Father, we thank you for another day, another Lord's Day that you have given and you've blessed us with. We pray for your enabling here on this day where we have gathered to give you honor and worship as we've gathered to use the means of grace corporately and to fellowship together. And so Lord, we again ask that you would Be pleased to fulfill your promises among us, enabling us in all of this, and especially as we seek to understand Hebrew poetry and how to better understand the Psalms, and that you would be honored in each of these things. We pray in Christ's name. Amen. Well we continue here these opening ideas in regard to the Psalter and how to understand the Psalms and of course we have covered many things here over the last few months and we started primarily with looking at some of the musical aspects of the Psalms and here now more recently been looking at the poetic aspect of the Psalter. And so, most immediately, then, we talked about Hebrew rhyme and meter and structure. And for Hebrew meter, we believe there was one, but we just don't really know much about it. There's not enough evidence to say for sure how things were done. So, if you run across something that somebody says, well, yeah, the Hebrew meter was this way, just take that very skeptically, because we just don't know enough at this point. As for Hebrew rhyme, it's a rhyming of ideas, not sounds, and so hence we call this parallelism. These parallel lines that say more or less the same thing, but there's a variation on it in some way. And then we last time talked about Hebrew structure and And in particular, the lines, the colons, as we call them, and the strophes, or stanzas, and how they're put together, and how the arrangement of the psalm, or Hannah's song in 1 Samuel 2, or other places, how they do things. Then we turn to a review of some of the figures of speech. And I've done this somewhat recently in Sunday School in another context. Some of this is review, some of it is in addition to it, focusing on this in particular. So last time, we started with the figures of comparison, and the first three in particular are what we see over and over again, similes, metaphors, and personification. Now, a specific aspect to this is, of course, how these things, these figures, are applied to God. And so we call this anthropomorphism, the human characteristics, anthropopathism, human emotion, and feelings applied to God. And so, excuse me, last time I ended kind of right in the middle of talking about imagery. And in many ways, imagery is your broader category for these different things. And it can apply to many other things as well. But simply, it's figurative and visual language used to describe something, whether it's God or something else. And it certainly includes some of these things that we talked about, but also other things. So let me review a few thoughts here, add a couple that I didn't get to last time. You cannot interpret a visual thing literally. And so here sometimes people say, we need to understand the scriptures literally. I understand what they mean, but that's not really the best term, because especially when it comes to figures of speech, you can't take it literally many times. The challenge here is what is being compared? If you say the Lord is our shepherd, what is being compared in that way? Now that's fairly easy because we have the rest of the psalm to help explain it. If you say that Yahweh is a bear robbed of her cubs, what does that mean? And we must make sure that we get the right connection here of what is being compared. This can be especially challenging. when we come to apocalyptic literature. And so if you're reading portions of Daniel or Ezekiel or Revelation, what is being compared? What is the image communicating to us? And so it can be uncertain. Images can be less precise in certain ways, but can be more vivid in other ways. They can communicate more information in certain ways. So if I said the Lord cares for us versus the Lord is our shepherd, the latter says more in many ways because of the image that is given to us. Now this goes in some ways without saying, but it's an important point to make. We need to understand the images as the Israelites would have understood them, not the way that we do, because sometimes it's very different. Sometimes it's basically the same, but we need to make sure that we are interpreting things as they would have understood it, not the way that we do necessarily. All right. One of the commentators made this point, that imagery is very vivid, but it also can be less precise, as I just mentioned. And part of that vivid aspect of it is to communicate something about God that is, in some ways, beyond language. Now, you don't want to go too far with that idea. You get into lots of trouble. But in some ways, it takes us beyond normal language, normal propositions, to communicate something that we cannot fully comprehend. And so images help in that way. On the other hand, because they are less precise, it does help to maintain the mysteries of God, the things that we cannot wrap our minds around. And so, there's just so much that is useful about them, you might say. Now one last thing here in this regard is, I think I mentioned, was it last week? I don't know, the last few weeks or something, that the poetry we see in the scriptures, we also see in the nations surrounding Israel. Some of the same elements