April 26, 2011 – Numbers 7:42 - 7:89

I don’t have anything to say about this reading because it is basically a repeat of the first half of the chapter.  But I do want to share something I never knew and just happened to read.  We spend a lot of time in the Old Testament and we just went through Sirach and just had a reading from Wisdom.  We still have most of Psalms and Proverbs.  I have just started a book that is about the Hebrew literature that these are written in.  Much of these Old Testament are written as Hebrew poetry. 

It doesn’t appear as poetry to us because we are so used to rhyming poetry and stanzas matching and all that.  It talks about the words aren’t suppose to match like that, but the subject matter of the sentences matches.  And they don’t necessarily say the same thing, sometimes they are the same, sometimes opposites, but always related.

A wise son makes his father glad, but a foolish son is a grief to his mother.

Ill-gotten treasures profit nothing, but virtue saves from death.    Proverbs 10:1-2

As you can see, the lines are contrasting, but saying the same thing.  I really always thought this was a very annoying way of writing and very difficult to read over a long chapter.  I never realized this was their way of writing poetry.  Keep this in mind as we read more Old Testament writing and see if you can catch the relationships between the lines and see the artistry that is in the writing beyond the lessons that are being taught.