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The Lamplighters Lectures
February 25–26, 2005: “Reading Biblical Narrative and Poetry”Lecture Materials
The Speaker
Dr. Jan Fokkelman has served as a Lecturer in Hebrew and Aramaic at Leiden University since 1963.
He received his Ph. D. from that institution in 1973 for the Dutch version of Narrative Art in Genesis
(as the commercial edition of 1975
is called). (Out-of-print and hard to find for several years, an updated version of Narrative Art
in Genesis has recently been brought back into print by Wipf and Stock Publishers, due in part to
BATL's instigation).
After receiving his Ph.D., he decided to test his method of close reading and his insights on the literary nature of the Biblical texts on a much wider scale. He chose the books of Samuel, which are often considered to be the longest stretch of the best narrative art in the Hebrew Bible. This enterprise of four volumes and some 2400 pages is called NAPS (Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel). After the completion of the tetralogy on Samuel, he concentrated on Biblical poetry. Some years ago, he discovered, after much painstaking work and counting of so-called pre-Masoretic vowels, that the poets of Psalms and Job (and probably others too) counted their syllables. The eventual result of this study was another four-volume set, Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible. For the public at large (Bible readers who do not know Hebrew or Greek), Dr. Fokkelman wrote two books in Dutch, in 1995 and in 2000; they give introductions into the creative reading of biblical narrative and verse and also appeared in English, as Reading Biblical Narrative, and Reading Biblical Poetry, both published by Westminster John Knox Press. The book on prose also appeared in French, Italian and Chinese. 
The LecturesFriday Night: Reading Biblical Narrative, 7:00 p.m.–9:30 p.m.
Saturday Morning: Reading Biblical Poetry, 9:00 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
LocationPeninsula Bible Church3505 Middlefield Rd Palo Alto, CA 94306
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