Literary Styles of Nephi’s Psalm

John W. Welch

There are about 30 different Hebraic literary forms or styles of writing, but the basic one is parallelism. There are different kinds of parallelism, such as synonymous parallelisms, synthetic parallelisms, or antithetic parallelisms. All of those different types of parallelisms are present in Nephi’s Psalm. It is a masterful work in the highest tradition of the Hebrew lament and also of the Hebrew Psalms of praise and of reassurance.

One article by Matthew Nickerson is called "Nephi’s Psalm: 2 Nephi 4:16–35 in Light of Form-Critical Analysis." Nickerson examines the ways in which biblically trained scholars have studied the writing style of the "lament psalm." There are about twenty Psalms in the Old Testament that fall within the form of the lament. In the lament, there are five stages:

It is not hard to see that Nephi’s Psalm follows that pattern precisely.

Further Reading

Book of Mormon Central, "Is ‘Nephi’s Psalm’ Really a Psalm? (2 Nephi 4:16–17)," KnoWhy 30 (February 10, 2016).

John W. Welch Notes

References