Finding Jesus Christ in the Old Testament often involves learning to discern the ancient music of the Hebrew Bible. In Seven Songs, Rosalynde Welch and Adam Miller explore the “Tanakh” as a literary masterpiece, organizing seven specific poems into a narrative arc that mirrors the lifecycle of a believer’s faith. From the fiery devotion of the Song of Miriam to the “salty tears” of divine absence in the Psalms, this approach treats the text as a living witness of Jesus’s own spiritual formation. In this interview, Rosalynde Welch explains how these poetic voices offer a theology of providence that remains sufficient even when God feels far away.
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Introduction
What is Seven Songs, and how does it fit into your larger series?
Seven Songs is the third volume in the series co-authored by Adam Miller and me that began with Seven Gospels, on the Book of Mormon, and then Seven Visions, on the Doctrine and Covenants.
We’ve been riding the wave of the Church curriculum cycle, so the next book of scripture to tackle was the Old Testament.
With a book as vast and varied as the Hebrew Bible, we could have gone a bunch of different directions. But Adam and I both have academic backgrounds in literature—he was a Comparative Literature major at BYU, and my PhD is in early modern English literature—so we decided to build on that shared love by focusing on the Bible’s most beautiful literary texts.
Large portions of the Old Testament are Hebrew poetry.
Many Latter-day Saints may not even be aware that large portions of the Old Testament are Hebrew poetry, because the King James Version doesn’t format the text in poetic lines.
Hopefully, now that we’re being encouraged to use additional translations, more Saints will come to understand the Hebrew Bible as a book of poetry, as much as history and prophecy. Seven Songs hopes to do its part in that respect!
What guided your selection of songs and the order in which you discuss them?
I’ve had a little book on my shelf for a long time, The Great Poems of the Bible by legendary biblical studies scholar James Kugel. Kugel was my first introduction to the Hebrew Bible as a book of poetry, and I consulted his table of contents for a first pass of possible texts to include.
As always, we looked for some kind of unifying angle together with lots of internal variety: the unifying angle was literary merit, and we sought internal variety in the speakers and topics.
And as before, it was a priority to include texts by and about women, so the song of Miriam in Exodus 15 was a natural choice, as was Lamentations 1, which is voiced from the perspective of an allegorical woman.
We each also got to pick our personal favorites—for Adam, that was Ecclesiastes 2, and for me, Psalm 42.
Because the texts were so scattered across the Old Testament, there wasn’t really any value in reading them in order of the text itself.
Topical Order of the Seven Songs
So instead—and for the only time in this series—we ordered them topically, as the record of a lifecycle of personal discipleship:
- Psalm 104 and Job 28 cover creation and formation.
- Exodus 15 represents a young and fiery faith.
- Lamentations 1 and Ecclesiastes 2, each in its own way, treat the catastrophes and collapses of faith that often occur in midlife.
- Psalm 42 speaks to the long “afternoon” of faith, when God feels distant.
- Isaiah 60 is the joyous reunion of the believer and her God.
How is the Tanakh the undisputed literary treasure of our standard works?
Tanakh is the Hebrew acronym for the Hebrew Bible, Judaism’s foundational sacred text, derived from the first letter of its three main divisions: Torah (Law), Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). We occasionally use that term in the book to remind readers of the Old Testament’s origin as the sacred writings of the Jewish people.
I think its literary quality comes at least in part from its incredibly long gestation period, in contrast to the other books in our standard works.
The Old Testament was written over a millennium and contains everything from mysterious, archaic texts from the deep past to the developed literary apocalypticism of the Prophets.
It reflects the best efforts of a culture that revered text and literacy above all else.
It reflects the best efforts and skill, culled from the centuries, of a culture that revered text and literacy above all else.
The Hebrew Bible contains what I judge to be the most beautiful language in all of scripture, including lines like:
- “The Lord is my shepherd.”
- “Let justice roll down like waters.”
- “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept.”
- “Arise, shine for thy light is come!”
What do you mean when you say that “we should aim to read Christ from the text, not into the text”?
We really took to heart the warning of Nephi, who chastised insensitive Christian readers of the Bible:
What thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them? Yea, what do the Gentiles mean? Do they remember the travails, and the labors, and the pains of the Jews, and their diligence unto me?
2 Nephi 29:4
While our whole series is focused on finding Christ in scripture, we thought the best reading of the Hebrew Bible wouldn’t force Christian theology onto it but would instead read Jesus of Nazareth out of it.
The best reading of the Hebrew Bible wouldn’t force Christian theology onto it.
In other words: How would Jesus have understood these texts? And can we see the values and themes of the poems reflected in Jesus’s own formation and ministry?
This seemed like a way to both honor the integrity of the Hebrew Bible while also recognizing its relevance to the Christian discipleship that we practice.
Human Enterprise
What excites you about how humans are depicted in Job 28?
My father is a tax attorney with a passionate love of physics and astronomy. I’m my father’s daughter, and I’ve always been attracted to human exploration, ingenuity, and ambition.
So I appreciate the picture of human nature that emerges from the poem’s opening scene in the sapphire mine.
You feel the miner’s exhilaration as he descends into the dark. The poem captures humanity’s restless drive to explore, to discover, to dream up something that doesn’t exist.
It makes me proud to be a human being.
My co-author Adam emphasizes the shadow side of human ambition when it veers into greed and exploitation—and he’s right about that.
Perhaps we’re invited to refine our ambition and enlist it in Christ’s own work.
But I continue to see human ingenuity as a gift, even if it’s incomplete and often misdirected. In fact, I argue that the poem shows God’s own creative work as the example for skilled human enterprise.
So perhaps we’re not so much condemned for our ambition as invited to refine it and enlist it in Christ’s own work.
