Poets of the Bible: From Solomon's Song of Songs to John's Revelation

by Willis Barnstone (Translator)

“The vividness and beauty of the language emerge in a fresh way . . . with evocative simplicity.” ―Robert Alter, professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature, University of California, Berkeley The world’s greatest poetry resides in the Bible, yet these major poets are traditionally rendered into prose. In this pioneering volume of biblical poets translated in English, Willis Barnstone restores the lyricism and power of the poets’ voices in both the New and Old Testaments. In the Hebrew Bible we hear Solomon rhapsodize in Song of Songs, David chant in Psalms, God and Job debate in grand rhetoric, and prophet poet Isaiah plead for peace. Jesus speaks in wisdom verse in the Gospel, Paul is a philosopher of love, and John of Patmos roars majestically in Revelation, the Bible’s epic poem. This groundbreaking volume includes every major biblical poem from Genesis and Adam and Eve in the Garden to the last pages of Alpha and Omega in Paradise.

Genres: Poetry, Religion, Christianity

544 pages, Hardcover

First published June 27, 2017

About the author

Willis Barnstone is an American poet, memoirist, translator, Hispanist, and comparatist. He has translated the Ancient Greek poets and the complete fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. He is also a New Testament and Gnostic scholar.

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me start with my comments on the text of book, and then I’ll examine the premise of the book itself …


Biblical poetry is a part of our daily language whether we know it or not. Well-known phrases from Proverbs (“Pride comes before the fall”), Job (“by the skin of your teeth”), or the Psalms (“bite the dust”) all come from Biblical poetry.

Biblical poetry is not lush and effusive, as is much (early) English poetry. It is not expansive and expressive. It’s also not a metaphorically rich poetry. Rather, it is a tight, cryptic form. You might even say crabbed. It takes much value in implying as much as possible through as few words as possible.

There is a quiet beauty in some Biblical poetry. Most of it is exceedingly ordinary or unadorned, and one gets the sense that much of it was put in a poetic form to help in memory, like a lesson. Outside of the Book of Job, one shouldn’t expect sweeping landscapes and dramatic actions and deeply expressive speeches.

The King James Version, while eliminating the poetic form on the page, provides a strangeness and a lushness that is not in the original poetry. That’s good and bad. While more intriguing and beautiful, it is not an accurate picture of the original work.

In these translations by Barnstone, I thought the poetry was a bit slack. They appear in free verse, with no rhythmic or rhyming structure. They are written in stanzas that are not in the original. I read it with pencil in hand eager to underline moving passages or interesting uses of words. I never used it. If you like your verse free and prosaic, you will enjoy this.

Hebrew poetry is not a form that we (English speakers) are familiar with or are accustomed to valuing. This is an interesting book, but if you are looking for moving, expressive poetry from the Bible, you might be better served going back to the prose King James Version.


Now, my thoughts on the premise of this book …

So I opened up Poets of the Bible, a big book jammed full of passages from the Bible, and I asked myself, “What is Barnstone’s definition of a poem?” Not many people know that the Bible is packed with poems and poetic language. Even I wasn’t aware it had this much poetry.

I looked at the intro, I looked as the information sections preceding the poems, the endnotes, the index – nothing. I can’t find a definition of poetry in this book other than “parallelism.” (Which is not really a definition of poetry. Prose can use parallelism.) So how in the world is Barnstone choosing these passages to include in the book? One would think that’s a critical thing to note since it underlies the entire premise for the book’s existence.

Since the start of the 20th century and the advent of Modernism, poetry has been defined as anything anyone calls poetry. If I say it’s a poem, it is a poem. Many decades and lush forests were wasted with one person saying “A poem can’t be XX” and someone deliberately making a poem XX. As a result, poetry today is vaguely defined as language (usually printed) with some kind of non-linear, heightened feeling except when it’s not. Thus we have prose broken arbitrarily into lines on the page (often to resemble a traditional poetic form) and called a poem. One can quibble with my gross over simplification, but that is basically where we are today. I don’t like it, but so be it.

Thousands of years ago, however, poetry was an actual thing. A honest-to-god object with a definition people could agree on. Everyone knew it when they saw it and could point out the difference between prose and poetry. Poetry, in short, was language put into a rhythmic or patterned form. The average shepherd of the time, with a few minutes of explanation, could have separated poetry from prose. It was not a vague feeling of heightened emotion. It was an actual thing. Heck, Lucretius wrote a scientific treatise in verse.

