Page 5 - The Poetic Books - Student Text

I remember when I was a kid, mom would
always be making bannock. We only had a
cookstove in those days and it would make our
old shack too hot in the summer, so mom
would make bannock outside. I always liked
raisin bannock, so I would talk my mom into
making some.
Now my sister was a big tease, and she was
always doing tricks on me. Of course I usually
managed to get her back. One day my sister
told my mom she would help her with the Figure 1: Bannock
bannock. “Don’t make that old hard kind,” I
teased her.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll make it real good for you,” my sister said. What I didn’t know was she
had a handful of big black flies she had killed, and instead of raisins, she put those dead
flies into one corner of the bannock.
It wasn’t long before my sister brought me a warm piece of bannock and some lard. I
should have known something was wrong because she was never this nice to me. I
slapped on a big chunk of lard and watched it melt. “Boy, this is going to be good,” I
thought as I took a big bite. I kind of wondered why my sister was acting so funny and
then I noticed that the raisins were not very sweet – in fact, they tasted terrible. “Ugh!” I
said, “What’s wrong with this?” Then I looked a closer at the raisins and saw they were
flies.
My sister and I are great friends today and every time we get together we laugh about
the flies in the bannock. Isn’t that the way it is though? Even though the rest of the
bannock was good, the taste of flies ruined it. Something rotten or dirty makes a good
thing bad. A few little sick things in a person’s life, like anger, lying, pride, sex sins, can
really ruin a person.
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1.2 Objectives

1. You will be introduced to unique features of Hebrew poetry.

2. You will be able to identify figures of speech used in poetry from many countries.

3. You will understand the place of poetical books in the OT.

4. You will be introduced to the concept of wisdom in the Bible.

5. You will compare biblical wisdom to that of other cultures.

4 Waabizesii, Wisdom from the Elders (Point Roberts: NAIM Ministries, 1993), 37-38.
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