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Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the OnScript podcast. This is Matt Lynch. I'm a co-host of the OnScript

podcast with Matt Bates, Andrew Johnson. And I'm coming to you today with a head cold. I just felt

like I needed to confess that so that none of you think I got a voice change. And in the interview that follows, you'll hear

a little bit of that, but there are much more important things that you can listen to in the

interview, namely Elaine T. James, who I am interviewing as part as the second in a two-part

series on understanding and reading biblical poetry. So I hope you enjoy this. Don't

have a lot more to say. So let's get right to it. Hey, everybody, welcome to Onscript. This is

Matt Lynch here today with Dr. Elaine T. James, who is assistant professor of theology at St.

Catherine University in St. Paul,

Minnesota. Elaine holds a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary and is the author of the book

we're discussing today landscapes of the Song of Songs, Poetry and Place, published by Oxford

University Press in 2017. She's also the co-editor with Blake Cui of a volume that's coming out shortly

called Close Readings, Biblical Poetry, and the Tasks of Interpretation, and that's going to be

by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Elaine, welcome to Onscript. Thanks for having me.

So I'm curious how you got involved in biblical studies and what your journey was like leading to eventually writing this book on Song of Songs.

Well, I was an English major in college.

I loved literature and actually taught high school English after college and thought, I loved it so much that I thought

that was probably what I was going to do for a career. But I also had this interest in seminary

and going to divinity school and just a sense of curiosity about theology. And I thought maybe I would consider after the M. Div doing

pastoral ministry. But when I went to Prince's Seminary for my M. Div, I fell in love with Hebrew.

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