like parallelism and strophes and figures of speech and so forth, we see it in the other cultures around Israel. And of course, some people take that and go in wrong directions, but It shows you that this wasn't just unique to Israel, these kinds of things. And one of the things that is helpful for us, though, is that sometimes these images that are used in scripture are intended to be a polemic against the other cultures. So let's just look at one example in this way. Let's turn to Psalm 68. And you'll recognize this because on occasion I use this as a call to worship. Psalm 68, beginning in verse 4, is what I often read, verses 4 to 6. Let's focus on verse 4 here in this context. Psalm 68, verse 4, sing to God, sing praises to His name, extol Him who rides on the clouds, note the imagery, right? By His name, Yah, and rejoice before Him. And again, I usually read verses five and six, but notice the imagery of riding on the clouds. That is a deliberate polemic against Baalism, because they said that Baal rode on the clouds. And here it says, no, no, no, Yahweh does. Yes, there. A polemic is basically a a way of speaking against, you might say, a direct, can you say, attack against wrong thinking, wrong actions, that kind of thing. And so the scriptures does that on a very regular basis. And here's one of those, and it's specifically speaking against Baalism. That Yahweh is the storm god, not Baal, or Mars, or any other the other gods that are talked about in the ancient world. And so the imagery sometimes is specifically used as a polemic. All right, well, again, we can say so many things here, but just a few brief words to finish off this topic. Any questions or comments before I continue? All right, well, let's turn then to the next category, and that is images of substitution. And here are some rather fancy words. The first one here is metonymy. Anybody know what metonymy means? We are substituting one thing for another. So if I said, Joey threw the pigskin, what am I substituting? Instead of saying Joey threw the football, Joey threw the pigskin. And that means a football. And so here would be an example of metonymy. Let's turn to Psalm 5 here a moment. And one thing that you notice when you're looking at images and figures of speech is there can be a lot of overlap, and even some debate on which category to put these things in. But in Psalm 5, verse 9, it says, and notice how this points us to Romans 3, there is no faithfulness in their mouth, they're in a part of destruction, their throat is an open tomb, they flatter with their tongue. And so Paul quotes from this in Romans 3. Notice especially that last line, they flatter with their tongue. What is being substituted here? What is David referring to? They flatter with their what? Yeah, their words. So they're substituting tongue for words. Now, somebody might want to put it in a different category, but I think we can consider that autonomy. The next one is synecdoche. Anybody know what synecdoche is? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so there, to my point, the king, the crown, is that metonymy or synecdoche? There's some debate there. Even what I just read in Psalm 9, you can argue one or the other for that. And fine, I'm not going to quibble over it, but it is a part for the whole. So if we say, all hands on deck, we're not cutting off our hands and throwing them on the deck of the ship. It means the whole person is supposed to come. Let's turn to Psalm 40 a moment. And here we have an example of this. Hold on a second. Yeah, I wrote it in the wrong place. Okay, well that's fine. Here's, I'll give you two examples. Psalm 40, verse two. Note it says, and I always remember Rosalie when I read this. He also brought me up out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my steps." Rosalie often quoted that in her prayers. But obviously we're not just talking about the feet on the rock, we're talking about the whole person. So it's a part for the whole. And here's where I read it wrongly. Let's turn back to 1 Samuel 2 and hear the song of Hannah. And if you look at verse 9, same image, used here. First Samuel chapter 2 verse 9, he will guard the feet of his saints. So again, it's not just guarding our feet, but our whole person. Alright, now another term that is used here is eponymy. I think I spelled that right. So let's turn to Psalm 24. This is really the same idea But it's more specific, you might say. In Psalm 24, we see in verse 6. Sorry, I'm having a hard time turning my pages here. Psalm 24, verse 6, what is the substitute here? Sorry, I can't get to the page. There we go. This is Jacob, the generation of those who see him who seek your face. What is the substitute here? That's right. All of Israel. That's right. That's right. Now we could see face as a anthropomorphism. We could see that as a figure of substitution for Yahweh. But we also then see Jacob being substituted for the whole. Okay. The whole of Israel. Eponymy. So figures of substitution. Here, these are the three main ones. And again, we can debate sometimes which exactly is happening here, but this is the basic idea. Yes? Well, that's a different figure of speech. I'll get to that here in a little bit. But again, you can overlap things here. We can be very specific, but sometimes that misses the point. You can just get the overall idea. All right. Any other comments or questions here? All