text:
The Prayers of the Psalter
Henry Wansbrough
The studies which follow were written for the seventh annual course for
monks and nuns during the Easter Vacation at St Benet's Hall, Oxford, at the
instigation of the Union of Monastic Superiors and in particular of Sister Zoe,
the Prioress of Turvey. I am grateful to her and to those who have so loyally
attended the courses, each time pushing me to do one more. I am particularly
grateful to the artists at Turvey who have provided the pictures which do so
much to enliven these booklets.
Countless Christians, and especially monastic communities, centre their
public prayer on those prayers of Israel which we call the Psalms. They are
ancient, pre-Christian prayers, from an era and in an idiom which is far from
contemporary. They attract immediately by their heartfelt devotion, and yet
they also contain elements which can puzzle and even repel. Poetry is all very
well, and prayers are all very well. But why did the Church choose, and why do
so many individuals choose, to pray by means of poems, often bloodthirsty and
vindictive, drawn from a tradition which is now foreign to us? Is it simply
that the psalms provide a large body of material which can be used as a sort of
prayer-wheel? It is important to face these issues.
The prayer-wheel approach is not to be despised. It was, after all,
current in the Church for a number of centuries when the psalms were recited in
Latin with little or no understanding. For those with no understanding of Latin
it was an exercise in quiet meditation against the background of the murmur of
the psalms. For those with a little Latin it was possible to pick up some of
the key words and concepts hallowed by Christian usage and theology, such as Dominus,
amor, justitia, misericordia. The recitation of the psalms could be made
very fruitful and prayerful by picking up on these terms and meditating on them
during the reading or recitation of the psalm. The communal recitation of the
psalms was in itself an exercise in community, and often an expression of joy
and unity. At other times it might of course be an exercise in patience,
self-restraint and tolerance, perhaps all the more valid as a prayer!
Even when the psalms were not understood, their use in prayer had at
least two great values. Firstly, these prayers were hallowed by use among God's
people for many centuries. Already in the time of the first and second Temples
they were the prayers of our forebears among God's people in preparation for
the Messiah, prayed through the vicissitudes and triumphs of monarchy, of
exile, of return, and of pilgrimage from the Diaspora to Jerusalem. Even the
least instructed would know that Psalm 109 (Dixit Dominus Domino meo) celebrated the kingship of David, and Psalm 136 (Super
flumina Babylonis) mourned the loss of Jerusalem from exile in Babylon.
Later they became the prayers of our forebears in the Church, sung in the
liturgy from the earliest times. Memorable is the account in the Peregrinatio
Egeriae of that lady finding the psalms being sung in Jerusalem on her
pilgrimage from Gaul in the fifth century. Similarly, nearer home, St Patrick's
use of Psalm 19 ('Some trust in chariots or
horses...') in his confrontation with the pagan Celts is well known. On
countless fabled and famous occasions in Christian history the psalms have
provided the apt quotation or prayer in need, the perfect demonstration of
their familiarity, springing to the lips of Christians in moments of crisis.
Secondly, the psalms were hallowed by the use of Jesus himself. The
psalms were no doubt the staple of Jewish public prayer in the assemblies of
his time, whether in the Temple or elsewhere. The Passion Narrative in the
gospels is shot through with allusions to Psalm 21, so that the evangelists
almost see the story of the Crucifixion through the filter of that psalm, keyed
in - so to speak - by its intonation by Jesus himself, 'My God, my God, why
have you forsaken me?'. It is surely permissible in Christian meditation on the
psalms to assume that he must have enriched them by using them all at various
times in the diverse needs and moods of his life.
Since the liturgical use of the psalms has become current in the
vernacular these values have not disappeared, but have been joined by others.
It is here that the understanding enters in which this booklet attempts to
mediate. The following pages represent an attempt to make the use of these
ancient hymns not necessarily more scholarly, but rather more prayerful.
Luther's view of the Psalms sets a fine tone for the study. The Psalter,
says Luther,
might well be called a little Bible. In it is
comprehended most beautifully and briefly everything that is in the entire
Bible. It is really a fine enchiridion or handbook. In fact I guess that the Holy Spirit wanted to take the
trouble personally to compile a short Bible and a book of examples of all
Christendom or all saints, so that anyone who could not read the whole Bible
would here have anyway almost an entire summary of it, comprised in one little
book. (Werke, 35.254).
The psalms provide a way into biblical history, and cannot be understood
without some knowledge of the history of Israel. There will often be historical
glimpses in the pages which follow, but a more thorough and continuous
knowledge of the history of Israel will contribute greatly to the appreciation
of the psalms. Similarly, as Luther says, they often provide a sort of summary
of theological themes and preoccupations which are seen at greater length and
fuller expression in other biblical writings[1].
The brief indications given in the following pages may therefore most profitably
be filled out by use of a biblical dictionary[2].
In the questions for study I have presumed to refer frequently to my 'Study
Guide', an commented index to the chief notes in the study edition of the New
Jerusalem Bible (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994); this provides ample
scope for personal study and reflexion..
The Numbering of the Psalms
In this booklet the numbering of the Psalms follows general liturgical
practice in using the number of the LXX Greek translation of the Psalms, rather
than that of the Hebrew.
Greek Septuagint Hebrew
1-8 1-8
9 9/10
10-112 11-113
113 114/115
114/115 116
116-145 117-146
146/147 147
148-150 148-150
1. The Psalter - an Open-Ended
Collection 7
1. What is a
2. Parallelism
3. Metre
4. Word-thrift
5. Imagery
6. Psalms found
2. Types of Psalms 17
3.The Liturgical Setting of the
Psalms 19
4. Psalm Commentaries
Psalm 1 An
Opening Blessing 23
Psalm 8 The
Crown of God's Creation 26
Psalms 14 and 23 - Entrance
Liturgies 30
Psalm 17 A Hymn of David 34
Psalm 21 The
Servant of the Lord 40
Psalm 28 The
God of the Storm 45
Psalm 33 Confident Shelter in
God 51
Psalm 38 A Mere Breath 56
Psalm 45 The Lord of Hosts is
with Us 60
Three Historical Psalms -
Psalms 77, 104, 105 62
Psalm 86 Jerusalem, Mother of
Nations 68
Two Psalms of David's Kingship
- Psalm 88 and Psalm 131 71
Psalm 92 The
Lord of the Seas 77
Psalm 94 The
Word of the Lord 83
Psalm 109 A Royal Coronation 86
Psalm 118 The
Law and Love 92
Psalm 126 Song of Ascent 96
Bibliography 99
Index of Psalms commented 100
Index of Matters principally
discussed 101
Chapter One
The Psalter - an Open-ended
The prayers and hymns which constitute our Hebrew psalter must be seen
as a collection of poems and prayers from among the treasury of poems and
prayers in the biblical tradition. The biblical tradition contains many other
similar prayers, some of which are contained in the canonical books of the
Bible, and some of which have been adopted into the Christian liturgy. There
are, however, yet others, such as Psalm 151, the Psalms of Solomon and the
Hodayoth of Qumran (see pp. 14-16). This in turn poses the intriguing question
of how and by whom the Psalter itself came to be built up.
1. What is a 'Psalm'?
A first attempt at definition of a psalm might
be 'a prayerful poem' or 'a poetic prayer'. It is obvious enough to us that the
psalms are poems, though the characteristics of Hebrew poetry need to be
analysed. The Hebrew Book of Psalms is entitled mylht, which means 'praises'. The Greek title is yalmoi,, or 'hymns', a title which over a third of the
psalms bears individually. Another title for them is twlpt, or 'prayers', which occurs in the headings of
seven psalms and at the end of Ps 72, 'the twlpt of David are ended'. However it must always be
considered that the collection of 150 psalms may be to some extent a historical
accident, and the genre of 'psalms' is not in itself clearly delineated, since
many similar poetic prayers appear in the Bible outside our psalter of 150
psalms, and many more within the Hebrew religious tradition also outside the
Bible. The New Testament further contains canticles, such as Luke's canticles
of the Benedictus, the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis,
not to mention the hymns of the Pauline corpus (Philippians 2.6-11; Colossians
1.15-20; 1 Timothy 3.16) and the hymns of the Book of Revelation (7.12;
15.4-5), all of which are impregnated with language, sentiments and rhythms
familiar from the Book of Psalms.
What, then, is a Hebrew poem, and what makes
the psalms poems? What constitutes a poem is no less difficult to determine for
Hebrew than for English poetry. Much of classic English poetry was discernible
by rhymes in various patterns at the end of rhythmical lines. This is, however,
much less frequent in modern compositions which are nevertheless clearly poetry.
The classic saying of Wordsworth, 'Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquillity' (Preface to Lyrical Ballads) is more adapted to the
Victorian poetic sentiment than to the powerful and often aggressive poetry of
the Hebrew Bible.
Parallelism, or binary rhythm, perhaps takes in
Hebrew poetry the place held in European poetry by rhyme. But it is a feature
of much Hebrew and semitic writing. It should be
accounted a feature not so much of poetry as of all elevated Hebrew writing, so
that it hardly suffices as a criterion of what is poetry and what is not.
Without rhyme and a set metre it is often difficult to determine whether a
passage should be set out in continuous form or broken into lines, according to
the conventions of European poetry. So the solemn promise of Genesis 22.17 may
plausibly be set out as poetry, just as Genesis 12.3, although in many Bibles
only Genesis 12.3 is so set out:
Gen 12 I
shall bless those who bless you
and shall curse those who curse you
and all clans on earth
will bless themselves by you.
Gen 22 I
will shower blessings on you
and make your descendants as many as the stars of
and the grains of sand on the seashore.
Your descendants will gain possession of the
gates of their enemies
all nations on earth will bless themselves by your
because you have obeyed my commands.
So, for that matter, may the story of the birth
of Moses in Exodus 2.1-7 be set out as poetry. The
same rhythm and parallelism would justify the same judgement of the ancient
Canaanite victory inscription of King Mesha known as the Moabite Stone (ANET,
p. 320). In some passages of Jeremiah (e.g. chapters 20-23) the writing slides
imperceptibly between prose and poetic forms. The merging of the two forms is
notable also in such writings as John 3-4. Indeed, Kugel rejects the whole
distinction between prose and poetry. He points out that there is no Hebrew
word corresponding to 'poetry', which suggests that there is no such concept.
It is preferable, therefore, he maintains, to speak of 'common speech on its
best behaviour' (p. 87).
The distinction between 'poetry' and 'prose'
is, as noted, not native to the texts; it is a Hellenistic imposition based, at
least originally, on the faulty notion that parts of the Bible were metrical...
To see biblical style through the split lens of prose or poetry is to distort
the view (p. 85).
2. Parallelism
The most obvious characteristic of Hebrew
poetry, which holds a place corresponding to rhyme in English poetry, is
parallelism. It has, however, a quite different function to rhyme. Rhyme, for
example in the heroic couplets of Pope or Dryden, is primarily pleasing to the
ear, secondarily giving a sense of completion. Repetition is a function of oral
writing, and the psalms were clearly written to be heard rather than read, so
that the repetitions serve the purpose of easing comprehension. It also gives a
sense of intensification, for the second member either intensifies or echoes
the first.
The parallelism of Hebrew poetry was first
extensively investigated by Robert Lowth in his lectures at Oxford in 1741. He
divided such parallelism into three categories:
1. Synonymous parallelism, when both paired
lines say more or less the same thing, e.g.
O God, come to my assistance,
O Lord, make haste to help me.
In fact there is often, as in this case, an
intensification or completion in the second line. In this case the second
prayer is not simply for assistance but for speedy help.
'For they wither quickly like grass,
they fade like the green of the fields' (Ps 36.2)
In the second line the image is more precise
and opens up wider vistas.
'But the humble shall own the land
and enjoy the fullness of peace' (Ps 36.11)
The second line adds to the first, because in
it the way of owning the land and its benefits are indicated.
Sometimes more complicated balances may be
seen, such as the double balance in Ps 71.1-2:
' O God, give your judgement to the
king, // your justice to a king's son
that he may judge your people with justice // and your poor with judgement.'
where italic corresponds to italic, heavy type to
heavy type, 'comic' to 'comic' and 'technical' to 'technical'. There is both balance within each couplet and chiastic balance
(judgement-justice-justice-judgement) between them.
2. Antithetical parallelism, when the positive
sentiment in one line is echoed by a negative sentiment in the other[3],
'Calm your anger and forget your rage,
do not fret, it only leads to evil' (Ps 36.7)
Again here, not only is the first line built on
a positive command and the second on a negative, but the second adds to the first because
in it the result of ill-temper is expressed.
'O Lord, you will not withhold your compassion
from me,
Your merciful love and your truth will always
guard me' (Ps 39.12)
'The wicked man borrows and cannot repay,
but the just man is generous and gives' (Ps 36.21)
In these examples the first line is negative, the second
positive. The second line is stronger than the first: not merely will God's
compassion not be withheld, but, more, God's hesed will guard me. The
just man does not merely not fail to repay, but goes
positively beyond wiping out a debt.
3. Synthetic parallelism (that is, joining two
elements together) - this is a sort of rag-bag of all the other kinds of
parallelism, of which there are many. Some of them may be listed.
Paired genders (masculine and feminine nouns)
or paired words, like day-night, heaven-earth:
'He covers the heavens with clouds
// he prepares the rain for the earth' (Ps 146.8).
'By day the Lord will send his
loving-kindness // by night I will sing to him...(Ps
A whole series of verbal pairs occurs in Psalm
32.2, 6-11:
Give thanks to the Lord upon the harp // with a ten-stringed lute sing
him songs.
By his word the heavens were
made, // by the breath of his mouth all the stars.
He collects the waves of the ocean, // he stores up the depths of
the sea.
Let all the earth fear the Lord,
// all who live in the world revere him.
He spoke and it came to be, // he
commanded, it sprang into being.
He frustrates the designs of the nations, // he defeats the plans of the peoples.
His own designs shall stand for ever,
// the plans of his heart from age to age.
Another variation is characterised by Kugel as
'A is so, and what's more, B' (p.8) or by S.E. Gillingham[4]
as 'A<B'. The second element strengthens or outbids the first:
'The Lord sat enthroned over the flood;
// the Lord sits as king for ever' (Ps 28.10).
'The Lord is the strength of his people,
// the stronghold where his anointed find salvation
(Ps 27.8).
The reverse of this also occurs ('A>B'),
where the second element is a mere echo or confirmation of the first:
'He drew me from the deadly pit, // from the
miry clay' (Ps 39.3).
'He put a new song into my mouth, // praise of
our God' (Ps 39.4).
It is rewarding to notice that this same
balance and parallelism persists into the New Testament, not only in the Lukan
canticles, but in many of the Jesus-sayings, such as the neatly-balanced
'The sabbath
was made for man // not man for the sabbath' (Mk
These are most highly developed in Matthew,
where this kind of creative genius is seen at its fullest development:
'Forgive us our debts // as we
too forgive our debtors (Mt 6.12),
'My yoke is easy // and my
burden is light' (Mt 11.30),
3. Metre
The metre of Hebrew poetry is extremely
difficult to judge. It is determined neither by number of syllables (like the
classical Alexandrines or Hendekasyllabics) nor by length of syllable (like
Greek or Latin metres), but by stressed syllables separated by varying numbers
of unstressed syllables, like Gerard Manley Hopkins' Binsey Poplars:
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and
wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
But there are further difficulties in the
corrupt state of the Hebrew text, which in innumerable examples makes it
impossible to be sure exactly what was the original wording. Still further
difficulties spring from our ignorance:
How was the poetry (and especially that of the
psalms) performed?
Was there a limit to the number of unstressed
syllables between stresses, or did a subsidiary stress intrude when a certain
number of unstressed syllables was exceeded? Hopkins here never has more than 3
at a time, and in the brutal third line there is only one unstressed syllable.
Could a single word could ever bear two stresses?
Did little particles (yk and l, meaning roughly 'to' and 'as') count?
Was a regular number of stresses required? The
Hopkins verse above has 5-5-5-4-2-2-3-5 stresses per line.
Despite such obscurities we can discern that
the most common rhythms are lines of two-plus-two (an energetic rhythm, like
the 4:4 of a modern march - Ps 28) or three-plus-three (especially frequent in
psalms of praise - Ps 150), or less frequently four-plus-four (most of Ps 45),
stresses each. A frequent rhythm, normally associated with mourning, is the
plaintive, qina-rhythm of 3 stresses followed by 2, in which the second
line echoes and falls away from the first (so frequent in psalms of lament - Ps
4. Word-thrift
A feature of poetry most difficult to reproduce
in a foreign language, and most easily lost in pedestrian translations, is
economy of language. It requires a poet to bring out the full richness of a
language, and few translators are poets; it is therefore not to be expected
that a translation will give a fair impression of the linguistic richness of
any poem. This is particularly so in the case of a lapidary language like
which is rich in imagery and few in words, resembling finely carved blocks of
masonry. The impression of the language can often be similar to that of gnomic
popular wisdom, 'Faint heart ne'er won fair lady', in which all superfluity is
pared down. A similar impression is given by the poetry of Gerard Manley
Hopkins who often seems to throw out great blocks of sense without concessions
to the continuity-words of prose. For example, the opening lines of Harry
Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue
Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped
flank; lank
Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank
Head and foot, shoulder and shank -
By a
grey eye's heed steered well, one crew, fall to;
Stand at stress. Each limb's barrowy brawn, his
That somewhere curded, onewhere sucked or
By contrast, a phrase like
'he has made you great', which in English requires several little auxiliary
words, is expressed in Hebrew by a single word. This adds dignity and solemnity to the
language. The first stanza of Psalm 28 has 29 words in the Grail English
translation, but only 16 in the Hebrew, four in each line. The first stanza of
Psalm 27 has 23 words in the Grail English, 11 in the Hebrew.
