This literature shares fundamental affinities with poetic literature outside the Bible, and not just poetic texts from the ancient Near East. As a result, we reject the notion that there is no poetry in the Hebrew Bible. This judgment is not intended to deny that Hebrew prose and poetic literature share important features. Nonetheless, the distinction between poetry and prose is not an imposition of foreign Greek categories on Hebrew.27 Rather, in Hebrew as with many other languages there is a body