Sometimes in the Bible, the narrator of a story will include some poetry that might surprise you. Often it’s in the form of heightened speech like a prayer, a blessing, or a song. Tomorrow I’m preaching on such a passage in 1 Samuel 2:1-11—Hannah’s prayer. How are we supposed to read passages like these?

Poetic passages found in narrative prose are more important than you may realize because they provide keys for interpretation and mark important developments. Here’s how S. M. Baugh explains it commenting on the songs Revelation 5:

Songs may seem like a mere adornment to us, but in the ancient world songs were often key to understanding developments in a drama… classic tragedies and comedies often featured only a few actors playing various parts and a chorus that would sing and dance periodically during the performance. The choral songs were not for entertainment only. The were interpretive and helped to explain what was going on in the play to the audience. Analogously, the songs in Revelation 5 have an interpretive function to help us understand what is going on in the vision of the Lamb.

And now some more J. P. Fokkelman from Reading Biblical Narrative:

Poetry embedded in prose has various functions. It articulates the material, contains a lesson, or offers a point: it intensifies the meanings already hovering in the air or implicitly present in the surrounding prose; or it formulates a conclusion in order to add a point of its own to the prose. The poetry embellishes and enriches or intensifies the prose, and is usually conspicuous, like a pearl within its setting. These functions are largely subservient to the prose, but sometimes the situation is reversed and we find it is the prose that has been geared to the verses.

Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1-11 is one of these kinds of poetry in prose passages. And it’s really important. You can see that in Fokkelman’s insight that the books of Samuel are “supported by three pillars of poetry” which hold up the beginning (1 Samuel 2), exact middle (2 Samuel 1), and end (2 Samuel 22) of the story.

I will share more about this in my sermon tomorrow.