are very dear texts for many readers, both Jews and Christians. And I'm thinking of the way that sometimes Christian Bibles are marketed, which is sort of like, we'll give you the New Testament and the Psalms, right? Sort of like what's minimally important. So I don't think that is something that we need, but I do think that having this more expansive view of the depth of the Hebrew Bible's literary traditions can really open up the possibilities for what we think scripture is and how it operates and can offer us models for really rich engagement with our world and our lives of faith.

LeQuita: So your target audience for this book is just about everyone, would you say? Or who are you targeting specifically?

Elaine: Well, it is written with the hope that really anyone could pick it up and read it. My aim was for it to be fairly accessible. I remember when I was a student reading Robert Alter's book The Art of Biblical Poetry, which I believe was a New York Times Best Seller. So a lot of people read that book. And I remember as a student, as a young person, thinking, "This book is sort of written for everyone." But it was still quite dense. That was my recollection. And I really wanted to write a jargon-free book that wasn't steeped in unnecessarily complex language about biblical poems. My hope is really that this is a book that can be accessible for most readers. And I have in mind here people who are curious about the biblical texts who want to learn more about it, but maybe aren't necessarily themselves professional readers.

And I did write the book... I myself went to seminary with a wonderful group of people. I studied at Princeton Theological Seminary. And I had a wonderful group of fellow students and friends who were also literature lovers. And we would read together novels and poetry outside of our curriculum. We had a little book group and we would just meet to share our love of literature. And as I was writing this book I was thinking of that group of people, people who are engaged in the biblical traditions. A couple of them are pastors now. A couple of them are doing other things in the service industries and nonprofit work. And I wanted a book that could be for them that could be connecting to a larger passion for literature, connecting to an appreciation for what poetry can do and the power that it holds in people's lives and potentially in communities, but that wasn't necessarily overburdened with a lot of the language and self-referential footnoting, for example, of a lot of biblical scholarship. So I wanted it to be accessible in that way.

My hope is that students at the undergraduate level could read it. My hope is that it could be a text for Bible and literature classes. Certainly seminarians or graduate students who are looking for an entrée into some of the questions and problems of reading biblical poetry. I hope this book can also be a resource for that. I do point in my footnotes to additional materials that can be helpful for people in their own study if they're looking to deepen their study of the biblical materials. But my primary hope was that people could really pick it up and gain sort of a view of the biblical materials that is at a number of different levels. So it's not just an overview of genres. It's also looking at forms and techniques, but it's not limited to formal dimensions.

LeQuita: Well, in my reading of your book, you did succeed with that goal.

Elaine: Oh, thank you.

LeQuita: Absolutely. I understand that you were in the process of writing this book before the COVID pandemic began. If it did, how do you believe the pandemic period influenced your writing and your thinking?

Elaine: Thank you for that question. Yes, I had started writing the book. But the really formative time of putting it together, writing my introduction, a lot of that major work of writing and editing did take place during COVID. And I felt acutely aware at that moment of the way that texts connect us to people who are distant from us in space and in time. And it was the feeling to me of being able to connect in space and time with other communities of people who had gone through real hardships.

And I had in particular... I write about this in my introduction. I was really moved by Psalm 91, which is a prayer about an experience of plague. It's a prayer that is about an experience of vulnerability in the face of physical disaster. And it was really poignant to me that the text was so vivid in its articulation of that experience in a way that really felt powerfully relevant, even millennia later in my experience of COVID. And that sort of feeling of tangible relevance of these ancient materials was something that I really hoped to capture and to try to give some language to. But it was also the openness of those texts, that they aren't necessarily trying to give an answer all the time, so much as posing the questions of the experience. And I wanted to foreground that dimension with the hope that texts will continue, these texts in particular, the Hebrew Bible, will continue to offer this way of connecting across time and community to people today and in future generations.

LeQuita: No, it almost sounds like this is like a journey that you go on as you're reading and interpreting the text.

Elaine: Yeah, I like that language of the journey. In fact, at the end of my introduction, I actually use the language of walking a labyrinth. And I was at the time teaching undergraduates. And I would often have the experience, this doesn't happen just with undergraduates, it happens frequently actually, is people will say, "Oh, I don't understand poetry," or, "Oh, I hate poetry," or, "Oh, I love poetry, but I can't talk about it because I don't have the right language to talk about it." People have this kind of variety of responses to poetry that rightly recognize it can be quite mysterious as an art form. And that can be very frustrating to readers who are trying to figure out What It Means. And if I were writing that out, I would capitalize that W, "What", capital I, "It," capital M, "Means." That's the big question, "What It Means."

