Hey everyone. Welcome back to the OnScript podcast. This is Matt Lynch coming to you from Regent

College in Vancouver. I wanted to introduce this new podcast that we launched just recently,

just a couple weeks ago, called In Parallel. And this is the second episode we're going to feature

on this OnScript feed from In Parallow. And it's the last one, too. So from now on, you're going

to have to go over to In Parallel and subscribe there and listen to future episodes. This first

season will have seven episodes, and then we'll take a break and produce more. And this podcast

is focused on the connections between biblical and contemporary poetry

in a really different style and format than we normally do with our interview style

episodes on script and biblical world.

So yeah, please subscribe and give it a rating and tell people about this podcast as we get it off the ground.

And special thanks to Keith Willis for producing it.

And of course, to Brent Strawn, who writes and narrates this podcast.

So we really hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to In Parallel, an offshoot of the Onscript podcast, in which we explore the connections between biblical and contemporary poetry. I'm your host, Brent Strawn. I'm a biblical scholar and

theologian.

I teach at Duke University, where I am Professor of Old Testament and Professor of Law.

I am at best an amateur poet, but I am a great lover of poetry and how it can capture the biggest of things in the smallest of forms.

The poet and theologian Christian Wyman once said that poetry reflects a certain density of lived experience suffered into form.

The great African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks captured that density more, well,

densely, when she defined poetry as life distilled.

Density and distillation, suffering, and form are all on display in the poem for this episode, Song of Songs 8, 6 through 7, a poem about love and death. Here's the poem in the new Jewish Publication Society version.

Let me be a seal upon your heart. new Jewish Publication Society version.

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