right. Well, some more general ones. Hyperbole. What does hyperbole mean? OK, yeah, or exaggeration to make a point. Yep, yep. And for those of you who have any Greek background, this is from Molo. This is from Poupere, the preposition. So to throw above is literally what it means. And so you're exaggerating to make a point. Everyone's going, Mom. That's hyperbole. Or Nathaniel, or not Nathaniel, sorry, Matthew was in a habit here a couple months ago about using the term million for almost everything. Come on, man. That's hyperbole. Be more specific. Don't always use extreme language. So let's turn to Psalm 73 here a moment. And here's one example of this, Psalm 73. And if you look at verse 7, now I do think we should understand this somewhat literally, but note the exaggeration. Their eyes bulge with abundance. Now, people who are excessively overweight, sometimes their eyes do bulge out. So maybe we should understand this somewhat literally, but note the exaggeration too. So here's one example. Now another general one that some people will talk about is scheme. And scheme here has to do with the arrangement of words and strokes in ways that are not normal. And this can be done in a variety of ways. Probably the one that is used most often is chiastic, the chiastic structure. So you have the one line in a certain order, and the next line is in the opposite order, putting, say, the verb last in the sentence instead of near the beginning or something to that effect. And so that's another one. And then we have trophic, another one that people talk about here. This is using words out of the ordinary. And so again, you can overlap with just ideas of imagery here and so forth. But if I were to say, Joe is cool, I don't mean that he wants a sweater or a light jacket. Right? I know, Joe, you tend to want a sweater or a light jacket. But when I say Joe is cool, that is usually what people, people usually do not mean it in that way. They mean that he's, you know, hip, or rad, or whatever term you want to use here. Yeah, there you go. There you go. But if I were to say Joe is bad, again, I don't mean that in a way that Joe is a bad person, sins, or something like that. But he's bad, like Michael Jackson used to say. And now the latest term is that Joe is sick. I don't mean that he is running a fever and needs a cough drop or something like that. He's sick. It's another word for cool or bad. It's the same idea. These are tropes. Using words in abnormal ways. Now, included in this, and maybe what we see most often in the scriptures, would be an idiom. Idiom. So if I were to say, stop and smell the roses, That's an idiom. We used to say that about Nathaniel, now we say it about Matthew. Wherever he goes, he stops and smells the roses. He's like, come on, buddy, hurry up. Come on. You don't have to take that long. Now, he's not literally stopping to smell roses, of course, but it's this idiom of taking their time and not being in a rush or something like that. It's been helpful for Nalene and I because we hardly ever stop to spell the roses, so anyway. Turn to Psalm 102 here a moment, and in verse 5. Now again, we can debate on how we categorize this, but I think this would probably fit here. Verse 5, because of the sound of my groaning, my bones cling to my skin. It's a rather abnormal way of saying things. To say that he is groaning so much probably means he's not eating or drinking, and he's lost weight, and so on and so forth. Not so much an idiom here, but an abnormal way of saying things to make the point. In fact, all these verses here, especially verses three to seven, they're figures of speech everywhere. So anyway, here are some more general ones that people like to talk about and so forth. So, any comments or questions to this point? The purpose here, again, is to help us to interpret things. To better understand what God has revealed to us. This isn't just a class. This isn't just some Let me now give you a rather long list of poetic elements here. And this isn't in any particular order. Assonance. What is it? What do we mean by assonance? Okay. All right. Now that was an example. Now, how would we define it? Yeah. That's right. The repetition of vowel sounds. So, say your example again there, Michelle. Okay. Mine also was a. All the players gave handshakes after the game. It doesn't have to start with it. It has to have the sound in the word. And so if you're saying it that way, that would be alliteration, the initial sound having the same. But assonance is just the same vowel sound, whether it begins the word or not. And so all the players gave handshakes after the game, repeated A throughout. So what then is a consonant? Yeah, same idea, but it's a repetition of consonants. Again, it does not have to be at the beginning of the word, but a repetition of it, of the same consonant. Now, did everybody get the bulletin today with the Psalm 1 handout? If you didn't, that's fine. I'll just write it down. But did you all get the handout for Psalm 1? Because I put the Hebrew on there. But I can also write it, so that's not a problem. All right, now look at verse 1. And the first three words, now remember, in Hebrew you start on the right. You don't start on the left. So maybe it would help for me to write it anyway. Here is the first word. So, let's see. Ashrae is the first word. See, it's the one on the right side. And then the next word