Ehrman Chapter 7

Chapter 7 starts off with the explaining of Hebrew Poetry, in which you are able to classify lines in four types; synonymous parallelism, antithetical parallelism, constructive parallelism, and climatic parallelism (Ehrman, Pg.166-167). The book of Psalms is the best known book of poetry in the Bible (Ehrman, Pg.168). The word Psalm is originally from the word “psallo” which means to pluck the string of an instrument, but eventually came to mean “to sing with accompaniment” (Ehrman, Pg. 168). Psalms is divided up into five books each ending with a doxology, or a “word of praise” (Ehrman, Pg.170). The book of Lamentations is a series of laments in which the prophet complains about life or certain situations and begs for God to help (Ehrman, Pg.
The poems in Lamentations are based on acrostics, which means “the first letter of the first word of each verse together spell a word or are significant for some other reason” (Ehrman, Pg. 173). Next, we move on to short stories, which are told as “freestanding compositions” instead of in context of a much longer story (Ehrman, Pg.177). The four-chapter book Ruth, has a main character who happens to be a Moab woman, who is married to and then widowed by an Israelite man (Ehrman, Pg.177). Ruth enters into the land of Israel, starts worshipping Israel’s God, is rewarded for her actions, and then is destined to become the great-grandmothers of King David (Ehrman, Pg.177). The book of Ruth is known as one of the Megillots of the Hebrew Bible, or one of “the five scrolls” (Ehrman, Pg. 179). The book of Daniel, in English, is among one of the Major Prophets in the English bible, but in the Hebrew Bible, it is not one of the prophets (Ehrman, Pg. 184). The first six chapters of Daniel are a collection of short stories that tells about Daniels being taken to Babylon after the destruction of Israel (Ehrman,