And so I offered the view of the labyrinth, because I think like a labyrinth you have a temporal experience when you're reading a poem. You're going through the lines in time, but it isn't quite so straightforward as going from point A to point B. Instead, often poems give us a rather circuitous path. So you're repeating ideas, or you're seeing images, or you are sort of jumping from voice to voice or from image to image. And that experience does not lend itself necessarily to a clear articulation of exactly what it means. And I felt like what if instead of feeling like the poem was a problem to be solved, what if we thought of the poem as exactly that language, the journey? It is an experience that's being offered. And what does it mean to value that experience? Even if at the end you can't come away with a tidy thesis statement about what it means or what it's trying to do to you.

LeQuita: Which is what we tend to do.

Elaine: We do and it's nice. We crave that. We do. I think we crave that kind of interpretive security. And I think a lot of readers especially want that from biblical texts. They want to be able to say exactly what this means for me.

LeQuita: Good point.

Elaine: And poems certainly can do that, but sometimes they are a bit recalcitrant. They resist it a bit. And that is part of their quality and it's part of their mystery. And I want to give people the space to appreciate that mystery and not let that be a barrier to the experience of the art form, because I think those experiences can actually be very rich.

LeQuita: Absolutely. I note here that you say that, "Like a labyrinth, a poem has no shortcut. It asks its audience to invest time, energy, care, and above all, attention. And as we do so, we access a sacred opportunity to become ‘collaborators’" [p. 15]. Yes, I think I mentioned to you earlier that when I have approached a poem it's, "Okay, what does it mean?" I almost want to know that from the beginning. I want to know where this is going to end up, but you invite us on this journey that is quite interesting and I guess more inspiring than certainly my previous approach. So you, go ahead.

Elaine: No, I was going to say there are wonderful traditions of reading poetry, but also of reading scripture that this has resonance with. If you think about the traditions of Lectio Divina, for example, this sort of meditative or spiritual quality of spending time with the text and seeing what it yields or what it reveals, is one example. There are other examples, as well. But I do think that quality of attention, and I'm not alone in observing this, is in its short supply in our current moment. And I think the temptation really is to get the shortcut. If you Google it, then you can find out what it means, so why would you take the time to do it yourself? And I think that to me one of the answers is, it's the experience that is worth it. It shapes our experience of time, it shapes our attention. And these are attitudes that are also well known across spiritual traditions as the disciplines of attention and prayer. And those are worth cultivating.

LeQuita: Amen. In your book, you unpack five basic dimensions or techniques that are taken into account when reading poetry. Dimensions that in your word, "shape the poem and the reader or hearer's experience of the poem and allows the poem to remain open." Can you say a few words about those?

Elaine: Sure. Well, I structured my book kind of starting small and getting bigger. So the first chapter focuses on voices. One of the distinctive things about biblical poetry if you compare it, for example, to biblical narrative is that it always seems to be spoken by a voice. And those voices can be variable, they can be gendered, sometimes it's the voice of God that's speaking. Sometimes the voices will shift back and forth. In fact, it's not at all uncommon both in the prophetic text, but also even in the Psalms, to have one speaker and then another speaker sort of back to back. And understanding that or noticing it is a way to also notice and invite, in your own practices of reading, your own voice. It's an opportunity to sort of be reflective about one's own voice, but also to think about your relationship to other voices. So there's really a practice of attentive empathy that is required by this acknowledgement.

The next chapter talks about lines. Biblical poetry is structured in lines, although they don't rhyme and they're not rhythmic. You don't get iambic pentameter, for example, that familiar verse line structure from English poetry. And they are usually, or often, certainly not always, structured in parallelistic lines. So lines that reiterate an idea. And if you take a look at biblical scholarship, a lot of books have been written about biblical parallelism trying to identify poetry with parallelism. And I wanted to move away from that model a little bit, but to still think about how rhythm shapes our experience of a poem in time in these shorter units.

My next chapter is looking a little bit bigger at structures and genres in a chapter called “Forms,” where I think about what types of poems we get in the Bible. We do get some love poetry. We do get prophetic poems. We get lament forms as our principal type in the psalmic materials and other texts, as well. So how do genres as ways of thinking and approaching the world give us opportunities to think in particular ways, ask particular questions, try on particular ideas? And how can they also spark creativity? We tend to think of forms as things that constrain. But how can those constraints also prompt new creative expressions?

In my last two chapters, I looked even bigger. So I had a chapter on figures where I think about imagery, metaphor, personification. The kinds of figures that is really sort of the meat of poetic imagination. And then finally, my last chapter is thinking about context. So how do you think about both the ancient context that these poems come from, how different it is from our own, and how ignorant we are of actually much that we wish we did know about where these poems come from and how much our knowledge is not only limited, but also I think should chase on our sense of confidence about always knowing again What It Means, right?

