Meme: Bible Book Haiku
Category: Faith...
Posted Tuesday, April 27, 2004 at 09:39 PM [GMT-6]

Update: The current list of Bible haikus is available here.

I've been thinking about this for awhile, and I've finally worked up the courage to propose it. I know there are a good number of Bible scholars on my blogroll, and a number of poets...but I wonder just how many poetic Bible scholars (or scholarly Bible poets) there are?

Here's one way to find out: I'm proposing a little blogging community exercise in which we attempt to create a haiku (short poem with three lines...5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables. But, you knew that.) for each book of the Bible -- in consecutive fashion (sort of) -- summarizing or capturing a main theme for that book.

Here's how it works. I'm going to begin with Genesis (duh), and since you're reading about this for the first time here, you get Exodus. But, if you encounter this meme elsewhere, you'll take the next book of the Bible. (Still with me?) Thus, if you read a haiku about the book of Joshua and decide to dive in, you'd then write about the book of Judges.

Your post should include:

1. the previous book's haiku;


2. a link to the post where the previous haiku appears;


3. your book and its related haiku; and,


4. these basic instructions.

If you want to send me an email or ping this post, I'll try to keep track of and accumulate all the resulting haikus, along with links to their authors. At some point, it would be great to have all 66 books of the Bible summarized in haiku. Of course, duplicates are inevitable, but that's part of the fun, seeing how different people summarize the same book...and you can also do more than one book, as long as you reference a predecessor's entry and write about the subsequent book.

OK. Let's kick this off and see where it leads, shall we?