Poetry of the Psalms

Psalms are considered poems, its poetic medium recognized almost from the very beginning of psalmic commentary. Josephus, Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome all suggest that the Psalms are poetry, even as verse arranged in lines. This article explores the poetry of the book of Psalms and the psalms as poetry, focusing on what psalmic verse consists of. It considers the different manuscript traditions of the Psalms—Masoretic, Qumran, and the various Septuagint manuscripts and papyri fragments—and what they reveal about poetic lines in psalmic verse. It also discusses the lyricism of psalmic verse, the Psalms’ informing rituality in relation to lyric verse, the free rhythms and parallelism of biblical poetry, and the orality of psalmic verse.