In poetry, especially, the dignity of the
language is further enhanced by the omission of little auxiliary words such as
'the', so that Psalm 81.3 reads more literally
'Justify weak, orphan // defend
afflicted, needy'
('Do justice for the weak and the orphan //
defend the afflicted and the needy').
or 'which', so that Psalm 117.22 reads more
literally (and clumsily in English)
'Stone builders
rejected // become corner
('The stone which the builders rejected // has
become the corner stone')
Here each word has its own accent, and the
effect is clearly one of great strength - again as in the third line of the
Manley Hopkins poem quoted above, where all the words but one have their own accent. In Hebrew the inflections of the
words which knit the sentence together and provide the sense are given by
modifications to the words themselves, so that in Psalm 110.1 the six strong
'Thank Yahweh full-hearted // in-meeting of-just and-assembly'
provide 'I will thank the Lord with all my heart // in
the meeting of the just and their assembly'.
Another example is the opening of Psalm 23, the
'Good Shepherd Psalm'. In the Hebrew the first couplet has just four words
(seven syllables): Yahweh ro'i, lo ehsah, yielding a translation:
'The Lord is my shepherd,
there is nothing I shall want.'
The feeling of the Hebrew poetry is powerfully
rendered by the psalms of the old Latin breviary, where the translator's
reverence for the sacred Hebrew text has led him to reproduce the Hebrew words
and concepts in a way which often yields very awkward, 'chunky' Latin and is
sometimes almost unintelligible without knowledge of the Hebrew original.
5. Imagery
A very special feature of the psalms is the
imagery, drawn largely from the countryside of the land of Israel, especially
in such splendid nature-poems as Psalm 103. Here again a specialised knowledge
helps greatly to enrich this symbolism. The dryness of the country is
constantly brought to mind by the imagery of life-giving water (v. 10; see
p.59-60). The image of Yahweh as a rock of refuge or stronghold immediately
recalls the precipitous escarpments of black basalt or threatening grey
granite, often still crowned with a proud Crusader fortress or even a ruined stronghold
of King Herod. Young lions no longer roar for their prey (v. 21), but the
hunter will still occasionally fall in with a leopard in the desert valleys.
The 'wine to cheer man's heart and oil to make his face shine' (v. 15) conjure
up the fertile little vineyards and olive-groves of the valleys in the hill
country, which made Moses' desert-parched messengers see Canaan as a land
flowing with milk and honey. But, except in the great oases like Jericho or on
the banks of the Jordan, a small flock of birds (v.12) is very noticeable in
the spindly and sparsely-leafed trees. Only on the mountains of the Lebanon (v.
16, and see p. 50 on the cedars) are the trees big enough for nesting storks.
Just one couplet, 'the goats find a home on the
mountains, and rabbits hide in the rocks' (v. 18) can be brilliantly evocative
of such clefts in stark rock as Nahal David, a quiet valley, cut into a steep
ravine, where a little stream appears mysteriously out of the rock and flows
into the Dead Sea, a mile away. The valley stands out from the surrounding marl
as a green ribbon. There the visitor can imagine himself to be completely alone
until a stone tinkles from the barren, buff hillside into the almost dry stream
bed, and then he notices that the hillside is covered with ibex, that delicate,
sure-footed mountain goat. Walking down the valley the visitor may have the
luck to come across a bush from which peer dozens of eyes, before a bevy of
brown, furry creatures scuttles out of the bush to hide in the clefts of the
rock; these are hyrax, intensely inquisitive and yet timid, inaccurately
translated as 'rabbits'. Sheep are so ubiquitous in the valleys leading down
from the hill country that they become a natural image for many uses; but they
are grey, scraggy, cross-grained and harassed, rather than white-fleeced little
darlings; happy is the shepherd who finds for them green pastures and restful
waters amid the rocky outcrops of the uplands.
6. Psalms found Elsewhere
The Liturgy of the Hours makes use of a many
psalm-like hymns of Old and New Testament. To show that this is far from being
the full treasury of the genre we quote a couple of others.
1. Psalm 151.
According to the title, it was written by David
himself when he had engaged in single combat with Goliath. It is given only in
the Septuagint version of the Bible and gives the impression of having been
written originally in Greek, rather than translated into Greek from Hebrew.
There are several characteristically Greek turns of phrase. This
rules out Davidic authorship.
I was smallest among my brothers,
and youngest in my father's house.
I was herding my father's flocks.
My hands made an instrument,
my fingers fashioned a harp.
Who will give the message to my Lord?
He is the Lord, he himself hears.
He himself sent out his messenger,
and took me from my father's flocks,
and anointed me with the oil of his anointing.
My brothers were handsome and tall,
but the Lord took no pleasure in them.
I went out to stand against the foreigner,
and he cursed me by his idol-gods.
But I drew the sword from his side,
I beheaded him
and rid the sons of Israel of their curse.
2. The Psalms of Solomon, 17
These 18 psalms were probably written in the
middle of the last century before Christ, rather than by Solomon himself. This
particular psalm is not especially rich in thought or imagery (indeed, it is
somewhat repetitive, especially towards the end). However, it does show a
yearning for God's Messiah, no longer linked to the dynasty of David. It is a
valuable indication of the messianic hope which was budding at this time, and
of the awareness of a need to be cleansed.
Lord, your mercy on the work of your hands
endures for ever,
your goodness with rich gifts for Israel.
Your eyes are fixed on them and will not fail
your ears listen to the prayer of the poor made in
Your judgements over all the earth are
your love for the seed of Abraham, the sons of
You train us as a first-born, only son,
to turn an obedient soul from the darkness of
O God, cleanse Israel in blessedness for the
day of mercy,
for the blessed day when your Christ arises.
Blessed are they who
are alive on that day,
to see the good things of the Lord, which he will
do in that generation,
under the training-rod of the Christ of the Lord, in
the fear of God himself,
in wisdom of spirit and justice and strength
for a man to direct them in works of justice, in
fear of God,
to present them all before the Lord's face,
a good generation in the fear of God, in the day
of kindness.
Great is our God, and living in glory in the
who day after day arranges the stars in plenty for
the moments of the hours,
and they do not swerve from the path he lays down
for them.
Their path is in fear of the Lord each day,
from the day God created them till eternity,
and they have not wandered since the day he
created them,
from ancient generations they have not left their
unless God instructed them by the command of his
3. The Hymn Scroll from Qumran (1QH)
This scroll yielded 25 psalm-like hymns,
probably dating from the first century before Christ. This is the fourth hymn.
The form is not so closely parallel as many of the
canonical psalms. The imagery is interesting: it combines some vivid images of
seafaring with standard apocalyptic imagery of the Pit, Hell and the Abyss.
What of the child-bearing? Is that an image or the basic reality of the hymn,
which is being imaged? Is the messianic child, the mighty Counsellor (who
immediately recalls Isaiah 9.5), a symbolic figure or a real person?
They made me like a ship in the depths of the
like a fortified city before the aggressor,
like a woman in travail with her first-born child,
upon whose womb have come pangs and grievous pains,
filling with anguish her child-bearing crucible.
For the children have come to the throes of
and she who bears a man labours in travail.
For amid the throes of death she shall bring
forth a child,
and amid an agony of pain shall spring forth from
her child-bearing crucible
a marvellous mighty Counsellor,
and a man shall be delivered through her throes.
Those who conceive vanity shall be prey to
terrible anguish,
the wombs of the Pit shall be prey to all the
works of horror.
The foundations of the wall shall rock like a
ship upon the face of the waters.
The heavens shall roar with a noise of roaring,
and those who dwell in dust, and those who sail
the seas,
shall be appalled by the roaring of the waters.
All their wise men shall be like sailors on the
for all their wisdom shall be swallowed up in the
midst of the howling seas,
as the abysses boil above the fountains of the
The towering waves and the billows shall rage
with the voice of their roaring.
And as they rage Hell and Abaddon shall open,
and all the flying arrows of the Pit
shall send out their voice to the abyss.
And the gates of Hell shall open on all the
works of vanity,
and the doors of the Pit shall close on the
conceivers of wickedness.
cf. G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in
English (41995), p. 196.
1. In the psalter find a couple of examples
of each type of parallelism described on pp. 5-7. |
2. Find an example of qina-rhythm (see p. 11) other than Ps 27.
Write out a couple of verses, underlining the stressed syllables. 3. Choose a short modern religious poem (5 to 15 lines); compare and
contrast it to a similar psalm. |
Chapter Two - Types of Psalms
The division of the psalms into different
categories was basically the work of Hermann Gunkel. He wrote his great
commentary on the Psalms in 1925-6, and his Einleitung in die Psalmen
was published posthumously in 1933. Since then details have been the subject of
scholarly controversy and some modifications to the schema proposed by Gunkel
have become generally accepted. A useful categorization (based on S.E.
Gillingham, The Poems and Psalms of the Hebrew Bible (O.U.P., 1994),
especially p. 231) is here proposed. Psalms explicitly discussed later in this
booklet are given in heavy type.
1. Hymns of Praise
These hymns normally begin with a call to
praise God. The bulk of the psalm is concerned with giving the reasons for
praising him. They conclude with a further call to praise. Within this
structure the details vary widely.
General Hymns of Praise: 8 28 32 77 99
102 103 104-105 110 112 113 116 134 135 145-150
of these some are especially concerned with God
as Lord of creation: 28 (92)103
others with God as guiding the history of Israel: 77
104 (105) 135
Hymns of praise to God in Sion: 45 47 75
83 86 121
Hymns of God's kingship: 46 92 95-98
2. Laments
The characteristic of these is an opening cry
of distress, then a description of the trouble, leading into a prayer for help,
and finally a declaration of confidence that God has power to save the
suppliant. Some are laments for a national disaster, such as a defeat in battle
(43) or the destruction of the Temple (73) or of Jerusalem (78, 136). Others
are more difficult to classify. It is often difficult to say whether these are
the laments of a single person for a personal difficulty, or a single person meditating
on and praying about public grief, often using the plural ('Revive
us now, God our helper!' 84.5) and singular ('I will hear...' 84.9)
Another untidiness of the classification is
that the declaration of confidence in God's power to save is, in some psalms,
in the form of praise, so that it is tempting to classify the whole psalm as a
hymn of praise.
Individual laments; 3 5-7 11-12 16 21 24
25 27 30 34 35 37 38 41-42 50 54-56 58 60 62-63 68-70 85 87 101 108 119
122 129 139-142
Communal laments: 43 59 73 76 78 79 81 82 84 89
93 (105) 107 125 136
3. Miscellaneous Psalms
Royal Psalms about a king of David's line: 2 17
19-20 44 71 88 100 109 131 143
Several of these seem to be attached to a
specific occasion, such as a coronation (2, 109), a royal wedding (44), the
installation of the Ark in the Temple (131)
Individual thanksgivings: 9 29 31 33 39
40 91 106 115 138
Communal thanksgivings: 64-67 117 123
Individual psalms of confidence: 4 10 15 22 26
61 83 90 120 130
Communal psalms of confidence: 114 124 128 132
Psalms on the occasion of a Public Liturgy: 14
23? 133
This is the usual classification of these
psalms. The discussion of the individual psalms will, however, cast doubt on
its exactitude. Psalm 133 could be used for any evening prayer.
Prophetic Exhortations: 13 49 51 52 74 80 94
Didactic or Wisdom Psalms: 1 18 36 48 72
111 118 126 127 138
So classified are psalms which show the
concerns of the Wisdom Literature, the latest section of the Bible, about how
the Israelite should lead a life faithful to God. There are sections in other
psalms which show the same concerns (e.g. 31.8-10). Since the psalms were used
and re-used constantly, it is not surprising that such concerns should have
crept into psalms which were not originally centred on these matters.
Look up psalms listed under
ten different headings in this chapter, and write a few lines on each,
justifying or disputing their classification under this heading. Would any of
them be better classified differently? |
Chapter Three - The Liturgical
Setting of the Psalms
1. A Cultic Background
It is continuously obvious that at least some
of the psalms presuppose a liturgical setting of some kind. There is frequent
mention of processions, trumpets and other musical instruments, going up to
'God's house', walking around the altar. Sometimes there are refrains which
appear to be a response to a verse-form, as though there were interchange
between a solo singer and a chorus or congregation, particularly when these
responses are short and frequently repeated ('for his great love is without
end'). The 'we' of the psalms
presupposes some sort of public gathering. In other psalms the
singular 'I' similarly seems to stand for a public personality, speaking in the
name of the people. The subject-matter of the psalms is often some national
occasion - victory or defeat - which would call for a public celebration or
The question is, however, complicated by the
dating of the composition of the psalms. The cultural background will differ
widely in function of the date at which a psalm was composed. It is difficult
to be certain of the date of composition of many of the psalms. Some of the
psalms presuppose a reigning king and an established cult in the Temple. Others clearly presuppose and mention the
events of the Exile.
In the course of the relevant centuries the
circumstances of the nation underwent changes which would show their effects in
any national liturgy. David was responsible for the beginnings of the kingship
and the importance of Jerusalem. But before the time of Solomon there was only
an embryonic royal court, and worship at Jerusalem was centred on the Ark.
Solomon's building of the Temple initiated a considerable expansion of cult,
liturgy and priesthood. The reforms of Josiah three centuries later were aimed
at centring all the cult on Jerusalem, abolishing the more-or-less idolatrous
mountain shrines and developing even the family festival of the Passover into
one great central festival at Jerusalem.
All this was rudely annihilated at the Babylonian exile. Then again,
after seventy years of exile, the Jews returned to a more impoverished and
fragile existence in and around a reduced Jerusalem and a more simply rebuilt
Temple. Only in the last century before Christ, probably after the end of the
composition of our psalter, was there any attempt at renewal of the kingship.
The political and national setting of the psalms will therefore differ widely
according to the period in which they were composed.
Similarly with imagery and language, some of
the psalms use the imagery current in Canaanite and Ugaritic poetry early in
the first millenium before Christ, while others show the influence of
Babylonian ideas (presumably most influential during the Babylonian Exile in
the middle of the millenium), and still others reflect the Aramaic language
which became current in the area only in the last three or four centuries
before Christ. These cultural and historical changes may, therefore, be
expected to show in the different psalms composed at different dates.
2. The Psalms of the Kingship of Yahweh
Three factors have focussed the quest for a background
and setting of the psalms espcially onto the royal psalms celebrating the
kingship of Yahweh. The first is the repeated expression malak Yahweh,
roughly translated 'Yahweh is king'(46.8; 92.1; 95.10;
96.1). The second is the analogy with Babylonian liturgy. The third is
indications elsewhere in the Bible of a great annual festival of Yahweh's
kingship. The argument that many of the psalms reflet a great annual festival
of the kingship of Yahweh was advanced most forcibly and famously by Sigmund Mowinkel
(Psalmen-Studien, 1912-1924, and The Psalms in Israel's Worship,
1951, translated into English 1962). Mowinkel maintained that very many of the
psalms, including the psalms of the kingship of Yahweh, were composed for a
great annual cultic festival of Yahweh's kingship.
1. The chief question is the exact meaning of
the expression 'malak Yahweh'. Does it mean 'Yahweh is king' in a static
and permanent sense, or 'Yahweh has become king' with the sense of a new event?
Mowinkel claims that, by analogy with other uses of the same word, it must have
the latter sense. Certainly in 2 Sm 15.10 of Absalom, in 1 Kgs 1.11 of Solomon,
and in 2 Kgs 9.13 of Jehu, it is an acclamation used of someone who has just
become king. Elsewhere it is used in another sense, of someone who was
king in the past, who ruled for a certain number of years, but not of someone
who is king. This would suggest that in the psalms it is an acclamation
to be used at some ceremonial re-enthronement of Yahweh as king, at which it
would be appropriate to cry out 'Yahweh has become king'. However, it
remains questionable whether it is correct to restrict the sense of the Hebrew
word so narrowly. Other Hebrew verbs have this static sense, indicating a
permanent condition which lacks any claim to novelty. The expression could
perfectly well mean 'Yahweh is king'.
2. The great difficulty is that if Yahweh has
become king, this seems to imply that at some time he was not king. Can Yahweh
cease to be king? The second factor in the claim that these psalms belong to a
festival of the kingship of Yahweh is therefore an analogy with Babylon. In
Babylon there was an annual festival at the new year
(which began in what we consider the autumn) of the re-enthronement of the god
Enlil or Marduk, although there is no indication that the god was ever felt to
cease to be king. The god - and his representative, the king - was a symbol of
the life forces in the universe and especially in the agricultural cycle. The annual celebration
was centred on the annual death and rebirth of vegetation. This was symbolised
by a ritual death and re-coronation of the king. In Israel
also the New Year Festival was (and still is) in the autumn, allied to the end
(and so also the beginning) or the annual crop-cycle. Yahweh as creator
is, of course, responsible for the continuation of the seasons and of the cycle
of fertility of the earth. Mowinkel argued that Yahweh's creative work was
conceived principally as a triumph over the forces of chaos (the flood-waters,
which might break out again at any moment, unless restrained by Yahweh), and
that his creative work and his kingship were celebrated anew each year at this
feast of Yahweh's triumph over the forces of nature. Each renewal of this cycle
is, therefore, a triumph for Yahweh, at which it would be appropriate to cry,
'Yahweh has become king'. There is, admittedly, no evidence that in Israel the
autumn festival included the re-enthronement of Yahweh or a renewal of his kingship, but it
would not - claim the proponents of the theory - be unreasonable to assume that
there was a similarity to the Babylonian festival.
One of the difficulties with this thesis is the
chronological relationship of these psalms to the Babylonian Exile. It is
therefore important to date the kingship psalms. On the one hand, the Temple
liturgy was surely formed before rather than after the exile. On the other
hand, influence from the Babylonian festival is obviously more likely to have
occurred in the course of Israel's experience of Babylon during the exile than
before that period. A critical factor in this is the relationship of the
kingship psalms to the exilic prophet who is responsible for the second part of
the Book of Isaiah. In many respects there is a close link between these psalms
and the poetic and psalmic forms of Deutero-Isaiah, especially in his prophetic
descriptions of the return of Israel across the desert as a royal triumph for
Yahweh ('How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the messenger
announcing peace, who proclaims salvation and says to Sion, "Your God is
king"', Is 52.7). Nevertheless, of the two sets of texts it seems likely that
the psalms are earlier, for their monotheism is less absolute. It was only
through reaction to their experience of the rampant polytheism in their land of
captivity that Israel reached the full conviction of monotheism. Until then
Yahweh was seen as the God of Israel without absolute rejection of the
possibility of other gods. Certain of the psalms, including the psalms of
Yahweh's kingship, still admit the possibility of other gods existing, subordinate
to Yahweh ('A mighty god is the Lord, a great king above all gods', Ps 94.3;
'The Lord is great and worthy of all praise, to be feared above all gods', Ps
95.4). This is an indication - disputed, to be sure - that these psalms are
pre-exilic. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a wholly new festival, or a wholly
new angle to an existing festival, would have been introduced into the annual
cycle after the exile.
