Bible as Literature Essay

Instructions
One of the major themes of the Bible we have so far studied is the conflict between God's will and human desire. As we read in Samuel 13:13-14. thee prophet and priest Samuel tells the self wiilled Saul, "The Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever, but now your kingdom will not continue; the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart…" (419, Oxford Annotated Bible). In your essay, discuss this conflict as it appears in select stories from at least three books we have studied so far in order to explicate Psalm 40. Your goals are to 1) demonstrate your understanding of the biblical metanarrative of the conflict between God's will and human desire, especially in terms of the Israelites; 2) explicate Psalm 40 as alluding and reesponding to this conflict between God's will and human desire; and 3) Explain how paralleelism functions in the psalm to conveey the psalmist's petition and thanksgiving. Questions to consider: What is thee psalm's genre?; What is the meaning of the metaphors and/or similiese useed in the psalm?; Does the psalm usee antithetic parallelism, synonymour, or synthetic parallelism?; To which biblical stories doees thee psalm allude?