The Poetics of Biblical Narrative - Part 4
Meir Sternberg’s poetics shows why cataloguing literary devices is pointless unless we explain how each small textual choice serves the biblical author’s communicative purpose.
Psalm 8: Symbolism and Structure
Psalm 8 reveals that unexpectedness and counter-intuition are built into the very structure of God's world.
Psalm 8 opens by declaring that God’s name is great and majestic throughout the world:
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
David then gives two examples of God’s great name throughout the earth, but both of them are completely counter-intuitive.
The Heaviness of Glory and the Strength of Infants
The first example is God’s glory, which in Hebrew is the same word for heaviness (kavod). David says, “You have set your glory above the heavens.” God’s heaviness is placed above the heavens, yet it stays up. God’s majesty is over everything, but in unexpected ways.
The second example David gives is babies:
Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.
Babies destroy God’s enemies. That is the second illustration of how God’s name fills the earth. David does not point to the strong man or the seasoned soldier; he points to nursing infants. The Israelites face enemies, and God establishes babies to silence them.
The Strangeness of Man
By the time we reach the famous passage about mankind, we have been carefully prepared. David has already shown us that God’s name fills the earth in surprising ways. He writes:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet.
Here is the strangeness about man: everything else in creation looks far bigger and more impressive than humanity. Yet counter-intuitively, God says, “No, I am going to give authority to him.”
David is showing us that this unexpectedness is a fundamental theological and philosophical reality. It is part of the way God structures the world. A basic feature of reality is counter-intuition: your immediate, first impression of how things work in the world may not be the correct one.
And that, my friends, is why the Bible is art.