3. A third factor is the likelihood that at
some time there was in Israel a great festival of the kingship of Yahweh. The
Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkoth) occurs in the autumn at about the time of the
celebration of the New Year. Among other things, it seems to have been a
celebration of the kingship of Yahweh. In the great eschatological celebration
of Zechariah 14 (certainly post-exilic) all the nations are to go up to
Jerusalem to celebrate Yahweh's kingship on the feast of Tabernacles. This
would have been a most suitable occasion for the singing of the psalms of
Yahweh's kingship, though it need not necessarily have been the occasion for
which they were originally composed. Even this, therefore, does not demand an
ancient cultic festival dedicated primarily to the kingship of Yahweh.
The contrary arguments therefore convinced C.
Westermann (e.g. The Praise of God in the Psalms, 1965) that Mowinkel
was mistaken, and that there is insufficient evidence for an ancient cultic
festival of the kingship of Yahweh attached to the celebration of the New Year.
If such a festival, dependent on Babylonian influence during the exile, did not
exist there may have been a somewhat similar festival of the kingship of Yahweh
in Israel associated with a festival of the Ark. Psalm 131 clearly celebrates (whether
at the time or in a commemorative celebration) the return of the Ark from
Kiryat-Yearim to Jerusalem in the time of David. Psalm 23.7-10 has frequently
(though probably incorrectly, see discussion of that psalm) been associated
also with the ceremonial entry of the Ark into the Holy Place. Psalm 98.1 sings
of Yahweh 'throned on the cherubim', those great winged creatures represented
in gold on top of the Ark. But here again the fact that the Ark figured
prominently in Israel's devotion and public worship does not mean that there
was a special annual festival of the Ark, unmentioned in the Bible, or that a
festival of Yahweh's kingship was associated with it. In short, it does not, therefore, seem
compelling to associate the psalms of the kingship of Yahweh with any
particular cultic festival.
The theory has now been largely abandoned,
though it can still be found in many books. A barometer of its decline may be
seen in two recent discussions. It still earns a mention in The New Jerome
Biblical Commentary (1990) but does not feature in 15 pages of the article
on the Psalms in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992).
Having read this chapter, check out the
theory with reference to all the psalms mentioned. Is the theory the most
likely explanation of these features? Write a short essay (2-3 pages) giving
your own reactions. |
Chapter Four - Psalm
Psalm 1 An
Opening Blessing
1. Genre
This psalm suits admirably to begin the
psalter. It begins abruptly, without any title. It outlines two possible
approaches to the whole of life, passing on in a strong conclusion to the
outcome of these two ways. It is an optimistic statement, putting all the accent on the positive side, mentioning the negative
only enough to provide the contrast. It is a Wisdom-Psalm, like many others in
the psalter, especially Ps 118, meditating on the requirements for sensible and
wise living.
Indeed, it could well be that at a certain
moment these two psalms bracketed an earlier and partial collection of the
psalter, bolting the collection together
as a statement about wise living, for a new set of psalms (the gradual psalms,
119-133) starts after Psalm 118. Psalm 1 could then be considered as a brief,
imaged, opening sketch, of which Psalm 118 is a much longer, expansive and
meditative concluding statement. There is a strong argument that the first
three books of the Psalms have royal psalms at their seams[6].
Since Psalm 2 is a royal psalm, this would constitute the initial 'seam', with
Psalm 1 placed before the whole collection.
The psalm contrasts two ways of living,
accompanied by promise and threat. Such paired promises and threats occur
frequently in the Bible, notably Deut 30.15-20, at the end of the giving of the
Look, today I am offering you life and
prosperity, death and disaster. If you obey the commandments..., but if you
turn away....
Another important passage is Prov 4.18-19. Most
familiar is probably the alternatives offered at the end of the Sermon on the
Mount, where Matthew lays before his readers the broad way that leads to
perdition and the narrow gate which leads to safety (Mt 7.13-14).
2. Structure
The contrast between the blessed and the wicked
is brought out in various ways.
a. There is a chiasmus running through the
a. (v.1-2) the
b. (v. 3) image
of firmness, the fruitful tree, successful and thriving
b. (v. 4) image
of impotent instability, insubstantial chaff, wafted away by any breath of wind
a. (v. 5-6) the wicked.
b. This main chiasmus is reinforced by several
means. The Grail translation has lost the Hebrew particles which reinforce the
structure: v.2 begins 'rather, his delight...', and the final stanza
also begins 'rather, they like winnowed chaff', and vv. 4 and 5 begin
respectively 'not so' and 'just so'. These give what Robert Alter calls 'an
exact moral calculus', sewing the whole neatly together, stage by stage.
c. At the end of the second line comes 'the
wicked'; answering it comes the same word in the last line. The blessed will
not sit in the company of scorners (v.1); the wicked shall not stand
(v. 5).
d. In the last verse there is a stark contrast
between the strong statement 'the Lord knows the way of the just' (and,
since the verb is used of intimate, often sexual knowledge, 'embraces' or
'hugs' might be a suitable translation; this is, in addition, the only place in
the psalm where God is the subject of a sentence, so the only place where God
actually takes action), and the evanescence of the wicked, who don't even
manage to stand up to being a subject of the verb. The verse makes a really
strong conclusion, to which the chiasmic structure contributes: verb - 'way of
the just' - 'way of the wicked' - verb. By the grammatical structure itself God
takes charge of the way of the just, whereas the godless way of the wicked
simply blows away into nothingness.
e. Another neat balance disappears in the Grail
translation: in the LXX (which is often a useful guide to the earlier Hebrew
version) the same word is used in v. 1b, 'does not walk in the counsel
of the wicked' and in v. 5b 'join in the counsel of the just'. The Greek
word in each case means the gathering where people join to discuss plans and
make decisions, and so also the plans and decisions themselves. The two
gatherings are contrasted, and the plans made there.
3. Beatitudes
The figure of pronouncing certain people or
qualities blessed by the Lord occurs frequently in the wisdom literature of the
Bible. For Christians the best known is Matthew's set of Beatitudes (Mt 5.3-10),
but very similar is Ben Sira 14.1-2:
Blessed is anyone who has not sinned in speech
and who need feel no remorse for sin.
Blessed is anyone
whose conscience does not reproach him,
and who has never given up hope.
A similar figure has been found at Qumran
(4Q525), which also, as the Psalm and as Luke's set of four Beatitudes and four
Woes, yields the contrast between the blessed and the wicked:
Blessed is anyone who speaks the truth from a
pure heart
and makes no calumny in speech.
Blessed those who cling to his decrees
and do not cling to perverse ways.
Another memorable exchange of this kind of
compliment is featured in the gospel story of the woman in the crowd who cries
out, 'Blessed the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you!', to which Jesus replies, 'More blessed still are those who
hear the word of God and keep it!' (Lk 11.27-28).
1. What is meant by calling this Psalm a
Wisdom-Psalm? What is the Wisdom Literature of the Bible and why is it so
called? (Read e.g. the Introduction to the Wisdom Books in the NJB [study
edition, p.749]) |
2. How is the Beatitude-form used in the Bible? (You will need some biblical
dictionary. Look up all the beatitudes you can in both OT and NT. See NJB
note Mt 5.3c) |
Psalm 8 The
Crown of God's Creation
1. Genre
This is one of the creation-psalms, celebrating
God's power as continuing creator. Of these there is a wide variety in the
psalter, spanning by their origin all the periods of Israel's history, and
drawing on the culture of other nations. So Psalm 18.2-7 resembles Babylonian
hymns to the sun-god. Psalm 28 celebrates the power of God in nature as the
storm-god, controlling the mighty powers of nature, a concept inherited from
the Canaanite culture which preceded Israel in their land. Psalm 32.6-11
celebrates creation from a different point of view, in this case relying on a
less pictorial conception: God creates by his word, and the thought is closely
allied to that of God's wisdom and his ordering of the world. The same concept
will be used of the Word in the Prologue to John's Gospel. Psalm 103 has clear
reminiscences of a lovely fourteenth-century BC hymn to Aton, the Egyptian
Psalm 81.1 ('God stands in the divine assembly, in the midst of the gods he
gives judgement') reflects the Mesopotamian concept of an assembly of gods,
presided by a chief god, in one case the moon-god[8].
The same conception perhaps stands behind verse 6 of this psalm.
2. Formal
The psalm has a certain lightsome and brilliant
quality about it. It is uniquely praise, without any hesitations or complaints,
and the subject-matter is elemental and uncomplicated. To this end serves also
an alluring repetitiveness. Not only is the opening verse repeated at the end
as a refrain, but throughout the psalm there are paired expressions:
Lord our
earth heaven
children babes
foe rebel
moon stars
man son
of man
glory honour
hand feet
sheep cattle
birds fish
air waters.
The sequence of thought is not immediately
obvious: why should it pass from the majesty of God (vv. 2b-3) to the
exaltation of humanity in creation (vv. 4-9)? The link is in the praise of
God's name by children and babes. The astonishing thing is that weak and
transitory human beings should be raised to such a position, and it is because
even the most insignificant of human beings,children
and babies, have this power that humanity is placed over creation. Thus the
key-verse is the central v. 5, which interrupts the sequence in every way: not
only is it an exclamation rather than a statement, as all the others are (the
'what is...!' makes more sense as an exclamation than as a question), but it
breaks the sequence of progression between the halves of the verses. In all the
other verses there is a progression between the first and the second half of
the verse, whereas in this case we have a mere repetition, and an exactly
patterned one at that:
what is man that you remember him
and the
son of man that you care for him.
The psalm circles round two principle
theological ideas, creation and the Name of God.
3. Creation
The psalm may be seen as a sort of meditation
on the first creation narrative (Gn 1). The heavens, the moon and the stars,
and the animal creation come in the same order in the psalm as in Genesis. Only
two points need to be noted. First, the sun is not mentioned; the psalmist is
looking at the night sky for a panoramic view of the divine splendour.
Secondly, the order within the animal kingdom is abruptly changed. We do not
come to the animals and then to Adam. The central point of the meditation is
made clear because the separate creation of the animals is omitted and the
thought skips immediately to the position of Adam in ruling over creation,
giving their names to the animals, and so having power and authority over them
(Gn 1.28; 2.19-20). The animals, then, for all the loving detail lavished on
have importance only as showing the extent of human sovereignty. It might be
worth noticing that even in the division of the animals there is an echo of the
creation narrative: these are the classes of creatures produced, namely animals
successively on land, air and water.
It is also important to observe that the human
authority over the animal creation is an extension of that of the creator. Man
is little less than a god, and endowed with the divine gifts of glory and hdr
('awesome splendour', see on Psalm 29). So human authority over the animal
creation is authority only to continue, conserve and care for the divine work
of creation, not to destroy it arbitrarily. This was already indicated in the
creation narrative: when God leads the beasts to Adam to see what he would call
them, and Adam gives them all names (Gn 2.19-20), by so doing Adam gives them
definite natures and therefore completes the work of creation which God has
4. The Name of God
The name of God in the ancient world had a
special place. In magical prayers and rites throughout the ancient world it was
crucial to employ the right name and title for a god. To have a deity's or a
demon's name was already to have some power over the deity or demon. Even today
to refuse to give my name is normally a sign of mistrust or of distancing
myself; if I give my name it makes me vulnerable. This was why the revelation
of the divine name in Exodus was a manifestation of friendship and trust - and
why it is not to be bandied around unnecessarily. To give someone a new name is
to give a new nature, or a least a new function: so Adam naming the animals,
Abraham (Gn 17.5), Jacob renamed Israel (Gn 32.29; 35.10), Simon renamed Peter
(Mt 16.18). The one who gives the name has a certain creative power and
propriety over the named.
The sanctity of the Name of God receives a
special dimension at the time of the Exile. By its failure, by its hypocritical
sacrifices and its foul idols, and especially by compelling God, the protector
of Israel, to allow the Sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple -
that dwelling-place of his holiness - Israel had profaned God's holy name among
the nations (Ezek 20.39). He was seen by
the nations as incapable of protecting his people, and so of living up to his
Name of being the protector of Israel. The restoration of Israel will put an
end to this profanation of his holy name, and will display its holiness:
The Lord Yahweh says this, 'I am acting not for
your sake, House of Israel, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have
profaned among the nations where you have gone. I am going to display the
holiness of my great name, and the nations will know that I am Yahweh. For I
shall take you from among the nations and gather you back from all the
countries, and bring you home to your own country' (Ezek 36.22-24).
Such thinking provides the context for our
psalm. The use of the creation-narrative in Genesis already shows that it
cannot have been written before the Exile. Its purpose, therefore, could well
be as a hymn of reassurance of human dignity in the dark days of the Exile.
In the Christian dispensation the Name receives
a new dimension. In the Acts of the Apostles, Christians are defined as those
who call upon the name of Jesus, and followers are baptised into the name of
Jesus, that is, into the power of Jesus. The significance of the Name reaches
its high point in the Pauline (or, more likely, pre-Pauline but adopted and
adapted by Paul) hymn in Phil 2.6-11. Here Adam and Jesus are compared, that
is, the first and second Adam. Both were created in the likeness of God. As Adam sought to be like God, so Jesus did not see in this
something to be exploited. As Adam was disobedient, so Jesus was
obedient. As Adam sought to escape death, so Jesus faced death. As Adam was
brought low, so Jesus was lifted high and given the name which is above all
other names. Therefore, to the glory of God the Father, he receives the divine
homage of all creation and the divine name of Ku,rioj or Lord.
1. Compare this psalm to any other poem or
hymn you know about the beauty of the world around us. What is special about
the psalm? How does it differ from your poem? |
2. Write a couple of pages on the theology of names and the Name of
God in the Bible. Use NJB study edition (p. 2092) on note to Gn 2.19, Is
1.26, Jn 17.6. |
Two Entrance Liturgies: Psalm
14 and Psalm 23
Psalm 14
1. Structure
The structure of the psalm is straightforward.
It begins with a question, to which verses 2-5 provide the answer, the last
line summing up with a blessing. Over the exact arrangement of the elements of
the answer there is room for dispute: is it a Hendecalogue (a list of eleven
commandments - one per line in the Grail arrangement) or an Ennealogue (a list
of nine commandments) preceded by two all-embracing conditions?
I would incline to the latter. The answer
begins with two general conditions, walking in wholeness and doing justice,
each expressed in Hebrew by a participle, which separates them from the
detailed conditions. In any case, these two are very general qualities:
wholeness, faultlessness, expresses the whole condition of moral approbation.
'Justice' is the same; the Greek translates it by the very general word dikaiosu,nh, used so liberally by Paul in Romans and
Galatians. The other conditions in this little examination of conscience can
perhaps be paired - with a final trio:
speech: speak
the truth - no slander
neighbourliness no
evil to a neighbour - no slur on a companion/colleague
God's values reverence
for the Lord - wariness of those who lack it
honesty in business security
in handling money - no usury - no bribery.
2. Occasion
The question-and-answer formula suggests some
sort of dialogue, perhaps a liturgical one. Since each half of v. 1 indicates
the Temple (for the holy mountain see comments on Psalm 86), the occasion of
the psalm could be a question put to the custodians of the Temple in the name
of the Lord.
Psalm 23
1. Structure
Traditionally Psalm 23 has been seen as
occasioned by a liturgy of the entry of the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem
or into the Temple. It was attached to different occasions according to the
scholar's estimate of its date. Thus it could be the liturgical hymn to
accompany any of the following occasions:
1. David's bringing the Ark up to Jerusalem (2
Sm 6), the great occasion which first consecrated the city to the Lord, turning
it from David's private fiefdom into the Lord's own capital city. The event is
related with more liturgical splendour in 1 Chr 13.
2. Solomon's placement of the Ark in the Temple
when the building was completed (1 Kgs 8). There was a magnificent occasion
when there was great stress on the coming of the glory of the Lord to his
Temple. This would accord with the frequent mention of 'glory' in vv. 7-10.
3. The restoration of the Temple under
Zerubabbel after the Babylonian Exile (Nehemiah 12.40-43). Ezekiel had written
movingly about the departure of the glory of the Lord by the east gate of the
Temple at the time of its destruction (Ezek 10.18-20), and had prophesied its
return in the same way (Ezek 43.1-5). Again the element of the 'king of glory'
in vv. 7-10 would be most suitable.
4. The re-dedication of the Temple after its
desecration in Maccabaean times (2 Mc 10.1-8).
There are two difficulties about all these
interpretations. The first and minor difficulty is that the psalm is obviously
composite, knit together from three elements. After the first two introductory
verses there is a certain unity provided by the question-and-answer schema of
the second and third parts (v. 3 corresponding to verses 8a, 10a; vv. 4-5
corresponding to verses 8bc and 10bc). The major difficulty is provided by the
third element, vv. 7-10.
vv. 1-2 A
cosmic introduction, praising God as lord of creation. It uses the ancient
Canaanite myth of God as controlling the seas, but in a more modern way,
referring to God as lord of all the peoples. This fits the enriched theological
concepts after Israel's horizons had been expanded by the exile and the events
which followed it.
vv. 3-6 The
short dialogue with examination of conscience, familiar from Psalm 14 and very
similar to it, beginning with a question, continuing with moral conditions and
concluding with a blessing. Such an examination is suited to a quieter and more
personal occasion than the great festivals pinpointed above. These verses could
perfectly well stand as an independent peice on their own.
vv. 7-10 Here
the difficulty is the refrain, 'Grow higher, ancient doors'. This is not a
suitable way, even in poetry, of describing the opening of monumental gates.
Such gates are not drawn upwards for opening[10].
