Literature and history

history come.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 21, The Bible's Magic Trick.

This is the seventh of ten episodes on the Old Testament.

In this show we're going to talk about the Book of Psalms,

a collection of 150 lyric poems,

subdivided into five sections that together make up one of the longest books in the Bible.

The Psalms are the first short poems we'll encounter in our podcast.

As we learned in previous programs, Heseids and Homer's epics were composed in verse, a specific

kind of meter called dactylic hexameter, a meter that helped performers with memorization and also wove together with the music being performed during recitations. The Psalms, like ancient Greek poems composed during the same period, were also carefully structured and almost certainly

set to music.

But unlike the long epic works of Heseit and Homer, the Psalms don't go on and on for hundreds

of pages. The Psalms are not the oldest surviving body of

lyric poetry. From the short works of Archilicus and Alkman in the 600s, B.C. E. ancient Greece produced a variety of short poetry covering

many different topics and styles, and the work of these Greek poets and successors like

Sappho, Stesigaris, Anachraon, and Pindon. and in future episodes, lyric poetry or short poetry, sometimes associated with a liar and frequently

discussing personal emotional experiences, shows up in the literary record as a genre for the first

time in the 600s b c.e. It was likely

occasional poetry during its initial centuries. In other words, poetry written for

specific occasions to be performed with musical accompaniment

before an audience. Audiences would have frequently included patrons who had commissioned

...