An Invitation to Biblical Poetry Quotes

“As art, these poems do intellectual work. They are deeply engaged in the questions and problems of human experience. I emphasize this in part because the Bible is often popularly characterized as didactic literature—its purpose is instructional, it aims to teach, and therefore the goal of reading is to extract the correct “message.” Biblical poetry can do these things, and some biblical poems are manifestly didactic (think, for example, of the many examples in the book of Proverbs). But to imagine that this is the only thing biblical poems do is needlessly limiting.”
― Elaine T. James, An Invitation to Biblical Poetry