Two clues suggest an alternative scenario. Firstly, 'ancient
doors' (vv. 7, 9) renders the literal 'doors of eternity', an expression which
is used of the gates of the underworld abode of the dead in both Egyptian
mythology and Qumran (1QH 3.18). Secondly, 'lift high your heads' also
has the sense of 'stand tall','stand proud'. There are many stories in both
Egyptian and Mesopotamian myth of a god (Osiris and Ishtar respectively)
gaining admission to the underworld. As they attempt to enter they are
challenged by the gate-keepers of the underworld. This little fragment of four
verses makes perfect sense, then, if it was originally a poetic version of just
such a challenge:
v. 7 The attendants of the king of glory call on the gates to be
proud that he should enter.
v. 8a The gate-keepers challenge for identification.
v. 8bc Identification
is given.
v. 9 Repeated call to the gates to be proud of his entry.
v. 10a Repeated,
more aggressive (almost 'Who then, who on
earth is he?') challenge for identification.
v.10bc Identification
given with the title Yahweh Sebaoth, literally 'Yahweh of Hosts',
probably referring to Yahweh's lordship over the hosts of lesser deities, the
Canaanite deities which Yahweh has subdued.
In its use in the psalm this fragment is best
understood as re-interpreted of Yahweh's final entry into the eschatological
holy city[11].
The whole psalm was surely, therefore, in its present state, understood of an
eschatological enquiry about who should accompany the Lord on his final entry
into the eschatological holy city. In the later, eschatological parts of Isaiah
Yahweh is often represented as a triumphant warrior: 'See how Yahweh comes in
fire, his chariots like the whirlwind' (Is 66.15, cf. 63.1-6), and the title
'Yahweh Sebaoth' is used six times. In Isaiah 33.10-15 just such a list of
moral requirements as Ps 23.4 is given for those who will keep company with him
at his eschatological coming:
'Now I shall stand up,' says Yahweh, 'now I
shall rise, now draw myself up.
The peoples will be burnt up as though by
The sinners in Zion are panic-stricken and fear
seizes on the godless,
'Which of us can survive the devouring fire,
which survive everlasting burning?'
The one who acts uprightly and speaks honestly,
who scorns to get rich by extortion,
who rejects bribes out of hand, who refuses to
listen to plans involving bloodshed,
such a man will live on the heights.
2. A Christian Perspective
This eschatological understanding of the psalm
is mirrored also in Christian tradition, though no direct link has been traced
to explain how this Christian eschatological understanding of the psalm came to
be. The fifth-century so-called 'Gospel of Nicodemus' gives for the first time
the detailed legend which became so popular as The Harrowing of Hell, cf. J.K.
Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993),
pp. 200-202, or in shorter form in the same author's The Apocryphal Jesus
(OUP, 1996), p. 100:
Hades and the gates of death trembled. And then
was heard the voice of the Son of the Father most high as if the voice of great
thunder and loudly proclaiming, he thus charged them, 'Lift up your gates, you
princes; lift up the everlasting gates; the King of Glory, Christ the Lord,
will come up to enter in'.
Satan and Hades then fall to terrified
consultation about means to ward off the incursion. The saints hear their
wrangling and join in, first Adam, then Isaiah, then John the Baptist, then
David being gradually recognised.
And again there came the voice of the Son of
the Father most high like great thunder, saying, 'Lift up your gates, you
princes, and be lifted up, you everlasting gates, and the King of Glory will
come in.' Then Satan and Hades cried out saying, 'Who is the King of Glory?'
And the voice of the Lord answered them, ' The Lord
strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle'. Then holy David, inflamed with
anger against Satan, cried out aloud, 'Open your gates, most vile wretch, that
the King of Glory may come in.' In like manner all the saints of God also rose
up against Satan and tried to seize him and tear him in pieces. And again the
cry was heard within, 'Lift up your gates, you princes, and be lifted up, you
everlasting gates, and the King of Glory shall enter in.' Hades and Satan at that clear voice again
asked saying, 'Who is this King of Glory?' And that wonderful voice replied,
'The Lord of hosts, he is the King of Glory'.
Psalm 17
1. David and the Psalm
This psalm occurs also, with minor textual
variations, in 2 Samuel 22, one of the additional chapters at the end of the
story of David. Both there and in the title of this psalm the prayer is
attributed to David himself 'when Yahweh had delivered him from the clutches of
all his enemies and from the clutches of Saul'. It is certainly possible to
understand it in the light of those circumstances, and J-L Vesco has recently
given a detailed reading of it as a Davidic psalm ('Le Psaume 18, lecture
davidique' in Revue biblique 94 (1987), pp. 5-62). There are good
reasons to doubt the value of the ascription of as many psalms to David as the
titles of the psalms claim[12].
But these 'Davidic' psalms do show a striking similarity of vocabulary, as
though they were all the work of one author. For example all the 42 occurrences
of 'enemy' (which occurs six times in this psalm) are in Davidic psalms; 16 of
the 18 occurrences of 'set above' (which occurs three times in this psalm) are
in Davidic psalms. However, the argument may be circular: psalms may have been
attributed to David precisely because they deal with such topics, and these
topics themselves generate a certain vocabulary. Nevertheless, the final verse
of the psalm, with its mention of 'his anointed' and its allusion to the
promises of God made to David by Nathan in 2 Sm 7, at least focusses the psalm
on David's royal line. In God's name the prophet Nathan promised that he would
grant a royal house to 'David and his sons for ever' - a promise which was
never far from the mind of Israel, and became the basis of the messianic hope,
echoed in the Benedictus (Lk 1.69).
2. Structure
The psalm clearly falls into three parts:
1. Deliverance from enemies by a cosmic
theophany (vv. 4b-20)
2. David's innocence and God's own integrity
(vv. 21-31b)
3. God's care of David in battle (vv. 33-49).
The opening cry of confidence (v. 3) sets the
scene by a magnificent series of seven images of security. God is a crag - an unassailable place of
a mountain-fastness or stronghold
a deliverer - the next-of-kin who must come to
help in crisis (see p. 28-29)
a place of escape
a shield
a horn of salvation (the expression occurs
nowhere else in the Old Testament, but a horn is a symbol of strength. The
expression is, however, used of John the Baptist in the Benedictus, Lk
a secure height or citadel.
Around and between the three parts come the
general themes and reflections, in vv. 2-4a, 31c-32 and 50-51. The three major
concepts here, which recur also throughout the psalm, are
love (vv. 1, 20, 26, 51)
praise (vv. 4, 50)
salvation (vv. 4, 20, 28, 36, 42, 44, 47, 49).
3. Two Major Concepts: Love and Salvation
a. Love
The three different words used for 'love'
invite comment. The word used in v. 1 is a very tender word. It is normally
used for the love of the stronger for the weaker, a gentle compassion or pity
('Can a woman forget her baby at the breast, feel
no pity for the child she has borne?' Is 49.15, cf. 13.18). The root of the
word is indeed related to the word for 'womb', and it is frequently used for
God's maternal love. It is the first word used for God's love in Ex 34.6 (see
below).Only here in the Bible is it used to express human love for God, but this
is perhaps the more apt in the context of the opening verses, stressing the
gentleness which relies on God for strength and protection. The second word for
'love', in v. 20, really means 'take pleasure in', 'take delight in'. God takes
no delight in the death of a sinner nor in blood
sacrifices, but in mercy and justice; most clearly, the name of the new,
restored, perfected Jerusalem is to be 'my-delight-is-in-her' (Is 62.4).
Finally in v. 26 and 51 the word used is hesed.
In human relationships hesed denotes
primarily an act of kindness which normally creates or expresses a bond. The
use of the idea in v. 26 of this psalm expresses perfectly its reciprocal
force. Jonathan's help to young David creates such a bond, so that David must
always show hesed to Jonathan and his family (1 Sm 20.14). When Hushai,
David's friend, deserts him, Absalom reproaches him for failing in hesed
(2 Sm 16.17). It is the prime quality of true worth in a friend, 'Hesed is
what people look for in a person; they prefer the poor to a liar' (Prov 19.22).
It is no mere feeling of friendship, but always issues in active and even
costly response to need. This vibrant concept of love is the major
characteristic of God's attitude to his people. Three passages must suffice to
illustrate its importance:
Exodus 34.6-9 Having revealed his name to Moses
as hwhy at the burning bush, but not the meaning of the
name, the Lord at last, after the covenant has been speedily broken, gives this
further sign of his forgiving trust and intimacy to his people by proclaiming
its meaning as a God of love (hesed) and fidelity. This passage echoes
down the Bible, being quoted and mentioned again and again. It forms the vital
background to Israel's whole conception of God.
Then Yahweh passed before him and called out,
'Yahweh, Yahweh, God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in faithful
love and constancy, maintaining his faithful love to thousands.
Hosea 2.21 The prophet's inspiration consists
in seeing that God's undying love for his erring people is an image of his own
undimmed passion for his faithless wife, and that God will always pursue his
people and draw Israel back to himself.
I shall betroth you to myself for ever,
I shall betroth you in uprightness and justice
and faithful love and tenderness.
(Isaiah 54.7-10)
During the Babylonian exile God again protests
his fidelity and the enduring nature of his love, more lasting than the hills:
In a flood of anger for a moment I hid my face
from you,
but in everlasting love I have taken pity
on you.
For the mountains may vanish and the hills may
but my faithful love will never leave you.
It is significant that this concept did not
exist among the Greeks, so that, when the Bible was translated into Greek, no
current Greek word was felt to be adequate to express it, and a little-used
word was taken and filled with new meaning, avga,ph. In the New Testament this word is used for
the love which unites the Father and the Son, passes from the Son to his
followers, and unites them to one another.
b. Salvation
God is the saviour of Israel, as is proclaimed
by the names 'Joshua' in the Old Testament and 'Jesus' in the New. These are
different forms of the same name Yehoshua, which means 'God saves'. The
salvation is conceived primarily in terms of liberation from external
oppression, so principally at three great moments:
the liberation from extermination in Egypt, when
Moses and his people were threatened with genocide (Ex 15.2),
liberation from the attacks in the early days of
settlement in Canaan which threatened to annihilate or cripple the tender,
nascent nation (Jg 3.31)
and liberation from the Babylonian exile, which
is so ecstatically predicted in the hymns of Deutero-Isaiah, often in terms of
a second liberation from Egypt (Is 45.8; 62.11).
But the idea comes often also, in less specific
contexts, of liberation from any threat, military or other, as in this psalm.
Nor is the idea confined to external liberation. There is a further dimension
which includes peace, justice and closeness to God (Is 60.16-19):
You will know that I, Yahweh, am your Saviour,
that your redeemer is the Mighty One of Jacob.
I shall make peace your administration and
saving justice your government.
You will call your walls 'Salvation' and
your gates 'Praise'.
No more will the sun give you daylight, nor
moonlight shine on you,
but Yahweh will be your everlasting light, your
God will be your splendour.
Especially Ezekiel sees salvation from the
Babylonian exile not merely as a deliverance from oppression, but as a moral
renewal (Ez 36.25-29):
I shall pour clean water over you and you will
be cleansed; I shall cleanse you of all you filth and of all your foul idols. I
shall give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I shall remove the
heart of stone from your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead. I shall
put my spirit in you, and make you keep my laws. I shall save you from
everything that defiles you.
The concept of God as saviour is closely linked
to that of God as go'el. In Hebrew family law the nearest male relative
was obliged to undertake certain duties to save his family members from dire
distress. If financial disaster forced someone to sell his ancestral land, the
nearest male relative must buy it back for him. If a man died without fathering
a son to continue his line, the nearest male relative must marry his widow and
father a son in his name. These were regarded as the binding obligations of hesed
or family love - quite apart from any emotion of affection. By binding himself
in the Covenant God has taken on such family obligations towards Israel, so
that in the depths of his despair Job can cling to the hope
I know that my go'el lives
and that he will rise up last, on the dust of the
After my awakening he will set me close to him,
and from my flesh I shall look on God (Job
In the New Testament there is of course a
development. In the miracle-stories when Jesus says, 'Your faith has saved you'
it is often unclear exactly how far this salvation goes. Is the beneficiary
merely saved from the disease or brought closer into the Kingship of God? In
any case during most of the New Testament it is God who is conceived as the
Saviour, just as in the Old Testament, though God is acting through Jesus:
'Jesus said to him, "Go home to your people and tell them all that the Lord in
his mercy has done for you"' (Mark 5.19). It is only in the later writings of
the New Testament, especially the Pastoral Letters, that the title of 'Saviour'
is transferred from God to Jesus.
4. Deliverance from enemies by a cosmic theophany
(vv. 4b-20)
This first part of the psalm is a chiasmus,
centring on v.11, the majestic intervention of Yahweh:
4b I
am saved from my foes
5 waves
of death rose about me
called to the Lord... he heard my voice
9 scorching
fire from his mouth
10 a
black cloud under his feet
11 He
came enthroned on the cherubim
He flew on the wings of the wind
12 the
dark waters of the clouds
13 hailstones
and flashes of fire
14 the
Most High let his voice be heard
17 he
drew me forth from the mighty waters
20b He
saved me because he loved me.
The poem is rich in the ancient Canaanite
imagery of the storm-god, which is perhaps clearest in Psalm 28 (see p. 45),
clouds, smoke, earthquake, threatening waters, thunder
and lightning, the cherubim, control over the ocean. In the Hebrew two powers
are even personified: the Grail 'torrents of destruction' (v. 5) translates the
Hebrew 'torrents of Belial'. Belial is the personification of the forces of
evil, 'Wickedness'. In the inter-testamental literature and especially at
Qumran Belial is the Angel of Wickedness, a sort of Satanic
figure, spreading evil in the world. In v. 6 the Grail 'snares of the grave'
translates the Hebrew 'snares of Sheol', the underworld, conceived as an evil
power grasping at the living to bring them down to the powerless, half-life of
the dead as it was envisaged at that time. In this sparkling mythological
account the details of the historical event are without importance and all the
concentration is on the all-powerful and effortless intervention of God to
overcome such powers, enthroned on the cherubim and flying on the wings of the
5. David's innocence and God's own integrity
(vv. 21-31b)
Between the two descriptions of divine rescue
comes an interlude on the reasons for the divine protection, almost a little
Wisdom passage, in which the psalmist concentrates on faithful observance of
the commands (a) and on God's own reciprocal fidelity (b).
a. The faithful observance of commands is again
presented in a little chiasmus, the three paired elements expressing respectively
a general, a positive ('kept') and a negative ('not', 'never') aspect of
careful observance:
v. 21 I
was just and my hands were clean
v. 22a I
have kept the way of the Lord
v. 22b I
have not fallen away
v. 23 I have never neglected his commands
v. 24 I
have kept myself from guilt
v. 25 I
was just and my hands were clean.
b. God's reciprocal fidelity is expressed more
neatly and insistently in the Hebrew than in the English, with five parallel
formulations, each beginning with the same preposition. Characteristically, it
begins with the crucial reciprocal concept of hesed (see p. 35), the other four are merely applications of this.
v. 26a With the loving...
v. 26b With the perfect...
v. 27a With the sincere...
v. 27b With the cunning...
v. 28a With the humble...
6. God's care of David in battle (vv. 33-49)
The third part of the psalm is a more practical
account of God's training and care for the triumphant warrior. It is finely
built up. First (vv. 34-37) his general athletic training of physique - swift
feet and unerring stance - and arms drill[13].
Next (vv. 38-43) the warrior advances to individual combat, comprehensively
reducing his opponents to dust. Finally (vv. 44-46) he
progresses as king to be head of the nations. His empire extends beyond
the bounds of his mere military might, and concludes with a swift and willing
submission, neatly expressed (literally, 'in the hearing of the ear they obey
me', v. 45a). The extent of the empire ('people unknown to me served me') is
perhaps due to the exaggeration of court language. For Christians it is a
reminder of the extent of empire of David's messianic successor, for so much of
the exaggerated court language about the Davidic king can be understood either
as poetic and flamboyant convention about an earthly monarch or in a
theological sense about the kingship of Christ.
Finally the psalm returns to the praise of God
with which it began.
1.Read again the story of David (1 Sm 16 - 2 Sm 20;
1 Kgs 1-2). What points of contact are there between this psalm and David's
mentality? Is the psalm aptly ascribed to him? |
2. Write a short piece on 'salvation' in the Bible. Use NJB index
on 'redemption', 'reconciliation', The New Jerome on the work of
Christ (article 82, #67-80), McKenzie's Dictionary of the Bible, under
'salvation'. |
Psalm 21 The
Servant of the Lord
For the Christian this psalm has a special
position because of its use in the Passion Narratives of the Gospels. However,
it must first be examined for itself and its place in the Hebrew Psalter.
Firstly, it is a typical example of an individual lament. Secondly, it has
close parallels to other laments in the prophetic literature, notably that of
the Suffering Servant.
1. A Psalm of Lament
a.. The Relationship of Trust
'My God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?' The initial invocation already gives the
clue which separates the psalms of lamentation and all the prayers of Israel
from the prayers of the surrounding nations. The covenant relationship, which
is at the heart of all Israel's thinking about God, gives a completely
different tone to their prayers. There is not, in the many contemporary prayers
which have come down to us from Egypt and Mesopotamia, anything corresponding
to the trust and intimacy of the prayers of Israel. The god is addressed as a
distant, often hostile deity, who needs to be flattered by titles and appeased
by sacrifices.
It is the invocation with its many titles,
which is all-important, as in this Egyptian prayer:
Hail to thee, Amon-Re,
Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands, presiding
over Karnak,
Bull of his mother, presiding over his fields,
Far-reaching of stride, presiding over Upper
Lord of the Madjoi and ruler of Punt
[Ethiopia], etc, etc.(ANET, p.365)
or this Sumerian hymn to the Moon God:
O Lord, hero of the gods, who in heaven and earth
is uniquely exalted,
Father Nanna, lord Anshar, hero of the gods,
Father Nanna, great lord Any,
hero of the gods,
Father Nanna, lord Sin, hero of the gods, etc (ANET, p.385)
These prayers express none of the sense of
mutual belonging familiar from Israel, and no sense that help from the deity is
somehow due to the suppliant. By contrast Israel has a unique relationship,
which enables them to pray 'my God' (v.2), 'my strength' (v. 20),
expressing the sense of belonging. This sense of belonging is dependent on that
fundamental claim, 'What nation has its gods as near as Yahweh our God is to us
whenever we call to him?' (Dt 4.7).
