(You may have never noticed it before, but the actual text of the NIV does mark off strophes with a blank line in between them). However, here the verses come one after the other, with no breaks to identify the strophes. What follows is Psalm 2 in the New International Version translation. What is the point of doing that? It reveals the major sections, the basic structure, and the progression of a psalm.Įxercise 2: Close your Bible. So it’s up to us to locate and identify them. However, the Hebrew text of the Psalms contains no markers for strophes. It's clear that the biblical poets thought and composed in strophes. A strophe is a distinct block within poetic material.
What's that? Think of it this way: a strophe is to poetry what a paragraph is to prose. In order to understand it, each verse requires the reader to identify how B relates to A.Ī second feature of Hebrew poetry is the strophe. Each verse consists of A and then B (and occasionally C, and even D). This feature is more commonly called parallelism because the two or more parts of a psalm verse are in some way parallel to each other. How does the second (and third, fourth) part of the line relate to the first part?Īs you have seen, the most basic feature of Hebrew poetry is couplet composition. I attended the session and got the following ideas from what he said:Įxercise 1: Describe the relationship between the two halves (or several parts) of these verses in the Book of Psalms. Clines was speaking at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in November 2000. Clines of the University of Sheffield, in the U.K. I want to give credit where credit is due: I based my observations and the student exercises on a presentation by Professor David J. A few years ago, I developed the following lesson plan for a unit on the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament course that I teach at Amarillo College.
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