is, I'm going to run out of room here. All right. Next is haish. Alright, and then the third word, which is the next line of the pronoun, is a share. Alright, so as I mentioned to you last week, that the psalm begins with consonants. I didn't use the word consonants, but that's what's happening. We've got That's the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph. We have again here and here. And so consonants here, repetition of consonants. Notice also, you see another letter that's repeated in each word. Yeah, Chelsea's in here. This one is Shin. and here, and here. So we have a double consonants taking place. And then we have some other things. Excuse me, this word, or letter. It's a yod. Excuse me. That's repeated. And then we have this one here. That's the R, the rage. So you see, there's only one letter that is in there once. And that's the definite article right here. But every other letter is repeated. And two of them in every word. Now the dots and dashes underneath and so forth, those are your vowels. And so we do have a similar sound in each one. This is an A sound here. This is an A sound here. And this is an A sound here. OK? So now, when we pronounce this one here, in seriode, it's pronounced A, ash-ray. So it sounds like an A, even though it's an E in terms of what vowel it is. So anyway. What I've been trying to tell you is that when you come to Hebrew poetry, the revelation of God is not merely the ideas. It's the form, the structure, the poetic elements are part of the revelation. God is creatively saying something. I'm trying to show you some of that creativity as much as as I can to someone who hasn't had Hebrew. I'm trying to explain it in a way that you can follow. And the main point is, God's being creative here. And that is part of his revelation. That's part of his character. That helps us to understand the blessings of the man. And so forth. Yes. Yes. Now, that's a very anglicized way of saying it. We were never really taught how to make the aleph a guttural sound. But it is a guttural sound. So if you listen to a Hebrew, an Israelite, even today, speaking, they'll have a little bit of a spit kind of guttural sound to it. I can't even really do it. I can't roll my R's either. So I could never do Spanish right. But anyway. I can't even do it. I'm so used to saying it the other way. I don't know. Michelle might be able to do the guttural sound better than me. But look out, Kathy. She might spit on you. But if you go to, there's some different websites where you can hear people reading the Hebrew. And they, you know. a whole lot better than I can. But anyway, you at least get the idea. Ashrae Ha'i Shosher. Yes, Susan. That's right. Yeah, it can vary. You can do it in different ways. Yes. Yeah, because A has, what is it, four or five different sounds in English. And you can vary that. You can use the same sound all the way through, or you can do a different, or use all the different ones. There's just a variety of ways you can do that. All right, so then the next one is alliteration. This is a little bit more specifically what Michelle was driving at earlier. This is the repetition of the initial sound, whether it's a consonant or a vowel. So, Michelle's example again was awful what? Yeah, awful Albert ate apples. So there the initial alliterative sound is that A sound. If I said Billy bounced the basketball between a bevy of blue boxes, that's alliteration. So these three here, how do you bring that from Hebrew into another language? Some people have tried. They've tried to take alliteration, or consonants, or assonants, and bring it into another language, whatever it is, obviously we're going to use English, and they try to do that, and on occasion it can be successful, but most of the time it's not. It's really challenging to bring poetic elements from one language to another, especially when it comes to sounds, because everything is different, or most things are different. We have a few Hebrew words, amen, Sabbath, and so forth. We have a few Hebrew words that we use in English, but for the most part we don't. And so it's just challenging. And so what I try to do is what I just did. Show you, explain to you how that is happening here, the first three words of Psalm 1. Alright, any comments or questions thus far? Modern English, yeah. sure yeah that's right that's right that's right yeah there were there's at least two or three books that I had to read at seminary that were written in Old English and that was hard especially the extra E's everywhere and, you know, other things. After a while, you kind of get used to it, but it is challenging. Yeah. Yeah. I was talking to Sean afterward here a couple weeks ago or something, and we were saying some of the same things that he remembered reading that were just challenging, just because it's different. Now, some things are easy. You know, the motherland spelled labor with a U, and we don't. That's not a big deal. But there are definitely other things that are more challenging. So, especially as you have more time in between things, then you have more of those changes. All right. Well, let's look at some more here. Sorry, I lost my thought here. Yes, inclusio. All right, inclusio. Who knows what an inclusio is? Let's turn to Genesis 2. I'm trying to give you a few examples outside of the Psalms here. I wanted to show you that it isn't just found at the very end of