<Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This section needs expansion . You can help by adding to it . (June 2014) </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This section needs expansion . You can help by adding to it . (June 2014) </Td> </Tr> <P> The Old Testament is considered one of the most important and influential works of literature in world literature, and has provided inspiration for writers (both religious and secular) throughout subsequent history . In 1886, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "In the Jewish Old Testament, there are men, things and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare to it . One stands with awe and reverence before these tremendous remnants of what man once was...The taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone of "greatness" and "smallness". To have glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste in every respect, to the Old Testament to form one book...that is perhaps the greatest audacity and sin against the spirit that Europe has on its conscience ." </P> <P> Christianity is based on the belief that the historical Jesus is also the Christ, as in the Confession of Peter . This belief is in turn based on Jewish understandings of the meaning of the Hebrew term messiah, which, like the Greek "Christ", means "anointed". In the Hebrew Scriptures it describes a king anointed with oil on his accession to the throne: he becomes "The LORD's anointed" or Yahweh's Anointed . By the time of Jesus, some Jews expected that a flesh and blood descendant of David (the "Son of David") would come to establish a real Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem, instead of the Roman province . </P>

What book of the old testament is considered to have the greatest poetry