I found our discussion of the practice of paraphrasing biblical passages when transforming them into hymns quite fascinating.\u00a0 Surely, it makes sense to alter the text slightly to get it to fit into a metrical pattern, or to make it easier for an audience to understand, but sometimes I personally feel these paraphrases took too much artistic liberty to still be considered equivalent in meaning to their original psalms.\u00a0 The paraphrase of Psalm 46 into the hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” is a good example of this.\u00a0 The hymn includes several mentions that are not present in the original psalm, including a lot of mentions about “darkness” and “ancient foes,” however the most striking difference is the inclusion of Jesus into this hymn.\u00a0 For me, this particular mention is what makes it no longer possible to say the current hymn bears any basis on the original psalm because it was written before the time of Jesus, nor would the Hebrew community Psalm 46 originated from have been attempting to subliminally imply the coming of Jesus in this text.<\/p>\n
All of this raises the question: how far from the original psalm can a hymn go while still maintaining the original meaning?\u00a0 I certain believe this is a possible pursuit, and one I am actually considering as a part of my final project for the course, but I do not think “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” successfully achieves this task.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I found our discussion of the practice of paraphrasing biblical passages when transforming them into hymns quite fascinating.\u00a0 Surely, it makes sense to alter the text slightly to get it to fit into a metrical pattern, or to make it easier for an audience to understand, but sometimes I personally feel these paraphrases took too… Continue reading Paraphrasing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9196473,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9196473"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}