Robert Alter, himself an outstanding translator of the Hebrew Bible, in his book, The Art of Biblical Poetry, cites a general (and now out-of-date) definition of poetry from Barbara Hernnstein Smith: “‘As soon as we perceive that a verbal sequence has a sustained rhythm, that it is formally structured according to a continuously operating principle of organization, we know that we are in the presence of poetry and we respond to it accordingly … expecting certain effects from it and not others, granting certain conventions to it and not others.’” (P.6)

Alter notes that Biblical poetry uses accentual-semantic-syntactic rhythm, meaning it usually three to four stresses per half line and the second half line is a parallel of the first half line – repeating the first half line in other words, building on the first half line, saying the antithesis, repeating the syntax, etc. This is the traditional Hebrew poetry form. There are some others (acrostic, for example), but this is the primary form.

Hebrew poetry is most evident in the Psalms and the Book of Job. Also, lines of this form are woven throughout the Old Testament. There is also a category of Wisdom Sayings such as Proverbs, which are in semantic parallelism. They often feature alliteration, assonance and an occasional internal rhyme. It seems here that the poetic form was primarily a memory aid for the students.

For centuries, the Bible was translated as prose. (At least in English.) It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 20th century that people began to look for and find poetry in the Bible. Robert Alter’s milestone translation of sections of the Old Testament along with the New Jerusalem Bible translation were pioneers in identifying and printing the poetry as poetry.

Throughout the Old Testament, there are snippets of poetry – a few lines in the traditional Hebrew poetic form. (See Genesis 3:14, for example.) Some books are all poetry, such as Job, the Song of Songs and some of the prophets. In the New Testament, the beginning of the Gospel of John is in a traditional Hebraic poetic form (though written in Greek).

Barnstone, however, finds poetry everywhere in the Bible. Just to cite one example, he includes the opening of Genesis (“In the Beginning ….”) as poetry. By what definition? Alter does not make it poetry. The New Jerusalem Bible does not. I’ve heard of no translation that does so. Yet Barnstone makes this a poem. And he makes Revelation poetry without any precedent. Again, by what definition?

Because it is “heightened language”? Because it is “beautiful”? Because it has a broad sweep and epic scope? None of these are definitions of poetry from biblical times. And Barnstone provides no evidence that these are poems other than his saying so. So we’re back to the present day.

I love Barnstone’s The Restored New Testament. It is a masterpiece of scholarship and translation. My one pique has always been his use of poetry for Paul’s Epistles and Revelation. Why? Why? Why? There’s zero evidence that these are poetry in any traditional Hebrew or Greek form.

Now he’s created a whole book built on this faulty, aesthetic quirk. I thought he might finally explain his decision behind doing this, but he hasn’t. The Poets of the Bible really provides very little justification for why these are considered poems.

I get it: They are beautiful passages. But can’t prose be beautiful. Can’t it use heightened language? Can it display a broad sweep and epic scope? What’s wrong with that as prose? Was Joyce or Faulkner or Melville incapable of writing this kind of prose?

Then again, maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s found or noticed something no one else has. It would have been helpful to have some justification for what he was doing.

Having said all this, the book ends up being a collection of moderately interesting passages of the Bible.

I know. I’m the only one who cares. So I give this three stars. With more rigor and selectivity, it could have been five stars.

[Lynelle Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A unique look into the scriptures.
The poetic rhyme adding a new dimension to the familiar giving it a fresh touch and deeper understanding of the Psalms and other scriptures.

"The world’s great poetry resides in the Bible. In the Hebrew Bible we hear Solomon carol in Song of Songs, David chant in Psalms, Job and God debate in Job, and Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos declaim amid the prophets; in the Greek Scriptures we hear Jesus speak wisdom verse in Gospels, Paul exult in Corinthians, John and James preach musically in Letters, and John of Patmos roar epically in Revelation. Although these are among the most familiar biblical figures, because their words are set as prose few have traditionally associated them with poetry. Consider William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. Melville is the greatest hidden author of the prose poem. These great poets in English capture the image and song. And those tales and harmonic resonance are immersed in their poetry and have profoundly fashioned their work. Today it seems unimaginable that the Psalms and Song of Songs were once printed as prose. Without that inspired biblical song “locked in prose,” as Emily Dickinson called the concealed holy poems, would we have Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Hopkins, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas? Their work would be diminished."

So the lord God casts a deep sleep on the man
And he sleeps. Then he takes one of his ribs
And closes up the hole with his flesh,


And the rib the lord God takes from the man
He makes into a woman and brings her to the man.
And Adam says, “She is bone of my bones


And flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman
Since out of man she is taken.”
So a man leaves his father and his mother,


And clings to his woman and they become one flesh, 
And the man and his woman are both naked
And they are not ashamed.

[Machaia · Rating 1 out of 5]

The translation was poor and flowed badly for something claiming to be a book showcasing biblical poetry. Furthermore, the reasoning behind the passages he chose felt random and arbitrary. He also had information in his introductions that was skewed at times and simply wrong at others.