Configuring Psalm 29 as a Poem: Cognitive Strategies and the Artful Reading Experience

The classic modern framework for biblical Hebrew poetry is based upon intertwined conceptions of parallelism and meter. This framework provides certain assumptions for how biblical lines work, as well as (often implicit) strategies for how biblical poems should be read as poems. These assumptions and strategies are apparent in modern analyses of Psalm 29, especially in the kinds of proposals consistently made for altering the Masoretic Text to make it more “regular”, even in the absence of textual evidence. My recent book on biblical poetry (Unparalleled Poetry: A Cognitive Approach to the Free-Rhythm Verse of the Hebrew Bible, 2023) has challenged these assumptions and strategies, proposing a new framework for biblical poetry that is theoretically grounded in cognitive research and based upon the textual data of the biblical poems. Preferring the term “conformation” to parallelism, I propose that the versification system of biblical poetry is constrained by Gestalt perceptual processing and that the listening or reading strategies demanded by this versification system require part–whole processing of lines into line groupings, line groupings into figures, and figures into the whole poem, as the poem aurally unfolds. In this article, I demonstrate that these part–whole strategies of reading biblical poems make sense of the textual shapes of Psalm 29 and lead to an artful experience of the poem.