I finished the Poetical and Wisdom books a while ago. They
include Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, and Song of Solomon. It’s
taken me forever to sit down and blog about this installment. I hate to admit
it, but it’s probably because I didn’t really care for this part.
I’ve been surprised that I haven’t found reading the Bible
to be particularly tedious until this section. It sounds bad, but I kind of
thought it would be boring. I laugh even as I type that sentence because I’ve
read long, really boring books for this book project that were much harder to
finish, and I didn’t go in to them with that thought. It’s like when H tells me
she doesn’t like something at dinner before she puts it in her mouth. How can
she possibly know?
For whatever reason I found the books that were more
stories, like Job and Song of Solomon, to be a little hard to follow. I suspect
that it’s because they are written more in verse than prose and not being much
of a Biblical scholar, I don’t really have the background to know the overall
story. I felt a bit like a ninth grader reading Romeo and Juliet for the first time; “Huh?” Also, Job really
dragged on there for a while.
The Psalms really weren’t bad. They are exactly like reading
poetry, as they are poems. I find it difficult to read too many poems all in
one sitting because I feel like my brain can’t absorb them properly after a
while. I didn’t want to skim them for the sake of saying I’d read them, so it
was rather slow going. For the most part, however, it was enjoyable. I had fun
when I ran into one that had been turned into a hymn or something and I
recognized the words. It’s that flash of recognition you get when you’re at a
concert for some band and they finally play that one song that’s on the radio
and you think, “Oh, it’s THAT band!”
It was the Proverbs though that really killed me. They were
just so repetitive, and a lot of them didn’t even seem to make sense to my 21st
century sensibilities.
I’m looking forward to moving on to something new.