Genesis 2. It isn't just found in Psalms, these elements, but it's also, in this case, not just found in poetic genres. If you look at verse 25 in Genesis 2, they were both naked, man and his wife, and were not ashamed. Now look at verse 7 of chapter 3. The eyes of both of them were open, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings." Do you see how those two verses are kind of bracketing the thought? Think of it as bookends, and not holding books together, but holding verses together. And so, verse 25 is the one bookend. They were naked, but no shame. Well then, chapter 3, verses 1-6 happen, so verse 7, now they are naked, and they are ashamed. So they hide from God, and they blame God, they blame one another, and so on and so forth. And so that is your section. You may remember, maybe, it's been a few years ago now, when I preached on this, that's how I did it. I looked at that section, from 225 to 37. Then I also you know, looked at the... broke that down. I don't remember how many sermons I did. Two or three there in that section. But I started by looking at 225 to 327 and the overall point. Now let's look at a psalm. Let's turn to Psalm 70. All right, verse one. Make haste, O God, to deliver me. Make haste to help me, O Lord. And then if you look at verse five. But I am poor and needy. Make haste to me, O God. You are my help and deliverer. O Lord, do not delay. You can see this as an inclusio. Now in this case, it's the first and last verse of the song. That's certainly not always the case. But again, think of bookends. And so everything in between is giving you the same basic idea. All right. I'll end with this one. Well, let me do it this way. Another thing we can talk about is the repetition of things. And we can have the repetition of words And we can have the repetition of clauses or phrases or something like that. We just saw one of those. But in particular, I'm thinking more of a refrain in that case. So repeated words, I do this all the time. I've been doing it in 1 Samuel here recently, looking at all the different names of God, how they're used, the ark, and the kavod theme, and the take theme, and so forth, how many times they're used. But it's done very intentionally to help us to see the point. And so I'm trying to draw out those things so that you can see that point. And many times, if you're reading carefully, you're going to see it yourself. But I'm, of course, leading you through that. element of repetition is not just found in poetry, and that is very obvious. In fact, it's one of the key elements of Hebrew narrative, and so we see that a lot. Here, repeated words are also found quite frequently in the Psalms, and so forth. But the other aspect here is the repeated line or phrase or clause, and we I typically call these a refrain. And so let's turn to Psalm 42, and we'll end with this. This one helps us greatly with structure. And you might remember I mentioned this briefly last week, that Psalms 42 and 43 we believe were originally one psalm. Note Psalm 42 has the title, Psalm 43 does not. But note the refrain is found in both Psalms. That's found in verse 5. Why are you cast down on my soul? Why are you disglided within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise him with the help of his countenance. And then look in verse 11, same thing. And then in Psalm 43, verse 5, same thing. Those are refrains, not just a repeated word, but a repeated, in this case, whole verse. And so these are some poetic elements, but also just elements that we can see in other genres, too. But here, especially with a refrain, we see that more commonly in poetry. Gives emphasis, helps with structure, helps us to understand the point, those kind of things. Okay, comments or questions? Yeah, I do. Well, that's the next thing on my list, acrostics. But there are other elements of poetry in there, too. In fact, we might be able to say that Most everything that I've mentioned here today and last week probably are found in Psalm 119. But yeah, we'll talk about acrostics here going forward. Okay, well, just to give you a little heads up, my plan next week is to finish some of these things, and then the week following I'll be giving a report from General Assembly. And then, because of things being just kind of hit and miss, I'll be on vacation and such in July for a few weeks and so forth, then Eric is going to do a series on, what did you say again? Yes, The Armor of God. And so, then when he's done, I'll come back and I'll finish some of these things on the introduction to the Psalms. Most notably, I'm going to focus on the structure of the Psalter. A few other things, but that in particular will be my emphasis whenever Eric finishes. So, that's the plan going forward. All right, let's pray together. Our Father in God, we thank you for your word and its complexity, its breadth of creativity, and all the different things that you have done in your word to communicate your truth about yourself and all things. And Lord, we thank you for that. We pray for strength to be able to see it and understand it, that we would grow in our knowledge of you and what you have revealed to us. And especially here in these poetic elements and our study of the Psalms. And so we pray as we come to our worship now that you would enable us by your spirit, that you would be honored and glorified in it. We pray this then in Christ's name, amen.