Here’s a selection from the psalmody of the day, Psalm 46: 4-8a, from my daily prayer app:
4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
6 The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts. . . . (for some reason, they excluded vs. 7) 8 Come, behold the works of the Lord . . .
Beautiful, right? Nice imagery. I was attracted to this passage, in part, because of the staccato rhythm of verse 6. So, I took the liberty to tweak the arrangement, just a little, to emphasize the poetic structure, for rhetorical effect. Here it is:
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.The nations rage,
the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice,
the earth melts.Come, behold the works of the Lord . . .
This rendering is obviously more potent. Why? The emphasis intended by the author, King David gets lost in the efficient (in terms of publishing a Bible) sentence or “straight-up prose” structure of the passage. The efficient arrangement sublimates all the nuance and richness of this little passage; the rhetorical/poetic arrangement underscores it. And this is just one, solitary example. There are more. So, what?
The mind equipped to “read rhetorically” (the classically trained mind) God’s Word will have “eyes to see and ears to hear” better the spiritual truths articulated therein. (Not at all intending here to discount the work of the Holy Spirit in illuminating scripture. My point here is pedagogical.) Greek and Hebrew, because they emerged in oral cultures, relied more heavily than we on the interplay between form and meaning. But something is lost.
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