There are, of course, prayers in distress, but
lacking any intimacy or sense of a family bond or covenant which engages the
deity to rescue the suppliant. They are appeals, so to say, from the outside
rather than the inside. An example is this Babylonian prayer to Ishtar:
I have paid heed to you, my Lady; my attention
has been turned to you.
To you have I prayed, forgive my debt,
forgive my sin, my iniquity, my shameful deeds, accept
my prayer,
loosen my fetters, secure my deliverance,
radiantly, like a hero, let me enter the streets with
the living... (ANET, p.
The profound difference in the prayers of
Israel, of which this psalm is a striking example, is in the sense of trust,
founded on the long-term family relationship:
In you our fathers put their trust (v.3-4)
It was you who took me from the womb, entrusted
me to my mother's breast (v. 10)
He has never despised nor scorned the poverty
of the poor (v. 25).
In the background of all this is the
relationship of hesed, the family love which binds family members together
and obliges them to help out one another in distress. This same hesed is
the central characteristic of Yahweh's relationship with Israel.
b. The Enemies
One of the chief characteristics of the Psalms
of Lament is, not surprisingly, description of troubles which the suppliant is
lamenting, and from which deliverance is sought. In this psalm animal imagery
is liberally used to characterise the persecutors:
Fierce bulls of Bashan close me in (v.13)
Against me they open wide their jaws, like
lions rending and roaring (v. 14)
Many dogs have surrounded me (v. 17)
Rescue my life from the grip of these dogs (v.
from the jaws of these lions, from the horns of
these oxen (v. 22)
In other psalms of lament a different imagery
is used for the enemies who beleaguer the psalmist. The chief complexes of
imagery are
1. Military attack ('My foes encircle me with
dead intent', 16.9; ambush, 55.7; 'the warrior's arrows sharpened', 119.4; the
watchman on guard for daybreak, 129.6),
2. Hunting ('he rescues my feet from the
snare', 24.15; 'the snares they have hidden' 30.5; hidden nets and pits,
34.7-8; 56.7; 139.6; 140.9; 141.4),
3. Natural phenomena ('your torrents and all
your waves swept over me', 41.8; 'I have entered the waters of the deep and the
waves overwhelm me, 68.3, 15-16; 'they surround me all the day like a flood',
4. Street-gangs ('night and day they patrol
high on the city walls', 54.11-12; 'they howl and roam about the city' 58.7, 15
- possibly canine gangs; 'he has made me dwell in darkness' - imprisonment?, 142.3).
It is possible that all these were in fact
pressing dangers in the contemporary world. There is little reason to believe
that the world of the psalmist was better ordered or policed than our own. But
the way in which these expressions are used does suggest that these are
interchangeable images. More common still are the more general images of lying
accusations, arrogance, mockery, taunting (as here, v. 7-9). The same imagery
occurs also in the 'Confessions' of Jeremiah, those laments of the prophet
where, in intimate conversation with Yahweh, he bewails the persecution which his
mission has brought him (Jer 11.18-12.5; 15.10-21; 17.14-18; 18.18-23; 20.7-18).
These 'Confessions' have strong associations with the psalms of lament, though
it is not possible to establish a line of dependence in either direction. In
the psalms themselves the people behind the lying and
mockery are most commonly called simply 'the wicked'. That this is a stock
description is suggested also by its similar use in Jeremiah 5.26 ('Yes, there
are wicked men among my people, who watch like fowlers on the alert').
In fact the danger is often described simply as
'evil' or 'wickedness' rather than wicked people:
'If I should walk in the valley of darkness, no
evil would I fear' (22.4)
'The Lord will guard you from evil' (120.7)
It seems that evil and its embodiment in
persons are often on a par without distinction, so that abstract, personal
singular and personal plural are used interchangeably. Thus in Psalm 139[14]
v. 2 has 'the evil man' (sg), v. 3 'those who plan evil' (plur), v. 5 'the
wicked man' (sg), v.6 'proud men' (plur), v.9 'the wicked man' (sg), v.12
'evil' (abstract). The enemies in the
Psalms may, therefore, best be understood as various personifications and
dramatizations of the power of evil and the evil influences by which the
psalmists felt themselves threatened.
2. The Thrust of the Psalm
There is such a strong reversal between verses
22 and 23 that some scholars have suggested that two psalms have been put
together, the first a lament and the second a song of thanksgiving. Such a
change from lament to thanksgiving is, however, far from unprecedented. The suddenness
of the change serves only to reinforce the psalmist's gratitude.
Attempts have also been made to focus on one
particular cause of the psalmist's misery. It is clear (see above) that the
hostile encircling animals are metaphorical. H-J.
Kraus (p. 179) surprisingly seems to think that the dry throat of v. 16 is
sufficient to establish the cause as a life-threatening illness including
fever. 'Like water I am poured out' (v. 15) could indicate being 'drained' of
energy, but the heart melted like wax is hard to attach exclusively to any
particular malaise. The animal-foes, the sickness, the derision (v. 7, 18), the
lynching (v. 17) are too diverse to coalesce into a single material
interpretation and must be regarded as varied symbolic expressions of the
psalmist's agony.
All-important, however, is the constant
expression of trust and confidence: the worse the misery, the greater the
commitment to God alone. The very fact that the psalmist prays for deliverance
is evidence of his confidence in God's inclination and duty to save him, but
explicit expressions of trust are scattered through the psalm. Perhaps the most
extreme way of emphasising this trust is by putting it sarcastically on the
lips, the curling lips, of his tormentors (v. 8-9).
The gradually widening circle of praise in the
final verses of the psalm make a fitting conclusion, first 'my brethren', then
all sons of Jacob/Israel and the great assembly. Then the praise spreads geographically to all
the earth and the mighty of the earth. Finally it spreads chronologically also,
to generations yet to come.
This psalm must be put beside the fourth Song
of the Suffering Servant of the Lord in Isaiah (52.13-53.12). There is the same
movement from life-threatening persecution and suffering, through liberation by
the intervention of God, to praise and thanksgiving. The psalm yields several
other reminiscences of this part of Isaiah: the feeling of temporary
abandonment by Yahweh (v. 2 and Is 49.14), the indebtedness to Yahweh from the
very womb (vv. 10-11 and Is 44.2, 24), the homage to Yahweh of all nations of
the earth (v. 28 and Is 53.10). The abstention of the psalmist from any railing
against his undeserved suffering or its perpetrators compares to the sheep dumb
before its shearers (Is 53.7). But the Song in Isaiah goes beyond the psalm in
making explicit the idea of vicarious suffering, the innocent suffering for the
guilty; to this the psalm does not quite attain.
3. Psalm 21 and the Passion of Jesus
The psalm features boldly in the gospel
accounts of the Crucifixion of Jesus. The soldiers divided his clothing among
themselves and cast lots for his robe (v. 19 and Mk 15.24; Jn 19.23-24). The
passers-by 'tossed their heads' (v. 8 and Mk 15.29) as they mocked him, and in
Matthew the chief priests and lawyers and elders even took for themselves the
mocking words 'He trusted in the Lord, let him save him if this is his friend'
(v. 8 and Mt 27.43). Jesus' cry 'I thirst' is seen by John as fulfilling the
scriptures (Jn 19.28), which may well be v. 16. Finally, Jesus' last words in
Mark and Matthew are the invocation of the psalm, 'My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?' (v. 1 and Mk 15.34).
The humiliation and disgrace of crucifixion was
a scandal in the Greco-Roman world. It was a disgusting and tortured death,
intended to strip the victim of any last vestiges of respect or dignity. The
first Christians had to explain it. One level of explanation was as the will of
God expressed in the scripture. Whereas the modern mind may see the Passion and
Death of Jesus as the culmination of the scriptures as a whole, the whole
movement and thrust of the history of and revelation to Israel, for the
contemporaries of Jesus, according to the fragmented and literalist principles
of exegesis of the time, the fulfilment of scripture as a whole was
demonstrated by the fulfilment of a multitude of small details. This appears
again and again in the gospel narrative (e.g. Jesus riding on both a donkey and
a colt at his entry into Jerusalem in Mt 21.7, in order completely to fulfill
Zechariah 9.9) and in the detailed exegesis of Qumran. Psalm 21 lent itself
ideally to this form of detailed theological explanation in relation to the
The invocation of the psalm as Jesus' last
words has frequently been misunderstood and made the fulcrum of the gruesome
theory that on the Cross Jesus suffered the pains of the damned, the awareness
of total separation from God. This is to neglect totally the thrust of the
psalm, by which it progresses from agony to triumph. Of this any scripturally
informed reader would be aware: allusion to the intonation of the psalm
includes allusion to the whole psalm. The main point of the use of this psalm
comes at the end: 'kingship is the Lord's; he is the ruler of the nations' (v.
29). The purpose of the mission of Jesus - as is particularly clear in Mark and
Matthew - is the bringing to completion or fulfilment of God's kingship on
earth. The kingship of God was the stuff of his proclamation, brought to the
beginning of its realisation in his miracles and put forward as a goal in his
The seeming tragedy of Jesus'
failure to achieve any success in his proclamation. He came to proclaim to Israel what was really
meant by the Kingship of God. He did not succeed in getting this message
across. His failure to win the crowds, his failure to keep the loyalty of his
chosen nucleus, the triumph of the representatives of that official Judaism which
he came to reform - reaches on the Cross its climax and reversal. For it is in
accepting his Father's will that he brings his Father's kingship to fulfilment.
The secret of the Cross lies not in the Father thrusting the Son away to the
pains of the damned, but in the Son achieving the kingship of the Lord
precisely by clinging to the Father's will in the pain of failure and derision.
It is therefore the moment not of separation but of most complete union, which
is expressed by the psalm taken as a whole.
A second element of v. 29 will have been
particularly obvious and important to Mark. Not only is the Cross the moment of
the God-ward completion of Israel (v. 24: 'all sons of Jacob, give him glory;
revere him, Israel's sons'), but also it is the moment of the opening of Jesus'
good news to the gentiles ('he is ruler of the nations', v. 29). The gentile
centurion at the Cross is the first human being to recognise Jesus as 'son of
God', so completing the process of Mark's Gospel, which opened, 'The beginning
of the gospel of Jesus Christ, son of God'. The two mentions of 'son of God'
correspond to each other as opening and closing brackets, giving the character
of the whole gospel message. That this gentile should be the first human being
to declare Jesus as son of God marks out the moment as the beginning of the
spread of the message to the gentiles: 'all families of the nations shall
worship before him' (v. 28).
1. Work through the psalm, using marginal
references given in a study-Bible, checking and marking features which recur
in the Passion Narratives. |
2. Compare and contrast the psalm with the 'Confessions of Jeremiah'
and the Song of the Suffering Servant. Are they simply in the same school, or
has each some special element? |
Psalm 28 The
God of the Storm
Since the study of Canaanite material behind
the Bible began it has been recognised that there is a strong relationship
between this psalm and the Canaanite background. How strong this is has been
disputed, and some compromise of the originally extreme position has been suggested. Three articles
represent different positions:
H.L. Ginsberg, 'A Phoenician Hymn in the
Psalter', in XIX Congresso Internazionale degli Orientalisti, Rome 1935,
pp. 472-6, presents the initial insight.
H. Cazelles, 'Une relecture du Psaume XXIX?', in A la rencontre de Dieu, Le Puy 1961, pp. 119ff,
suggests that the original Phoenician poem has been reused and overlaid by the
biblical author.
P.C. Craigie, 'Psalm XXIX in the Hebrew Poetic
Tradition', in Vetus Testamentum 22 (1972), pp. 143-151, suggests that
the psalm is well within the Hebrew poetic tradition, seen already in the Song
of the Sea in Exodus 15 and continuing into the Enthronement Psalms.
1. Structure
a. Envelope-structure.
Verses 1-2 and 10-11 act as
an envelope, enclosing verses 3-9. In these opening and closing lines the scene is in heaven, where God is
waited upon by the 'sons of God', who celebrate his glory and power. Just as at
the beginning they give God the due glory and power, so at the end God himself
gives strength (the same word as 'power' in v. 1) to his people as a blessing
which concludes the psalm. Each pair of verses circles round the same complex
of ideas:
God enthroned among his courtiers, the sons of
God (vv. 1, 10)
the ineffable glory due to God (vv. 1, 2, 10)
the divine gift of strength (vv. 1, 11).
The transition from the heavenly to the earthly
occurs at the end of v. 2, slightly obscured by the Grail translation. 'In his
holy court' renders a literal 'in the court of his holiness', but the word
'court' would be better translated 'apparition'. In fact the word means an
awesome apparition of the divine splendour, and the line leads directly on to
the following description of that divine manifestation in the storm: 'adore the
Lord in the apparition of his holiness'.
Although the Canaanite imagery is much stronger
in the central portion of the psalm, there are already in the 'envelope' two
elements which reflect this background, 'sons of God' (v. 1) and 'enthroned
over the flood' (v.10).
1. The idea of the 'sons of God' is drawn from
the imagery of the heavenly court widespread in near eastern myth. Since for
earthly monarchs the splendour of their majesty was determined by the number
and splendour of their courtiers, so it was only fitting that a god should have
an extended court. In the Babylonian myths these courtiers of a god are
represented also by weird superhuman animals, fiery dragons or seraphim,
huge stone figures guarding the entrances to the palace (cherubim, like
Part of the enrichment and
expansion of theology which Israel underwent in the agonizing but therapeutic
shock of the Babylonian exile came from confrontation with such Babylonian
ideas. Most disturbing of
all, of course, was the question posed by the fact of exile
itself: is Yahweh the God only of Israel, or could they continue to worship the
God of Israel on alien soil, in the territory of another god, Marduk? David,
after all, in exile with the Philistines, complains that he is exiled from
Yahweh's presence (1 Sm 26.19). When Naaman the Syrian had wanted to worship
the God of Israel at home in Damascus, he had taken home with him two
mule-loads of Israel soil, so that he could stand on the soil of Israel to
worship the God of Israel (2 Kgs 5.17). Indeed, what was the relationship
between Israel's God and Marduk? Out of this confrontation came the
realisation, expressed so forcefully for example in the first creation
narrative (Gn 1), that Israel's God is the God of the whole world.
What, then, of the gods of Babylon? It is here
that the concept of 'sons of God' is pressed into service, for the gods of the
nations receive the position of courtiers of the true God, and are called the
'sons of God'. So, in the creation narrative, the sun, moon and stars, which in
Babylon were independent gods, are given by God the creator the humble duty of
marking times and seasons (Gn 1.14-18). The sons of God are often represented
as stars:
What supports its [the earth's] pillars at
their bases?
Who laid its foundations
to the joyful concert of the morning stars
and unanimous acclaim of the sons of God? (Job
38.7, cf. Bar 3.34).
In the New Testament very much the same
procedure occurs with the mysterious spirits which were thought by some to have
control over the world. The patron deities of cities are demoted to the
position of the angels of a city (e.g. the seven spirits of the churches of
Asia who are before God's throne in Rv 1.4; 2.1, 8, etc). Those strange
entities 'thrones, ruling forces, sovereignties, powers' (Col 1.16), have no
power, since they were created through Christ and for Christ, the first-born of
all creation. He has stripped them of their powers and paraded them in public,
behind him in his triumphal procession (Col 2.15).
2. The conception of God 'enthroned over the
flood' alludes not so much to Noah's flood but to the conception, drawn from
Babylon, of God controlling the mighty waters of the seas and oceans. In
Babylonian mythology the sea was a fearsome female goddess, Tiamat, powerful
enough to cover and drown the world. In Israel's confrontation with Babylon of
course the goddess Tiamat became subordinate to God (Gen 1.9-10). The
Israelites were no sea-dogs and were continuously afraid of the sea, envisaging
it as an element which threatened to engulf the land unless God held back its mighty power. 'Am I the
Sea, or some sea monster,' complains Job, 'that you
should keep me under guard?' (Job 7.12), and in the great final speeches God
tells how he brought the sea under control,
Who pent up the sea behind closed doors
when it leapt tumultuous from the womb,
when I wrapped it in a robe of mist
and made black clouds its swaddling bands,
when I cut out the place I had decreed for it
and imposed gates and a bolt?
'Come so far,' I said, 'and no further;
here your proud waves shall break' (Job 38.8-11).
In Israelite mythology the sea stands for the
darker powers, even the darker powers of human nature, difficultly controlled
and always capable of breaking out. Here God's control as he sits enthroned on
the flood is no idle exaltation, for he gives to his people his own strength,
which the sons of God duly attributed to him in the beginning, and blesses his
people with peace.
b. Mathematical and Formal.
The divine name hwhy
occurs four times in each part of the 'envelope', once in each half-verse. It
has been suggested that these two quadruple mentions correspond to the four
elements of earth (fire, earth, air, water), or the four points of the compass.
Whatever its symbolic meaning, the balance must be
The main body of the poem celebrates the Voice
of the Lord. Accordingly, the expression is hammered home seven times. Seven is
a special biblical number signifying completion. Here it may be related - among
other possibilities - to the seven days of creation, the seven signs of John's
Gospel, the seven letters to the Churches of Asia in Rv.
One of the features of Canaanite poetry which
occurs in this poem is the step-structure, by which a new feature is added to a
line, step by step. Note that the translations here given are as close as
possible to the Hebrew, rather than literary. Note also the inversion in vv. 5,
8 and 10.
v. 1 Give
the Lord
Give the
Lord glory and power
Give the
Lord the glory of his name
v. 3 The voice of the
Lord on the waters
The Lord on
the waters in plenty
v. 5 The voice of the
Lord breaking the cedars
He breaks, the
Lord, the cedars of Lebanon
v. 8 The voice of the
Lord shaking the desert
He shakes, the
Lord, the desert of Qadesh
v. 10 The
Lord over the flood is seated
He is seated, the
Lord, king for ever.
v.11 The
Lord will give strength to his people
The Lord will
bless his people with peace.
