A NEW BOOK ON THE PSALMS:

"This is very bellicose literature," [Amy] Cottrill [assistant professor of religion at Birmingham-Southern College, Alabama] said. "It's very violent. They are asking God to go kill their enemy."

Though they may be largely ignored, the psalms are considered along with the rest of the Bible to be divinely inspired and the word of God to most evangelical Christians, Cottrill said. "The Bible has a tremendous amount of authority," she said.

The ancient texts, held sacred for millennia, are deserving of scrutiny and study, she said. "There is a trend toward reading less scripture," she said.

Cottrill, 37, has a doctorate in Hebrew Bible from Emory University in Atlanta and a master of divinity degree from Methodist Theological Seminary in Delaware, Ohio.

She grew up in Parkersburg, W.Va., the daughter of a United Methodist minister, but she is a teacher, not an ordained minister or preacher.

"I knew pretty early on I wanted to teach," she said.

Cottrill arrived on the faculty at Birmingham-Southern a year ago and teaches classes on world religions, Old Testament, New Testament, gender in the Hebrew Bible, and Bible in contemporary culture.

Her book, "Language, Power and Identity in the Lament Psalms of the Individual," offers literary analysis of the writing style of the psalmists.

She finds them to be starkly different in worldview from the modern religious sensibilities of Jews and Christians.

"Most mainstream religious people do not think of God as a religious warrior," she said. "The psalmists did. To them, God is all-powerful, but God is also very personal, very close. They definitely feel they have access. Sometimes they barter with God, saying, `If I die as a result of this suffering, who is going to praise you?' That's a pretty bold view."