READING THE PSALMS

“Let the sea resound, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it.
Let the rivers clap their hands,
    let the mountains sing together for joy;
let them sing before the Lord,
    for He comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
    and the peoples with equity.”  (Psalm 98:7-9 NIV)

Those who talk of reading the Bible "as literature" sometimes mean, I think, reading it without attending to the main thing it is about; like reading Burke with no interest in politics, or reading the Aeneid with no interest in Rome...   But there is a saner sense in which the Bible -- since it is, after all, literature -- cannot properly be read except as literature, and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.  Most emphatically, the Psalms must be read as poems -- as lyrics, with all the licenses and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry...  Otherwise we shall miss what is in them and think we see what is not.

-- C. S. Lewis in “Reflections on the Psalms”

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