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What are the limits of human wisdom based on your reading of Job 28, and where can true wisdom be found?
The poem in Job 28 makes clear that human practical knowledge, on its own, can’t grasp ultimate wisdom. We can mine sapphires, but we can’t buy the book of wisdom at any price.
It dwells with God alone.
And yet the poem’s answer to its own question, “what is wisdom,” is surprisingly simple: “the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”
Some readers find this a kind of fideism and a theological letdown. But I think the point is that wisdom is hidden in plain sight.
Jesus’s ethic is clear but totally counterintuitive: love your enemy, lose your life to find it. A moment to recite, but lifetimes to learn by heart.
Divine Providence
What is providence?
Providence is an old-fashioned word I’ve come to love. It shares a root with “provide” and in religious contexts it means God’s foresight and protective care.
Providence doesn’t mean God will deliver every cherished hope or urgent need. As I say in the letter: houses burn, cancers metastasize, and children lose mothers every day.
It doesn’t mean I will lack nothing.
What it means, I think, is that because I am in a relationship with God as my creator, whatever remains will turn out to have been enough.
That’s my reading of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” doesn’t mean I will lack nothing; it means finding that what’s left is sufficient.
Like the widow of Zarephath, whose rime of flour and slick of oil held up just long enough.
What are the implications of the rough situation of the woman in Lamentations for the concept of providence?
The woman in Lamentations represents Jerusalem after the Babylonian invasion, but the character is presented in very personal terms as a woman who has lost everything: husband, children, friends, home, reputation, dignity, and even her bodily autonomy.
She’s been cut from the weave of creation that we saw in its glory in Psalm 104.
She refuses to sever that final relationship.
Lamentations 1 pushes hard on the question: how many relationships can be destroyed before a person ceases to exist in any meaningful sense?
It’s a very rough read, hopeless and despairing throughout. But I find it meaningful that the woman keeps crying out to God to look at her, to witness her suffering. She refuses to sever that final relationship.
In demanding God’s gaze, even in her wretchedness, she affirms that the bond between creator and creature remains.
That’s the essence of providence: God continues to uphold the world and to lend me breath from moment to moment.
Divine Absence
How does Psalm 42 express grief in the face of divine absence?
Psalm 42 is first and foremost a love song for a beloved who has abandoned his lover: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you.”
The Psalmist gives us some of the most emotionally raw poetry in scripture: “My tears have been my food day and night,” he writes.
Think about that image: when the freshwater of God’s presence runs dry, he’s left licking up his own salty tears of despair. It’s a self-consuming spiral of hunger and withdrawal.
My favorite line in the whole poem is this one: “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.”
Is it God’s absence threatening to drown the speaker, or does he yearn to drown in God’s presence?
The ambiguity is part of its power.
These lines resonate across scripture with Joseph Smith‘s anguished cries from Liberty Jail: “O God, where art thou?”
What is lost by not having a theology of divine absence?
Divine absence may be more the rule than the exception in covenant life. As I write in the letter, in later life months creep past, spiritual practices feel exhausted, growth stagnates without the fireworks of a faith crisis.
Without a theology of absence, we’re left grasping for default explanations of why God feels so far away—either the ancient Hebrew explanation that absence means punishment (you must have done something to drive God away), or the modern Western explanation that absence means nothingness (God isn’t there because he doesn’t exist).
Neither story is helpful because neither one really responds to the phenomenological predicament of divine absence.
Psalm 42 offers a framework that allows us to see divine absence as a facet of God’s continued reality.
How are periods of divine absence consonant with God’s reality, rather than evidence against it?
I argue that the hallmark of reality is, in fact, friction, distance, and difference.
Ironically, a vending-machine God-on-demand who guarantees frictionless availability looks more like a psychological comfort construct than a real Father.
I suggest that Jesus’s “cry of dereliction” from the cross, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, is actually his greatest testimony of the Father’s reality.
In that groan of estrangement, he affirms a relationship with someone other, who can be absent, and who is therefore real beyond wishful thinking.
Looking Ahead
What is the next book in the series focused on?
We just submitted the manuscript for the final book in the cycle, Seven Crossings: Encounters with Christ in the New Testament.
We focus on the Gospel of John and have selected texts that narrate an encounter or “crossing of paths” between Jesus and an individual. Think Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Lazarus, and the rest of the beautiful narratives in the fourth gospel.
Adam, characteristically, focused on divine indwelling, a key theology of the Johannine community, and I focused on the ecclesial community of love that is charged with carrying Jesus’s light and life in the world now that he is gone.
It was, as always, a joy to write, and I think it will conclude the series on a high note.
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About the Scholar
Rosalynde Welch is the associate director and a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. A specialist in early modern English literature with a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, her work focuses on the intersection of Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literary theory. She is the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction and has contributed extensive scholarship to BYU Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. Her collaborative project with Adam Miller, including the volume Seven Songs discussed here, applies her expertise in poetic structure and historical context.
Further Reading
Explore more From the Desk articles about the Old Testament:
- What Does Genesis Really Say About Creation?
- Robert Alter and the Hebrew Bible
- Jonah in the Bible: A Commentary by Rabbi Steven Bob
- Second Temple Literature with Malka Simkovich
- “His Hand Is Stretched Out Still”: The Lord’s Eternal Covenant of Mercy
Poetry in the Old Testament
Read what top scholars and publishers say about poetry and songs in the Old Testament:
- Seven Songs: Signs of Christ in the Old Testament (Deseret Book)
- The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader’s Companion with New Translations (Free Press)
- A Review: Seven Songs: Signs of Christ in the Old Testament (Times and Seasons)
- New Guidance on Bible Translations for Latter-day Saints (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
- What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry (Dialogue)
