Interpreting Hebrew Poetry

This book is most helpful in understanding Hebrew poetry beyond the notion of parallelism. It discusses grammatic and semantic parallelism, which are helpful in getting a deeper understanding of Hebrew poetry.

The "Guides to Biblical Scholarship" took a decisive turn for the better shortly before this volume was produced. This is easily one of the better volumes. Petersen clearly demonstrates the techniques and structures utilized by the Hebrew poets with plenty of examples from the biblical text. Terminolology has become quite confusing in this area, but Petersen cuts through these difficulties. Controversial matters such as the existence and function of meter in Hebrew poetry are treated in a balanced manner. Furthermore, the book goes beyond mere demonstration of poetic features and fulfills the promise of the title by illustrating how an understanding of these features informs the interpretation of poetic passages of scripture. This is a good place to begin before moving on to the more extensive treatments of the subject by Gillingham or Alter, or the more complex and cutting edge analysis of Kugel.

This is a very good book on Hebrew Poetry. It takes into consideration some of the more current thoughts in linguistics. If you are interested in Hebrew Poetry, you should have this book in your library.