But then thinking too about how contexts of interpretation shape poems. So I think about Paul Ricoeur has that nice idea of the three worlds of the text: the world behind the text, the world of the text, and then the world in front of the text, which is where we live as interpreters on this far side of history, as it were. And those contexts also shape the way that we encounter and interpret poems. And being sensitive to that is a way to extend empathy to our ancient writers of poems or ancient writers and tradents who pass these traditions down to us. And it's also a way of practicing and extending empathy in the contemporary world.

LeQuita: I see. You write about different metaphors for God in the chapters on figures. And you share that there is a more inclusive lexicon in the language for God found in biblical poetry. Specifically, you cite Psalm 22, a psalm of lament calling for trust in God as a deity with the skill of a midwife. And you also mention Isaiah 49 on a restoration for exiled Israel, which imagines God as a nursing mother is to her child. Can you share more?

Elaine: Yeah, absolutely. So the biblical poems actually have a pretty wide imagination about how to think and talk about God. And that language is drawn from animal life, God is a lion, God is an eagle, God is a mother eagle. They're drawn from the natural world, God is a rock, God is a fortress, God is a mountain. We get all kinds of this sorts of variety of language. And as you say, we also get language that uses the metaphorical range of female experience. And this is especially worth recovering, because people tend to talk about God as if God is a male deity. And it's true that the God of ancient Israel is mostly thought of and talked about in terms drawn from, that are gendered masculine. And yet that is not the only language for God. And so using biblical poetry's imagination is a way of inviting people to think more expansively about how we relate to God.

Remembering that even to use masculine language for God is a metaphor, of course. It's not as if God simply is male and then we can add on other things. But rather it's to remind us that all the language we use to talk about God, who is not bounded by our experiences in the same way, is a way of using our experience to think and talk about God. And it's really important in our moment to both expand our way of conceptualizing God and to be more inclusive to people in communities of faith today. But it also is important because it reminds us that God cares about and relates to not just the humans in the world, but to all of the features of the creation.

God's relationship to the world is expansive beyond just care for humans. And the texts of the Hebrew Bible and its poetry are just very insistent that that's the case. And recovering this more robust language for imagining God is so important. And it also, I think, I hope, could be inspiring as people imagine new metaphors. What new language do we need to talk and think about God and communities of faith today? The creativity of the imagery of the biblical poems is one way of sparking our own creativity in thinking about how we talk about God.

LeQuita: And it is an opening up for us.

Elaine: Oh, it's such an opening.

LeQuita: …very closed in terms of our interpretation.

Elaine: Absolutely. I mean, I'm thinking about Psalm 104, in particular, which is one of our most sort of ecologically descriptive Psalms. In this text, of course God is the God of the whole universe, the God of darkness, the God of light, the God of the lions, the God of the cattle and the plants. I mean, God is not just attentive to humanity in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible. And that is so crucial in our current moment.

LeQuita: Yeah, amen. You wrote that each reader experiences the poem differently when it comes to biblical poetry. And I'm wondering if this also could mean that there would be multiple interpretations of poetry that could possibly lead to very different perceptions by individual readers, even conflicting interpretations.

Elaine: Well, of course that's the case. I wouldn't have a job if that weren't the case. If there was just one clear interpretation of all of the Bible you wouldn't need the work of biblical interpretation. But what scholars do, what pastors do on Sunday morning, what people do when they read the Psalms in their homes at night, if that's a practice, is all on a continuum of engaging these materials in meaningful ways and trying to understand how they intersect with and give courage to and also challenge our own lives in our current moments. And I think it is tempting to want to have one safe and secure reading. I think there is a certain appeal of that. And I do think you can have better readings and worse readings. I think you can have actually very bad readings of texts that don't give context, that don't pay attention to questions of empathy and consideration.

And so it's not that there are no standards for how we think about what makes a good interpretation, but that also means we're going to be challenged to listen to different voices. Sometimes I like to think about the way that it is when you sing together in a community, where everyone's voice is joined together and you're kind of all singing the same thing, but your voices are never actually identical. Rather you always are going to have to have space for people who are singing a little bit off the beat, or people who are singing out of tune, or people who aren't singing at all. I mean, there's all kinds of different ways of relating to a tradition. And there will be dissenting interpretations within communities of interpretation. And there should be sort of space for that. Certainly the way that I read the Bible would not be accepted to all readers across all times. And I'm totally okay with that. And I think that's a grace to us that there can be many voices. And sometimes those are dissenting voices.

