AT FIRST, THE INVITATION to put together a selection of poems from the Bible seemed to have been addressed to the wrong person. I had actually begun writing about the Bible twenty years earlier by trying to show that the whole idea of biblical “poetry” is a bit off: biblical style is not really divided into two clearly different modes, verse and prose, so talking about the Bible’s “poems” is, technically speaking, only an approximation (on this see below). What is more, I don’t particularly like to talk about compositions like the psalms or prayers or prophetic speeches as poems, since this word is in any case likely to summon up a host of associations inappropriate to these texts. They are really not very much like what we think of as poetry in the mainstream Western tradition. And even the idea of making a selection—sifting through the Bible to find its high points, as it were—was bound to be somewhat repugnant to anyone who, like me, thinks of it all as sacred Scripture.展开