The same Canaanite step-structure may be seen
in two ancient, biblical songs of triumph and victory, the ancient Song of the
Sea in Ex 15 and clearly in the Song of Deborah in Jg 5 (the awkward English
renders the Hebrew word-order).
Jg 5.4 Also the heavens pelted
Also the clouds pelted rain
Jg 5.19 They came the kings and fought
Now they
fought, the kings of Canaan
Jg 5.27Between her feet[15] he crumpled and fell
Between her feet he crumpled and
As he crumpled there
he fell destroyed.
The stress-rhythm of the psalm is
overwhelmingly in two beats per line, just as the triumph-song of Exodus 15. In
the case of the psalm the vigorous stress may suggest thunder-claps - just as,
but quite differently from - the murderous, dull thud of the axe, so painfully
represented by Hopkins' line 'All felled, felled, are all felled' (see p. 00).
2. The God of the Storm
The central part of the psalm evokes the God of
the Storm. At least in a pre-mechanical world - and possibly even since then -
thunder, lightning and earthquake are the noisiest and most frightening of all
manifestations. In Canaanite religion the chief god, Baal, is often represented
as a storm-god, poised to hurl a thunderbolt. This was no doubt Israel's
cultural background too, and such a presentation was easily integrated into
Israelite imagery. The great experience of God on Sinai was expressed in terms
of thunder, lightning and earthquake:
Now at daybreak two days later, there were
peals of thunder and flashes of lightning, dense cloud on the mountain and a
very loud trumpet blast; and in the camp all the people trembled. Mount Sinai
was entirely wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended upon it in the
form of fire. The smoke rose like smoke from a furnace and the whole mountain
shook violently. Louder and louder grew the trumpeting. Moses spoke, and God
answered him in the thunder (Ex 1916-20).
The point of the storm is not merely its
manifestation in thunder and lightning, but principally what it expresses of
the unseen world beyond it. The language of storm and earthquake which is so
often used of the manifestation of God is generally thought to be derived from
the terrifying storms on Sinai, which must have been an element in Israel's
experience of God on Sinai. In the later apocalyptic literature such language
is expanded to embrace the extra-terrestrial universe, with the heaven split
open, stars falling from heaven and other cosmic phenomena. All these are used
to express the might and absolute control of God over the whole universe,
particularly with regard to the ultimate visitation of God, the 'Day of the
Hence the psalm is a hymn to the unseen glory
of God manifested and expressed in the storm. This is why the earthly
manifestation of the Voice of God in the storm is surrounded by an 'envelope'
of the heavenly scene. No human being can see the divine splendour and live.
(There is a certain appropriate reverence in the Jewish refusal to pronounce
the personal name of God, and a reluctance to use the generic noun.) Even Moses
cannot fully see even the glory of God. So, when Moses asks to see God's glory,
the Lord replies, 'When my glory passes by, I shall put you in a cleft of the
rock and shield you with my hand until I have gone past. Then I shall take my
hand away and you will see my back, but my face will not be seen' (Ex
33.22-23). At his vision of God in the Temple Isaiah cowers, and is filled with
a sense of his own sinfulness and unworthiness (Isaiah 6). The only due
reaction is expressed in Isaiah's awesome poem whose refrain is,
Go into the crevices of the rocks
and the clefts in the cliffs
in terror of Yahweh, at the brilliance of his
when he arises to make the earth quake (Is 2.10,
19, 21).
No Christian reading of the psalm can fail to
see the link with the full revelation of the glory of God which takes place in
Jesus, especially in the Gospel of John. It is promised in the prologue ('we
saw his glory, the glory that he has from the Father', Jn 1.14), starts
historically with the marriage feast at Cana (Jn 2.11: 'He revealed his glory
and his disciples believed in him') and reaches its climax in the passion
(especially from Jn 17 onwards).
3. The Voice of the Lord
The central portion of the psalm, consisting of
the seven allusions to God's voice, falls into two halves. The first half (vv.
3-4) is introductory, rugged in its simple splendour, and is bolted onto v. 2
of the heavenly preliminary by its final 'apparition' (for whose meaning see
above). Shorn of any gentle Englishness, it reads powerfully:
Voice of the Lord on the waters
The Lord on waters abundant
Voice of the Lord in power
Voice of the Lord in
The second half (vv. 5-9) is concentric in its
In order to appreciate these manifestations of
divine power some background description is needed. Of the cedars of Lebanon
few remain, but the visitor feels that he is climbing to the top of the world,
up twisting, snow-pocked lanes till finally those awesome
great evergreen trees appear on the skyline. These few sentinels are the
remnants of the great forests which Hiram of Tyre cut for Solomon's Temple, for
cedars can grow for as long as 3,000 years. They were considered the only wood
noble enough for the main columns and beams of the Temple (1 Kgs 7.1-12). They
were felled by levies of Israelites, ten thousand working in Lebanon for a
month at a time (1 Kgs 5.27-28). These are the mighty mountains which the Lord
makes gambol in a crazy dance, like calves, lambs or children (Job 21.11).
On the other side of the concentric pattern
comes the solemn desert of Qadesh, scorched, silent, searing
in its heat. It is part of the eerie moonscape of the Negeb, the desert to the
south of the 'land flowing with milk and honey', whose very name means 'dried
up'. This was the tribal centre for Israel's wandering for forty years, an
oasis to which they returned in the 'vast and terrible desert' (Dt 1.19), where
the judgements and way of life of Israel developed under Moses. This land the
voice of the Lord will cause to writhe in twisted anguish - the word is used
for the most severe pains of childbirth.
Finally attention is turned to the great
oak-tree or terebinth, another solemn and imposing solitary tree, for millenia worshipped
in the near east, from Akkadian times to Arabian[17].
By denuding it, the Voice of the Lord will show his superiority to that also.
After the violence of the storm the psalm
concludes in tranquillity, with the assurance that all this power will be put
to the use of granting strength and peace to his people.
1. Gather some idea of the early poetry which
Israel inherited. Read appreciatively Psalm 92 (and comments on p. 75), the
Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, the Song of Deborah in Jg 5, the Lament of
David in 2 Sm 1. Write a short introduction to this sort of poetry for a
friend to use. |
2. Examine the imagery of the 'Day of the Lord' as it appears in the
Bible. Write a short essay showing how it increases in grandeur. Use NJB
Study Guide, etc. |
Psalm 33 Confident Shelter in God
1. A Wisdom Psalm
This is an alphabetical psalm, in which the
initial letter of each line works steadily through the alphabet, a literary
achievement used in various ways in the psalter: Psalms 110 and 111 work
straight through the alphabet, line by line (each line being a half-verse).
Psalm 25 uses the sequence verse by verse, Psalm 37 every alternate verse. Most
skilled of all, Psalm 118 has the same process but stanza by stanza, each line
of the stanza beginning with the target-letter. This is obviously a highly
artificial process, and one must admit that the resultant poems are somewhat
lacking in passion. All are within the Wisdom tradition, concerned with the
wise conduct of life, with virtues and vices. Thus in the present psalm
1. The invitation to instruction in the fear of
the Lord is echoed
in many Wisdom passages:
v. 12 Come,
children, and hear me, that I may teach you the fear of the Lord.
Prov 1.8 Hear, my child, your father's
Prov 4.1 Hear, my children, a father's
2. There are several proverb-like utterances:
v. 23: The
Lord ransoms the souls of his servants;
those who hide in him shall not be condemned
Prov 10.27 The fear of the Lord adds length to
the years of the wicked will be cut short.
there is none of the chuckling imagery of the wittiest proverbs:
Prov 10.26 As vinegar to the teeth, smoke to
the eyes,
so the sluggard to the one who sends him.
3. An Egyptian inscription at Tell el-Amarna
has the exact equivalent of v. 13 (see R. Couroyer in Revue biblique 57
[1950], p. 174), and Egypt is the principal source of the biblical Wisdom
tradition (e.g. the Sayings of the Sages, in Prov 22.17-23.11, based on the
Wisdom of Amenemophis).
4. The life-stances recommended are those which
feature frequently in the instructions of the Wisdom tradition.
2. Structure and Genre
Despite the Wisdom character of most of the
psalm, the opening double encouragement to join in praising God constitutes the
psalm a Psalm of Praise, under which the wisdom element is subsumed.. This is followed by a short recital of God's help to the
singer, which fails to develop into any detail and slides off into the Wisdom
1-4 Invitation
to praise
5-7 Recital of God's help
8-22 Instruction
in Wisdom
23 Final
verse, probably added later, because the alphabetical sequence finishes at v.
3. The Poor in the Psalms
In the earlier literature of Israel the
blessing of God is measured in terms of wealth, particularly, during the
nomadic phase of the Hebrews, in terms of cattle(Gn 12.16; 32.15-16). This
persists into later times with, for example, the rewarding of Job for his
perseverance with immense flocks and herds (Job 42.12). In the Wisdom
literature, also, there is a strong emphasis that poverty is the result of
folly and fecklessness. Much of this literature - and certainly its origin - is
directed towards the achievement of material success and prosperity by hard
work and sensible management. It is the more striking that there is at the same
time always an awareness that the poor are somehow a
privileged class and should be protected.
There is, however, a rich vocabulary about
poverty in the Bible, each word having its own peculiar shade of meaning. In
the same way Hebrew has fine shades of meaning between different words for
locusts, and Arabic has many words for various camels. This suggests that the
various kinds of poverty created a problem with which language was preoccupied.
Thus ebyon denotes the beggarly poor, those lacking home and resources
and often exploited. The word dal is used most often in connection with
poor and struggling peasant farmers who lack sufficient grazing or who are
obliged to pay excessive taxes to rich land-owners. Not dissimilar is rash,
used of the owner of a single ewe lamb in Nathan's parable (2 Sm 12.1-4). On
the other hand mahsor envisages the spendthrift and feckless poor (Prov
14.23; 21.5). Different from all these is the word used in v. 7, ani and
its cognate anaw.
The ani is most specifically the
oppressed and afflicted poor. In the prophetic books of the eighth century,
Amos and Hosea, there is strong emphasis on the injustice suffered by the poor
at the hands of the luxurious rich ('Listen to this, you who crush the needy
and reduce the oppressed to nothing', Amos 8.4) by tampering with weights,
selling sub-standard corn, extorting levies on wheat, denying the poor their
rights in judgement and appropriating their land and houses. Once the calamity
of the Babylonian Exile has occurred, the whole people in exile can be
described as ani, and a principal theme of Deutero-Isaiah is that this
oppression will not last, that God will come to deliver his afflicted people:
So listen to this, afflicted one (ani),
Thus says your Lord Yahweh, your God, defender
of your people:
Look, I am taking the stupefying cup from your
the chalice, the cup of my wrath, you will not
have to drink again (Is 51.21-22).
There is then a growing realisation that the
only hope for the afflicted is in the Lord, and that affliction itself calls
for the pity of God. In the exilic and post-exilic literature of Judaism there
increases side by side the awareness both of sin and of helplessness to achieve
a remedy unaided. This engenders a spiritualization of the term ani, so
that the anawim[18]
come to be regarded as those who cast themselves on God's protection in the
realization of their own powerlessness. Hence it is often translated
prau.j in the Septuagint of
the Bible, meaning 'meek, gentle, humble'.
This is the sense in which the term is used in
v. 7. The rest of the psalm can be seen as a reflection on this spirituality,
with the blessing on those who seek refuge in the Lord (v. 9), who seek the
Lord (v. 11), who call to him (v. 18), whose spirit is crushed (v. 19), who
hide in him (v. 23). It gives the character to many of the prayers of the
psalter (e.g. Psalms 145 and 146). Such an attitude finds its prolongation in
Luke's presentation of all the characters waiting for the Lord's salvation in
the Infancy Narrative as the poor of Yahweh; this finds its climactic
expression in the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis. It is also a
keynote of the Matthean Beatitudes (Mt 5.3-10), with their emphasis on the
'poor in spirit' and on the virtue of gentleness (prau,thj). Jesus himself is the exemplar of this
spirituality: 'Come to me, all you that labour and are burdened, for I am meek
and humble of heart' (Mt 11.28).
4. Praise and Thanksgiving
At some stage a few untidy thoughts must be
aired about the basic category of praise and thanksgiving. This is such a
primeval instinct that its activity and its motives are not easy to analyse.
It is a human instinct to rejoice in worth
where worth is found, and to wish to share this joy by proclaiming it to those
around. It is part of the willing admiration and pleasure in achievement,
whether it be courage or physical endurance or skill or intellectual brilliance
or artistic success, to wish to spread the news of such achievement by mulling
it over to oneself, by recalling it to others (to whom it may often be equally
well known - discussion of the brilliance shown in a particular football match:
'And did you see how...?'), by recording it for future generations (on a
memorial plaque or inscription). A basic way of expressing gratitude for a
present lies in demonstrating (running the train-set, wearing the scarf) or
describing to others the qualities of the present received, so that they may
share one's own appreciation and wonder.
One way of showing gratitude is to reciprocate
the generosity, to give gifts in return for gifts, to risk one's own skin in
return for risks taken on one's behalf. This is, however, not always possible. There
is no way in which the small child can, at least in the short term, reciprocate
the care and gifts received from parents. If I daren't or have no opportunity
to exercise the courage shown by my rescuer, I at least show my gratitude by
talking about it. The word 'bless', with which this psalm opens, is eloquent
testimony to the human effort to reciprocate. In Greek blessing in each
direction, earthward or heavenward, is expressed by the word euvlogei/n - literally 'to well-speak'. This has diverse
meanings according to whether God or a human being is the subject. When God
blesses the world or its inhabitants, his creative word confers blessing,
creates, sanctifies or enhances life. When in return a human being blesses God,
this blessing cannot enhance the divine life, but the human 'attempt' to do so
is itself a recognition of the blessing received.
This is the instinct to which the praise of the
psalms responds, a public sharing in song, with as much dignity and celebration
as circumstances permit, of recognition of the greatness of the Lord. There is
no way in which human beings can adequately reciprocate the love and generosity
of God, so the instinct is simply to talk about it, to praise it. Sometimes
this is done by recognition of God's awesome power as it is seen in natural
phenomena (Psalm 28), sometimes of God's control of and care for creation
(Psalm 103), sometimes of God's guidance of Israel's history (Psalm 104). There
is also a recognition that God is something beyond and
greater than all this, to which the only response is fear of the Lord (v. 8,
12), a reverential acknowledgement that the experience of God cannot be put
into words:
Go into the crevices of the rocks
and the clefts in the cliffs,
in terror of Yahweh, at the brilliance of his
when he arises to make the earth quake. (Is 2.21)
1. Write a couple of pages about Praising. Is
there any point to it? Why do we do it? Whom does it benefit and in what way?
What is the best way of praising? ('Imitation is the sincerest form of
flattery'?) |
2. Examine the concept of 'the poor' in the Bible. Use NJB Study Guide
and McKenzie's Dictionary, and the Anchor Bible Dictionary (if
available). |
Psalm 38 A mere breath
This psalm is a tragic meditation on the
meaningless of life and on human failure, alleviated only (but totally) by the
strong statement of hope at its very centre in v. 8.
1. Structure
The various refrains and repetitions in the
psalm have suggested a variety of complicated structures (most recently Pierre
Auffret, 'Car toi, tu as agis' in Bijdragen, tijdschrift voor filosofie en
theologie 51 [1990], pp 118-138, who discusses previous attempts). The
repeated assertions, 'I was silent' (vv. 3a and 10a), 'mortal man is no more
than a breath' (vv. 6c and 12c), do not seem to be as structurally significant
as one might hope. Structurally, the only useful thought is that the author
unusually seems to think in triplets ('a mere breath...a mere shadow...a mere
breath... in vv. 6-7) instead of the usual complementary pairs of lines.
It seems best to consider the poem in a much
simpler structure:
vv. 2-4 Introduction:
silence or speech?
vv. 5-6b Life's sharp ending
vv. 6c-7 A
mere breath
vv. 8-9 The
central hope
vv. 10-11 A
cry for release
v. 12 Life's
swift passing
vv. 13-14 Conclusion:
speech granted a hearing
2. My Hope is in You
The psalm is full of sorrow from the beginning,
the introductory frustration (vv. 2-4), when the psalmist first determines not
to speak, to remain silent, but is finally compelled to burst into speech. This
is expressed in three triplets, a triplet of determination (v. 2), a triplet of
silence (v. 3), a triplet of fire bursting into speech
(v. 4). In each of the first seven verses there is a triplet, the second line
repeating and intensifying the first, before the third line introduces a
slightly new idea.
After the introduction comes the real
subject-matter of the sorrow: the nothingness of human life. Stated at the
beginning and end, it welds together the rest of the poem. The images are
strikingly different. In v. 5 the triplet is all about stopping: 'you have
shown me my end', the measure (rather than 'the length') of my
days, and how defective (rather than 'fleeting') I am. In the final
verses 13- 14 this is translated into movement. First there is the image of the
temporary alien or passing guest, a figure well-known in nomadic society, and
always at a disadvantage. Then finally the poem just walks off into nothingness
with 'before I walk and I am not'. The abruptness of the disappearance simply
takes the breath away. There is nothing left. Suddenly the poem is over.
Midway between these two extremes comes the one
alleviation: 'in you rests all my hope', expressed
again in a triplet (with 'set me free...do not make me'). The contrast of v. 8
stands out luminously with its brief question and answer, occurring as it does
only after the complete nothingness of human life has been triply stressed. On
either side of this brief positive statement are two reflections which take us
one to Qoheleth or Ecclesiastes and the other to Job. Before the high-point of
hope the inanity of human life is expressed in language which is reminiscent of
Qoheleth's most extreme cynicism. The imagery of verse 6c-7 takes the reader
straight to the frustration and disappointment of Qoheleth, who sees no point
in life. The Hebrew word translated here 'mere breath' is the key-word of
Qoheleth's opening: 'Vanity of vanities and all is vanity' or 'Sheer futility;
everything is futile', a thought expanded in the following verses (Eccl 1.2-7)
of the pointlessly and endlessly circling sun, wind and water:
The sun rises, the sun sets, then to its place
it speeds and there it rises.