LeQuita: But there's also the harmony, right?

Elaine: But there can also be harmony to go back to that singing metaphor. Beautiful.

LeQuita: That’s right. That's right. Yeah, that's quite beautiful. In the conclusion of your book, which you've entitled “Giving Poetry Life,” a life beyond its moment of origination, you advocate for a way of reading poetry that, in your words, sees "that the work artists do in composition is inextricable from the work that audiences do in perception” [p. 172]. You resist finitude and destruction and instead you embrace a signal of futurity. Say a few words about that.

Elaine: Yes, absolutely. Well, we know we have plenty of examples of it, of bodies of literature, of entire cultures, that are lost to time. We know libraries in the ancient world that were burned, right? There's so much that we do not have. And so we have to be cognizant of the fact that texts can disappear, traditions can disappear, cultures can disappear. And so to continue to choose to read a text is to make a choice to keep a tradition alive. And to me that's a profound act in and of itself, which is why I think we can be a little bit more generous with dissenting readings. Because even the arguments, even the people whose voices and whose readings are different from ours, nevertheless are, I hope, engaged in the work of keeping a tradition alive.

And so the act of reading to my view is the thing to do with a poem, because otherwise it remains just marks on a page. It isn't alive until it is given life by the act of reading. And so I have a lot of respect for people who read the Bible in a lot of different contexts. I don't think you have to be a scholar. I don't think you have to be a certain kind of believer. I don't think that at all. I think there's a lot of hope in the expansiveness of the opportunity that we have to read, which is, as I said, to keep a tradition alive, to dignify these ancient poems by giving them our attention.

And I'm quite moved by the philosopher John Dewey, who talks a lot about, "What is aesthetics? It’s experience," is sort of a central idea of his. But he talks about how reading a poem is not merely uncovering a meaning that already exists. We're not just archeologists dusting the dust off to find the artifact, but rather he writes this, "A new poem is created by everyone who reads poetically. Not that its raw material is original, for after all we live in the same old world. But that every individual brings with them an exercising individuality, a way of seeing and feeling that in its interaction with old material creates something new, something not previously existing in experience."

So I really believe this actually, that it is in the reading of the poem that we not only give the poem life, but that we also create a new poem. So reading itself is an art form. And I love that idea. And I hope that that can be an encouragement to people to be reading and writing as artfully as they can. This is part of our meaningful engagement with our world, is to create beauty and opportunity and aesthetic experience even in our acts of reading. I love that idea.

LeQuita: Even in our acts of reading. Amen. An art of words. That's the way you referred…

Elaine: That's right.

LeQuita: I love that. Are you working on any other projects around this, connected to this?

Elaine: I am. I'm writing a book right now that thinks about what it means that people make things. So as we encounter material, as we make artworks, even as we make poems, how were the ancients thinking about that, those acts of making? That's a question of theological anthropology that I don't think we've really wrestled with. And of course, in our moment, in the Anthropocene, the idea of humans as makers, as artists, is both very profound and also not unproblematic, because we see what the things we make are unspooling in the world in sometimes terrifying ways. So it's a project that I'm really enjoying at the moment.

LeQuita: Sounds wonderful. I look forward to it. Absolutely. Before we close, could you please share one of your favorite poems in scripture that demonstrates some of the dimensions and movements that you've discussed?

Elaine: I was just talking the other day with some poet, I have a couple of poet friends I was talking with, about Psalm 19, which I do think is this really beautiful poem that connects the idea of making poetry to the beauty of creation. So in this poem I think God's creative act is essentially a poem. God makes the world. The world is the poem that God makes. And it is connected then to the way the speaker at the end talks about meditating or speaking the words of God's law. So it's this nice kind of way of thinking about the relationship between the created world and what it means to meditate on a poem. So with that set up, would you like me to read it?

LeQuita: Yes, I would.

Elaine: Okay. Well, this is the NRSV's translation for those of you who are interested in translations:

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims God's handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, there are no words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In the heavens God sent a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, and like a strong man runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them; and nothing is hid from its heat.

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is clear, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of the LORD are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb. Moreover by them is your servant warned; in keeping them is great reward. Who can detect their errors? Clear me from hidden faults. Keep back your servant from the insolent; do not let them have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of a great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.

LeQuita: You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Interviews are conducted by me, LeQuita Porter, and Shari Oosting. Our producer is Garrett Mostowski. If you like what you're hearing, and we hope you do, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app and you can hear many other interesting discussions. And while you're at it leave us a review and let us know how we're doing. The Distillery is a production of the Office of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Find out more at thedistillery.ptsem.edu. Until next time, thanks for listening.