That’s No Literature, That’s My Bible: On James Kugel’s Objections to the Idea of Biblical Poetry

Abstract

In The Idea of Biblical Poetry, James Kugel dismantles attempts to find a meter in biblical parallelism. In the process, he implicitly locates the distinction between sacred and secular texts in the formal aspects of the language. This paper challenges Kugel’s main assumptions. First, the premise that poetry must be metrical is controversial, not given, in the history of literary criticism. Second, the formal properties of language do not prove anything about the significance attributed to the forms. I argue that the categories of ‘literature’ and ‘scripture’ cannot be reduced to the presence or absence of formal qualities. The distinction between sacred and secular texts requires consideration of the relation a community of readers takes toward a text. Future discussions of biblical poetry should incorporate relational issues, not just formal ones.