Southward goes the wind, then
turns to the north;
it turns and turns again, then back to its
circling goes the wind.
Into the sea go all the rivers, and yet the sea
is never filled,
and still to their goal the rivers go.
Qoheleth also, as the psalmist in v. 7, is
frustrated by the passing of his inheritance: 'All I have toiled for under the
sun and now bequeath to my successor I have come to hate; who knows whether he
will be wise or a fool?' (Eccl 1.18-19). The effect in the two writers is,
however, entirely different, for the psalmist is driven by human inanity
straight to God. The flash of hope makes all the difference.
Once God has been brought into the equation,
the pain continues, but with the paradox of Job, for in v. 11 the psalmist
joins Job's cry to be released from God's attentions. Here again, however,
there is a difference: the psalmist knows his guilt, whereas Job protests his
innocence. Despite the one hope in God, they share the longing to be freed from
the divine punishment:
Remove your hand which lies so heavy on me,
no longer make me cower from your terror.
Do you want to intimidate a wind-blown leaf?
Do you want to pursue a dry straw?
You examine my every step
and measure my footprints one by one (Job
The result is confusion and frustration, a hope
which is no hope, a prayer where prayer has no place, but which is yet the
testimony of an enduring longing.
3. A Christian Response[19]
Like the Book of Job, this psalm is crying out
for an answer, expressing a hope for which it cannot see the fulfilment. The
process of revelation about the future life was gradual, and became substantial
only at the very end of the Old Testament period.
1. In the earliest days the conception of
existence after death was expressed in terms of being gathered to the clan or
the ancestors, a notion which stems from the nomadic custom of burying the
family dead in a family burial centre to which the clan returned once a year.
This is the expression which is most frequently used about the patriarchs,
though the expression 'slept with his father' continues to be used later to
signify that a person died a peaceful, non-violent death after a full and
worthy life. One notable use of this terminology is by King David. When the child born of his adultery with Bathsheba falls ill and
dies, in his mourning David says, 'Why should I fast? Can I bring him
back again? I shall go to him but he cannot come back to me' (2 Sm 12.23).
2. Somewhat later we find the concept of Sheol,
a shadowy place to which all must come in the end. There the dead have no
power, no possessions (Ps 48.18), no memory of the wonders of God (Ps
87.12-13), 'cut off, as they are, from your hand'
(Ps.87.6). An evocative description is given by Isaiah:
On your account Sheol below is astir to greet
your arrival.
He has roused the ghosts to greet you, all the
rulers of the world.
He has made all the kings of the nations get up
from their thrones.
They will all greet you with the words, 'So,
you too are now as weak as we are!
Your pride has been flung down to Sheol with
the music of your lyres.
Under you a mattress of maggots, over you a
blanket of worms' (Is 14.9-11).
Yet even here the dead are not beyond the reach
of God ('Should they burrow into Sheol, my hand will haul them out', Amos 9.2),
and there are, especially in the psalms, occasional cries of confidence that
God has not wholly deserted those who are in Sheol: Ps 15.10, 'For you will not
leave my soul among the dead, nor let your beloved know decay'; Ps 48.16, 'But
God will ransom me from the clutches of Sheol, and take my soul to himself'.
The word there used for 'take' is that used for God's taking Enoch to himself
in Genesis 5.24, and Elijah in 2 Kgs 2.3. Is the psalmist hoping God will do
the same to himself? Consonant with this hope is Job's poignant cry,
I know that my go'el[20]
and that he will rise up last, on the dust of the
After my awakening he will set me close to him,
and from my flesh I shall look on God (Job
There seems to be no room for this hope in
Israelite theology, and yet it is there. One can say no more than that the
biblical authors are grappling with a problem. There was no way through to see
how Sheol could be evaded, and yet believers were loth to accept that God would
desert them.
3. It is only at the end of the development of
the Old Testament that a positive hope begins to be expressed. In the Wisdom
literature Ben Sira, in many ways a conservative thinker,
sticks to the old ways. There is no glimmer of hope of escape from the
inevitability of Sheol here,
Give and receive - enjoy yourself - there are
no pleasures to be found in Sheol.
Like clothes every body will wear out, and the
age-old law is 'Everyone must die'.
Like foliage growing on a bushy tree, some
leaves falling, others growing,
so are the generations of flesh and blood: one
dies, another is born (Eccles 14.16-20).
Nor is there any more hope in the disillusioned
reflections of Qoheleth, 'For the fate of human and
the fate of animal is the same: as the one dies, so the other dies; both have
the selfsame breath' (Eccl. 3.19). This passage shocked the later rabbis so
much that they tried to change the statement into a question by a subtle change
of vowels: 'For the fate of human and the fate of animal, is it the same?'
At about the same time, however, advances were
being made. The catalyst seems to have been the heroic fidelity of the martyrs
in the Maccabean persecution, which could not go unrewarded. As
one of the martyrs declares with his last breath, 'the King of the world will
raise us up, since we die for his laws, to live again for ever' (2 Mc 7.9).
Similarly and contemporaneously, the Book of Daniel speaks of the Book of Life
in which the names of some are written. There seems as yet to be uncertainty
whether all or only some are granted eternal existence. In the one verse it
looks as though only 'all those whose names are found written in the Book' will
be spared, while in the next verse all rise again to different fates: 'Of those
who are sleeping in the Land of Dust many[21]
will awaken, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace'
(Dn 12.1-2). Perhaps the 'shame and everlasting disgrace' cannot be
characterised as 'everlasting life'. This would accord with the constant
teaching of John's Gospel (and eternal life is an ever-present reality in John,
occurring 17 times in the Gospel, as opposed to twice or three times in each of
the other Gospels), where everlasting life is the reward for the faithful, who
commit themselves to Christ, while the future of those who refuse to believe is
left undefined. This reinforces the suggestion that in John the concept of
'everlasting life' corresponds to the concept in the synoptics of the
kingdom/kingship of God, which is mentioned in John only twice in the
conversation with Nicodemus (Jn 3.3, 5). Everlasting life, then, is only for
those who welcome the kingship of God. By the time of Jesus the notion of a
general resurrection at the end of time was very widely accepted within
Judaism, though still not by the theologically traditionalist Sadducees.
1. Trace the development in the Bible of the
concepts of the after-life. Use NJB Study Guide under 'sheol', 'life', etc. |
2. Is there any important difference between faith and hope. |
Psalm 45 The
Lord of Hosts is with Us
1. Genre and Form
A psalm of Sion, celebrating
the presence of God in the holy city, though the name of the city is not
mentioned. The psalm has a
dual axis: the beginning, the centre and the refrain[22]
all stress the presence of God with us; and yet the psalm also celebrates the
universal power of God, since each of the three stanzas of the poem stresses
the power of God over the whole earth. Thus:
a. The presence of God with us:
v. 2 God
is for us a refuge and strength
v. 6 God
is in its midst (in the very heart of the city)
v. 4, 8, 12 The Lord of hosts is with us
(the same expression as comes in Isaiah's 'Immanuel', except that the
personal name of God is used: Yahweh immanu).
b. The power of God over the whole earth:
v. 3 ...
though the earth should rock
v. 7 ...
the earth shrinks away
v. 9 ...
the redoubtable deeds... on the earth
v. 10 ...
an end to wars over all the earth
v. 11 ...
supreme on the earth.
2. The Three Stanzas
The poem is symmetrical. It begins with the
symbolism of the divine superiority to the chaotic powers of nature. Then there
is a sudden change from the chaos of nature to the peace of God's city, both a
change of mood and a narrowing of geographical focus onto the Holy City.
Finally in the last stanza the optic again becomes violent and world-wide. Only
this time it is the Lord's superiority, rather than that of the powers of
nature. The stanza ends with peace again, for the Lord has destroyed violence.
This symmetrical structure is arranged round the central v. 6, expressing the
stability given by the divine presence. The first two stanzas make very
different use of the image of water, the dread waters of chaos and the fertile
waters of peace.
The first stanza invokes the myth of final catastrophic chaos,
and particularly the raging powers of the sea-goddess (see on Psalms 28 and
92). But the worst that these chthonic deities can do brings no fear in the
face of divine protection.
The second and central stanza stands midway between the first and third
stanza, neatly joining them together. It begins with another image of water,
the river of life, expressing the concept which is central to the whole psalm,
the presence of God in the midst of the city (v. 6). Finally it turns to the
tumult of the nations which will be the subject of the final stanza. The idea
of the river of life (v. 5) belongs more to the conception of the holy city
than to the actual geographical reality of Jerusalem. There is no river in
Jerusalem, yet Isaiah prohesies
Look, I am going to send peace flowing over her
like a river,
and like a stream in spate the glory of the
nations (Is 66.12)
Isaiah also combines the two ideas expressed in
this psalm, the river of peace and the supremacy of Sion. For the final
restoration of Jerusalem, Ezekiel 47 also makes use of this image: a river of
peace in his prophecy of the New Jerusalem. Ezekiel includes in his blue-print
for the eschatological heavenly city a marvellous river of life. As it flows
out of the Temple the water gets deeper and deeper, flowing east and even making
the Dead Sea wholesome.
Wherever the river flows, all living creatures
teeming in it will live. Fish will be very plentiful, for wherever the water
goes it brings health, and life teems wherever the river flows. There will be
fishermen on its banks. Fishing nets will be spread from En-Gedi to
En-Eglaim... Along the river, on either bank, will grow every kind of fruit
tree with leaves that never wither and fruit that never fails; they will bear
new fruit every month.
Looking eastwards from the Temple over the
still today barren aridity of the Judean desert, one can only marvel at the
promise of this luscious fertility. A four-hour tramp to the Dead Sea, through
country so lifeless and hostile that it is shunned even by the Bedhuin, only
increases this wonderment. The fierce heat is such that the accidental spillage
of a few drops of water enables vegetation to spring up. The rare spring on the
shore of the Dead Sea, such as En Gedi, with its date-palms and perfumes, shows
the rich profusion that water can bring. But even these waters flow vainly into
the Dead Sea, making no impression on its life-destroying chemicals. Such is
the eschatological river of life, and such the joy which the waters of a river
give to God's city.
The imagery of water is also used for the Law
and Wisdom itself, rooted in Jerusalem. The crusty but endearing scribe who was
the author of the Book of Ecclesiasticus has a vivid love for Jerusalem, and
pictures Wisdom taking root there:
I have taken root in a privileged people,
in the Lord's property, in his inheritance..
I have grown tall as a cedar on Lebanon,
as a cypress on Mount Hermon.
All this is no other than the Book of the
Covenant of the Most High God,
the Law that Moses enjoined on us.
This is what makes Wisdom brim over like the
like the Tigris in the season of fruit,
what makes intelligence overflow like the
like the Jordan at harvest time,
and makes discipline flow like the Nile,
like the Gihon when the grapes are harvested.(Eccli
24.12-13, 23-27)
The Law, or the Wisdom of God, God's revelation
of himself and of his own nature to Israel, was Israel's greatest treasure. It
gave sense and direction to life, as well as knowledge and understanding of God
(See on Psalm 118). This is why it can be equated with life-giving water, the
most precious element in life. In the final vision of the New Testament the
same imagery is used. Now it is appropriately centred on Christ: the river of
life will rise from the throne of God and of the Lamb, flowing crystal-clear
down the middle of the city (Rv 22.1-2).
The third stanza completes the idea which has lain beneath the
surface in the first two, that of peace. In the first stanza the turmoil in
nature held no fears; in the second the tumult between nations shrinks before
God's voice. In the third comes the definitive ending of war[23],
another eschatological promise. Like the refrain, the language of this stanza,
especially of v. 10, is reminiscent of the Immanuel promise of Isaiah (Is
7.14-15) and the climax of the Immanuel chapters in Isaiah 9.4 and 11.6-9:
The wolf will lie down with the lamb, etc
No hurt, no harm will be done
on all my holy mountain
for the country will be full of the knowledge of
Only the promise of the psalm is more
universal. The promise of Isaiah was of peace for Jerusalem at a time of
political and military threat; the psalm extends this more widely to 'the ends
of the earth' (v. 10), and consequently extends to the ends of the earth also
the exaltation of God. Whereas in the first stanza the powers of nature were
locked in turmoil; now God's sway has brought the nations to subjection. The
repeated Hebrew word with which the stanza ends, translated 'supreme' in v.11,
has awestruck overtones, literally 'lifted high', compelling reverence and
Your faithful love towers to heaven,
your truth to the clouds (Ps 56.11)
Exalted above the heavens, O God, over all the earth your glory (Ps 107.6)
To this the final refrain acts as a suitable
Three Historical Psalms -
Psalms 77, 104, 105
To call these three psalms 'Historical Psalms'
is only a rough classification. Each is different and has its own point of
view. Each is a meditation on what the author sees as the most important events
of God's guidance of his people through history. They do not, of course,
recount the historical events but presume knowledge of them, choosing, shaping
and commenting the events from the author's point of view, so that close
attention reveals the outline of the author's own theology. These three psalms
are here chosen for comment because they provide good examples of how the
history of Israel may provide the material for prayer and meditation in totally
different ways.
Psalm 77 - A Defiant and
Rebellious Race
The point of view of Psalm 77 is the fickleness
and rebelliousness of Israel, and especially of the northern tribes. It is
written from the viewpoint of the southerner, concluding with God's choice of
the southerner David 'to be shepherd of Jacob his people' (v. 71). The Sion
tradition may also be indicated by the use of the title 'Most High God' (El
Elyon) in vv. 17, 35, 41, 56. In the mysterious story of Abraham and the four
kings, Melchizedek, king of 'Salem', is called a priest of the Most High God
(Gn 14.18), and it seems likely that Melchizedek is represented as the king of
the ancient Jebusite city of Jerusalem. Certainly names compounded with -zedek
('just'), such as Adonizedek, continue right up to the time King David captures
the city, and this particular title 'Most High God' may well remain associated
with Jerusalem and the Sion tradition.
Critique of the north is everywhere: 'the sons
of Ephraim' (v. 9) attaches to the north, for the tribe of Ephraim held the
main part of the hill-country north of Jerusalem, including the sanctuary of
the Northern Kingdom at Bethel, which the southern kingdom hated and despised
so thoroughly. For good measure we are told at the end 'he rejected the tent of
Joseph, he did not choose the tribe of Ephraim' (v. 67), two parallel and
almost synonymous lines, for Ephraim and Manasseh were the two sons of Joseph
who had a place among the twelve tribes. Between these two mentions of Ephraim
the psalm draws attention to the rejection of Shiloh, the sanctuary in the
northern kingdom which had been the abode of the Ark when it was lost to the
Philistines (1 Sm 4). By contrast, there is no criticism which attaches
uniquely to the south, though the southerners are not exempt from the general
criticism of the repeated failures of Israel through history. In a way the
climax of the historical story is God's grant of 'his holy land, a mountain
which his right hand had won' (v. 54), and this holy mountain must surely be
Jerusalem. The psalm ends with the blameless care of David as a shepherd of
God's people (v. 72), an unmistakably southern touch.
1. Structure
1-8 Introduction.
The repeated reference in these verses to
instruction of successive generations on the lessons of history places the
psalm in the tradition of Deuteronomy in such passages as 'Do not forget the
things which you yourselves have seen, or let them slip from your heart as long
as you live; teach them, rather, to your children and to your children's
children' (Dt 4.9). To learn from the lessons of history the love of the Lord
and the untrustworthiness of his chosen people is one of the principal themes
of Deuteronomy. So it is not surprising that the opening couplet has a very
similar ring to the opening of the Song of Moses at the conclusion of
Deuteronomy 32.1 Psalm
Give ear, heavens, while I speak, Give ear, my people, to my Torah,
hear, earth, the words of my mouth. Turn your ear to the words of my mouth.
The mention of Torah (law or teaching) in vv. 1
and 5 is a further link with this fifth and last book of the Torah. Further
similarities to Deuteronomic theology will appear later. The psalm may
therefore be classified rather as a Wisdom psalm than as a historical psalm.
Rather than merely outlining the history, it seeks to show the lessons of
history for a practical attitude to life, and Wisdom in Israel is concerned
primarily with the practical wisdom of living a happy, contented and
well-directed life.
9-11 Historical heading: The theme-tune of
Israel's history: failure and forgetfulness.
12-41 Failure
to recognise God's care during the desert wanderings
42-53 God's
care of Israel at the exodus from Egypt
54-66 Israel's
infidelity during the period of the Judges
67-72 God's choice of David to be shepherd of Jacob.
2. Date
Like most of the psalms, this psalm has been
placed in widely differing contexts. One attractive solution is to place it
early in the monarchical period, perhaps soon after the division of the
kingdoms, which would account for the polemic against the north. The final
satisfaction with the choice of David, and lack of any suggestion of shadow
over this choice, could hardly have been written after the failure of the
Davidic dynasty and the Sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586. Especially
v. 69 ('He built his shrine like the heavens, or like the earth which he made
firm for ever') indicates that the Temple is still firm. It is a presentation
of the monarchy which is entirely upbeat and optimistic. Similarly, the polemic
against the north would have been sharpened and clinched if the Fall of Samaria
to the Assyrians in 721 had been mentioned; silence on this suggests that it
had not yet occurred.
Another indication of date might be a whole
series of links to the prophet Hosea (see p. 63), who was active in about 740,
though the usefulness of this indication is dented by the difficulty of dating
the final composition of the Book of Hosea. The infidelity of Israel, which is
such a strong theme of the psalm (v. 37),
is castigated also by Hosea 8.1, 'they have violated my covenant and
been unfaithful to my Law', and Hosea 5.15 expresses in the same way the threat
of punishment if they fail to return and repent (v. 34). There is even striking
similarity of imagery: Israel's unreliability is like that of a faulty bow,
which splinters just when the archer relies on it (v. 57 and Ho 7.16).
Further indications of the date must be the
similarity of the theology of history in the psalm with that of the
Deuteronomic History. However, this link is rendered less helpful by the doubt
over the date of the Deuteronomic History and the emergence of the view of
history which it expresses. This is usually placed either shortly before or
during the Exile.
