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Wisdom-Trek / Creating a LegacyWelcome to Day 1356 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomMastering the Bible – Understanding Hebrew Poetry – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before.


Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase wisdom and create a living legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1356 (https://wisdom-trek.com/captivate-podcast/day-1356/) of our trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.


To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.


Mastering the Bible – Understanding Hebrew PoetryInsight Fifty-One: Understanding Hebrew Poetry Is Essential for Interpreting Psalms and Proverbs


When you and I encounter the word “poetry,” we immediately think of something read, sung, or listened to that rhymes. If we studied poetry academically, we’d learn that there’s a lot more to poetry as we know it, but rhyming is our most familiar experience of the concept.


Because we think of poetry this way, it’s hard for us to see why Psalms, Proverbs, and other portions of the Bible are classified as poetry. Like English, a line of Hebrew poetry is broken down into smaller units called cola. “Mary had a little lamb // its fleece was white as snow” is a complete line made up of two parts (two cola). That’s really where the similarity ends. The fundamental difference in Hebrew poetry and what we think of with respect to that term is that Hebrew poetry doesn’t rhyme in sound. It rhymes in thought.


This concept of “thought rhyming” is called parallelism. In simplest terms, a line of Hebrew poetry (e.g., Psalm 2:4 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+2%3A4&version=NLT) ) can begin with a colon (“The one who rules in heaven laughs”), which is followed by another colon that expresses a similar thought (“The Lord scoffs at them”). The relationship between the two cola is the important item for interpretation. The second colon corresponds to the first in some way. The second element advances the thought of the first. There is a symmetrical relationship in the thought expressed.


This “thought rhyming” can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Sometimes colon two is virtually synonymous with colon one. Perhaps only the vocabulary varies. The example from Psalm 1:6 says (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+1%3A6&version=NLT) ,


(colon l): For the Lord watches over the path of the godly,


(colon 2): but the path of the wicked leads to destruction.


The two thoughts here are consistent with one another, but they are like two sides of a coin. By definition, if the wicked leads to destruction, that fate will not befall the righteous.


Grasping the range of possible ‘‘thought rhyme” strategies used in Psalms and Proverbs takes time, close reading, and careful thought. Study Bibles and other books help by providing brief introductions to the techniques with examples. Making an effort to learn about parallelism will provide insight into your reading of those books and help...