3. The lessons of the Deuteronomic history
During the exile in Babylon the early history
of Israel in Canaan was written up, from the time of Joshua and the settlement
in Canaan, beginning with the capture of Jericho, right up to the Sack of
Jerusalem. The history of this period was seen to illustrate a consistent
pattern in four movements. The schema is detailed in Judges 2, which acts as a
sort of introduction to the history of the period:
1. Infidelity to the Covenant Jg 2.12
2. Punishment by hostile invasion Jg 2.14
3. Conversion to the Lord Jg
4. Liberation through a figure raised up by God. Jg
This is obvious enough in the early history of
the Judges. Again it comes to view in the story of the loss and return of the
Ark under Samuel and David respectively. Further on, in the period of the
Kings, the same lesson is seen: those kings who were faithful to Yahweh lived
long and successfully, those who were not faithful were afflicted in some way,
until the final great affliction which was the Sack of Jerusalem and the Exile
itself. Psalm 77 meditates steadily on the repeated infidelity of Israel
throughout its history (oddly meditating on the plagues and exodus from Egypt
only after the consideration of the people's behaviour in the desert, though
that was chronologically later). The conclusion may seem rather unfair: in the
psalm, the result of these infidelities is not the punishment of the people as
a whole, but finally the rejection of the northern tribes and the choice of
David and Judah (vv. 67-72).
Psalm 104 - God's Guidance of
Quite different in spirit is Psalm 104. It is
definitely both a historical psalm and a hymn of praise. Like all hymns of
praise, it starts with an invitation to praise the Lord for his 'wonderful
works' (vv. 1-7), stressing his 'strength', his 'miracles', the effectiveness
of 'his judgements'. The emphasis of the recital concentrates on God's steady
guidance of the course of Israel's history, with its constant 'he sent' (vv.
17, 20, 28) and 'he spoke' (vv. 5, 11, 19, 31, 34), 'his word' (vv. 8, 27, 28,
42)and 'his judgements' (vv. 5, 7), followed by the
effects of these actions. Unlike Psalm 77, it has no hint of Israel's
disobedience, hesitation or murmuring, even during the wanderings in the
desert. On the contrary, water from the rock, manna and quails are represented
simply as the answers to Israel's prayers, and the psalm concludes with a firm
statement of the purpose of history, the observance of God's precepts and laws.
The recital of history is meditative rather
than descriptive, in that it is allusive and difficult to follow without
previous knowledge of the course of that history. The full range of events
described presupposes the already completed edition of the Pentateuchal
history. There is a satisfying unity in the material chosen to illustrate the
historical theme - or rather, the repeated references to 'the land' (vv. 11,
12, 16, 30, 35, 36, 44) make it a strongly territorial psalm - which forms a
parabola, beginning in Canaan, the land of Abraham, going down to the land of
Egypt, and finally returning to Canaan, the land of Israel.
Psalm 105
In marked contrast to Psalm 104 is the adjacent
Psalm 105, where the emphasis is again on human disobedience. The two psalms
must have been put deliberately side by side at the end of the fourth book of
the psalter to highlight the contrast. Psalm 105 is a hymn to God's love under
its aspect of forgiveness. The psalm has been described as a Psalm of Lament,
but is this a just description? Certainly the title in the New Jerusalem Bible
('National confession of guilt') is not without its justification.
1. The History
Once the historical recital begins, an almost
unrelieved succession of failures is chronicled. Under the heading, 'Our sin is
the sin of our fathers; we have done wrong, our deeds have been evil' (v. 6)
the succession runs:
Failure to understand the wonderful deeds of
God in Egypt
Defiance at the Red Sea - followed by
short-lived belief ('they hastened to forget his deeds')
Impatience, greed and challenge to God in the
desert, leading on to rebellion and idolatry, punishment for which was averted
by the intercession of Moses
Disbelief in God's guarantee about the Promised
Land and idolatry to foreign gods, punishment for which was averted by Phinehas
Provocation to God at Meribah, in which even
Moses was implicated
Refusal to destroy the non-Yahwistic
inhabitants of Canaan, and consequent syncretism
All this occurred in the short time-span of the
generation of the wanderings in the desert. There was always in the Bible an
ambiguity about this period. The view of the desert period here presented is
very different from that of the eighth century prophets. Hosea sees it as the
honeymoon period after Yahweh's betrothal to Israel:
But look, I am going to seduce her
and lead her into the desert
and speak to her heart.
There she will respond as when she was young
as on the day when she came up from Egypt (Ho
In another passage Hosea sees it as the ideal
period of Israel's childhood innocence, when Israel responded to God's
affection with the trusting dependence of child to parent:
When Israel was a child I loved him, and I
called my son out of Egypt...
I myself taught Ephraim to walk,
I myself took them by the arm,
but they did not know that I was the one caring
for them,
that I was leading them with human ties, with the
leading-strings of love,
that, with them, I was like someone lifting an
infant to his cheek,
and that I bent down to feed him (Ho 11.1-4).
Jeremiah, too, sees the desert period as one of
unsullied love:
I remember your faithful love, the affection of
your bridal days,
when you followed me through the desert, through a
land unsown.
Israel was sacred to Yahweh, the first fruits
of his harvest (Jer 2.2-3).
This psalm presents a very different picture of
the murmuring and infidelity in the desert. Jeremiah's phrase, 'a land unsown',
is heavy with meaning. It requires little experience of the 'great and terrible desert'
of Sinai to understand how each of Israel's opposite reactions could easily
occur. The distances are so vast and the country so stark and
threatening that even the chatty traveller falls silent. Limitless
stretches of sand lie flat under the merciless blue sky. The sand is the colour
of attractive beach sand, but is harsh and unyielding to the touch.
Periodically great organ-pipes of rock squat inconsequentially on the sand to
punctuate the view. Of water, life or movement there is none. It is a country
of extremes, where the brooding, unseen, almighty power of God is dauntingly
present. There is room for a honeymoon of trust and confidence. But to be lost
on Sinai, even for a few hours, is an experience which can still chill the
heart years later. Bewilderment passes swiftly to fear and then to longing or
even indignation at having been persuaded to leave the lush vegetation beyond
the territories of this hostile gaoler (cf. p. 81, note 29).
The recital reaches its climax in the final[24]
verses 39-47, where Israel's infidelity is seen precisely as the rupture of the
marriage-bond with the Lord. Despite Israel's adultery, 'he remembered his
covenant' to the extent even of making their captors treat Israel gently. Such
forgiveness gives grounds for the final prayer, to be gathered again from among
the gentiles.
2. The Framework
According to the form-critical criteria
established by Gunkel, the psalm should be classified as a psalm of praise,
since it starts with an invitation to praise Yahweh (vv. 1-5). The other
element in the framework fits the criteria also, the final prayer (v. 47) for
the return from exile, so that 'we may make it our glory to praise you'. This
seems at first sight strangely at variance with the dark character of the rest
of the psalm and its emphasis on failure. The bridge is provided by the object
of praise, for the first few verses contain keywords which would be highly
evocative to every singer steeped in the biblical tradition, namely hesed ('for
his great love is without end'), zedaqah ('what is just')
and jeshua ('Come to me, Lord, with your salvation'). It is for
these qualities that God is praised, and all are qualities of forgiveness..
1. Hesed (see p. 13-14) Over and above
the general meaning and usage of this word, perhaps best translated 'steadfast
love', the connotation of forgiving love is built in. When Yahweh declares to
Moses that he is a God of hesed, it is in a context of forgiveness, for
this scene (Exodus 34) occurs immediately after the breaking and the renewal of
the covenant in the desert. Similarly in Joel 2.13 this is the quality of
Yahweh which is stressed in the Call to Repentance. Indeed Yahweh's
self-identification as a God of forgiveness echoes down the scripture. It is
alluded to and even quoted again and again, as, for instance, in the amusingly
satirical scene at the end of the Book of Jonah. Jonah complains bitterly at
being made to look a fool because of God's refusal to destroy the repentant
city of Nineveh, 'That was why I first tried to flee to Tarshish, since I knew you
were a tender, compassionate God, slow to anger, rich in hesed' (Jonah
2. Zedaqah is not 'justice' in any
modern sense of the word. In modern usage 'justice' is considered in function
of law and of obedience/disobedience to the law. That is, the law is the norm
against which justice is measured. In biblical usage about the justice of
Yahweh the situation is wholly different. The yardstick of God's justice is his
promise in the Covenant that he would always protect and cherish Israel, and
would forgive. God shows his justice by showing his fidelity to his covenant
promises. Because of his justice, Israel could rely on his forgiveness. Thus,
in the psalms and throughout the Old Testament (and in Paul, especially
Galatians and Romans), God's justice is frequently paired with his forgiveness
or his salvation. It is always a forgiving or saving justice rather than
Ps 7.11: 'God is an
just judge, slow to anger'.
Is 46:13, 'I am bringing my justice
nearer, my salvation will not delay'.
Is 51.6, 'My justice is suddenly
approaching, my salvation appears'.
Is 51.8, 'My saving justice will last for
ever, and my salvation for all generations'.
Dn 9.16, 'In your saving justice turn
away your anger,... for we have sinned'.
Also in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1QS 11.9-12, 'He
will wipe out my transgressions through his justice.
Human justice is dependent on divine justice.
Human beings cannot be 'just' on their own; they can
be 'just' only by being enveloped in the justice of God.
3. Jeshua - the word which is
transliterated (via Greek and Latin) into the name'Jesus' - is a wider term,
used primarily of the salvation brought by God particularly in time of
distress. It is the deliverance from the penalties brought on Israel through
sin and infidelity, particularly the punishment of the Babylonian Exile. In
consciousness of failure Israel cries to God, confident that God will bring his
salvation. In the Old Testament God is the Saviour, and this persists into the
New Testament. It is only in the course of the development of Christology that
the title 'Saviour' is transferred to Jesus, 'for it is he who will save his
people from their sins' (Mt 1.21).
Compare Psalms 77 and 105. What are the
differences between the views of the history of Israel expressed in each of
them? Can one be described as more correct than the other? |
Psalm 86 Jerusalem, Mother of
1. Genre
Hymns of Sion abound in the psalter,
celebrating Jerusalem. Many of them use the ancient myths of Canaan, the idea
of a healing river flowing from the city (Psalm 45.2) or a city built on a holy
mountain (Psalm 47.2). But these ideas continued to be used and need not be
signs of an early date, for the aura of Jerusalem continued to grow throughout
biblical times[25].
A special group of Sion songs is formed by the Songs of Ascent (Psalms
119-133), sung by pilgrims on their way up to the city. Another large group is
constituted by songs of the Temple. This sparkling short song celebrates
Jerusalem as the centre of all nations.
2. Structure
One striking neat feature, not too clear in the
English translation (which seeks to avoid monotony of expression), suggests a
chiasmus. Each time the feature occurs at the end of a line:
in the literal Hebrew in the
Grail translation
v. 3 in
you Of you
v. 4 will
be born there will
be her children
v. 5 in
her shall
be her children
v. 6 will
be born there These are her children
v. 7 in
you In you
This would suggest that verses 1-2 form an
3. Mother of the Nations
The literal meaning is clear enough, only two
features requiring comment, the holy mountain (v. 1) and the register of
peoples (v. 6). In addition we might say that the comparison to 'Jacob's
dwellings' is a reference to the northern kingdom of Israel, destroyed and
transported in 721 BC. The reference, however, cannot be used to date the
psalm; the remark could fall at any time after the establishment of a rival
temple in the northern kingdom by Jeroboam as a result of the division of the
kingdoms in 931 BC.
a. The Holy Mountain
Holy mountains feature naturally in religious
traditions. No mountain-climber or hill-walker can doubt the appropriateness of
this: there is a certain commanding awe about the summit of any mountain, which
has always made mountains suitable homes for gods. In flat Mesopotamia
worshippers were reduced to creating their own holy mountains, the ziggurats,
made from billions of mud-bricks, and still today from their summits serenely
dominating the Mesopotamian plain. The eastern coast of the Mediterranean had
its own special holy mountains, in the north Mount Zaphon in Syria and in the
south Mount Sinai. The latter certainly compels reverence by its stark and
polychrome bare rock, a scene unrivalled for the great encounter with God.
It must be confessed that physically Mount Sion
does not rate too well as a holy mountain. From the south and especially the
east the slope is steep. But the City of David is really a lower escarpment running
out from the higher hills to the north-west, and even the Temple built further
up towards the north-west, on the flat threshing-floor of Araunah, falls well
below the crest of the ridge. But the presence of the Ark, installed by David,
made it the dwelling-place of God and so the holy mountain. 'In the city of our
God his holy mountain rises in beauty, the joy of all the earth, Mount Sion,
true pole of the earth' (Ps 47.2). For all their size, the mountain masses east
of the Jordan must envy it: 'High-ridged mountains are
the mountains of Bashan. Why look with envy, you high-ridged mountains, at the
mountain where God has chosen to dwell?' (Ps 67.17). At any rate at the end of
time the disparity of physical size will be put right:
It will happen in the final days
that the mountain of Yahweh's house
will rise higher than the mountains
and tower above the heights (Is 2.2).
b. 'His register of peoples' may be intended as
a reference to the Book of the Living. This shadowy conception of a book which
lists the names of those who are to live surfaces already in Ex 32.32 ('If not,
please blot me out from the book you have written') and again in Daniel 12.1 ('Your own people will be spared - all those whose names are
found written in the Book'). The idea is combined with that of a theoretical
citizen-list of Jerusalem (cf. Is 4.3: 'Those who are left in Zion and remain
in Jerusalem will be called holy, all those in Jerusalem noted down to live';
contrast those excluded from the list in Ezek 13.9). The concept is extended
into the Book of Revelation with the Lamb's book of life (Rv 17.8; 20.12;
Why are these names in
particular included? Babylon and Egypt are of course the great nations at
either extreme of the fertile crescent, the important
forces dominating Israel throughout biblical history. Philistia, the coastal
plain which gives its name to Palestine, was once the bitter rival, encroaching
on the hill-country of Israel and particularly mocked as uncircumcised. Tyre,
the proud merchant harbour-city to the north, is included perhaps because of
its splendour and independence (cf. Ezek 26.1-28.19), Ethiopia perhaps because
of its fabled distance.
It has been suggested that the psalmist is
thinking merely of the joy of Jewish exiles returning from these countries (cf.
p. 96), but this would scarcely make the countries themselves Sion's 'children'.
More likely the psalmist is thinking of the joyful eschatological procession of
the nations to Sion (Is 2.2):
Then all the nations will stream to it,
many people will come to it and say,
'Come, let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh,
to the house of the God of Jacob
that he may teach us his ways
so that we may walk in his paths'.
Indeed, finally this becomes an obligation, so
that 'Should one of the races of the world fail to come up to Jerusalem to
worship the King, Yahweh Sabaoth, there will be no rain for that one' (Zech
14.17, cf. 2.14; 8.20-23). This is the sort of triumphalism which is far from
the tenderness of the psalm and of the picture of Jerusalem as the forsaken
wife reclaimed by Yahweh and mother of the redeemed:
Break into cries and shouts of joy, you who
were never in labour,
for the children of the forsaken one are more in
than the children of the wedded wife, says Yahweh
(Is 54.1).
Two Psalms of David's Kingship
- Psalm 88 and Psalm 131
These two psalms are so different in approach
that it is useful to put them together in order to appreciate the contrasts
between them.
Psalm 88
This psalm falls into three distinct but
connected parts:
1. A hymn about God's power
2. The prophecy to David
3. A lament for the monarchy.
These are, however, knit together, especially
at beginning and end, by the themes of David (vv. 4 and 50), God's
faithfulness/truth (vv. 3 and 50), and his love (vv. 2 and 50 - both in the
plural, signifying God's concrete acts of love, translated 'mercies' in
v. 50 of the Grail version). These are palpably the main concerns of the psalm.
Verse 53 is, of course, added as the doxology
concluding the third book of the Psalms (cf. Psalms 40.14; 71.18-19; 105.48:150).
It has no part in the movement of thought of this psalm. It has been plausibly
suggested that Psalms 2, 40 and 88 are royal psalms deliberately placed at the
'seams' of the first three books of the psalms, to increase its 'Davidic'
character. This has interesting consequences for the formation of the books of
the psalter:
1. The first two books were joined together as
a Davidic collection before the royal psalms began to be used at the seams. In
the first book the titles imply that all the psalms may, in any case, be
considered Davidic at least by implication. The concentration of Davidic psalms
decreases gradually in each book. In the second book 21 of the 31 psalms are
'Davidic', whereas in the third book only one of the 17 psalms is. This strengthens
the suggestion that the collection of psalms given in the third book of the
psalter was a subsequent addition.
2. The last two books of the psalter are
considerably less Davidic in character, and concentrate much more on direct
divine rule - as is shown by the stress on the kingship of Yahweh in Psalms
95-99. This would be compatible with a date after the end of the rule of
David's dynasty.
3. At some stage,
probably rather late, Psalm One was put at the beginning of the collection.
Possibly at the same time Psalm 118 rounded it off. Both are Wisdom psalms, and
would make Psalms 1-118 a neatly parcelled package about wise living (see p.
1. A Hymn about God's Power
This first part is in the familiar form of a
chiasmus, a sort of pyramidal structure focussing on God's divine power. It
begins on earth, mounts through the heavens, to God's own council, before
returning through the same steps. The middle step in each direction makes use
of the ancient myth of the earth-powers, now vanquished and demoted to the
position of God's servants. This is especially clear in vv. 11-13, with the
mention of Rahab, the primitive sea-dragon, and the holy mountains, Tabor and
vv. 2-5 The
psalmist's joy in God's love and fidelity, expressed in his covenant with David
vv. 6-7 God's
power over the heavens and their powers, the defeated deities
vv. 8-9 God
unequalled in the council of the holy ones
vv. 10-14 God's
power over the heavens, the seas and the holy mountains
vv. 14-19 The
blessing and joy of those who find joy every day in God's favour to the king.
The final element contains a remarkable balance
between the kingship of Yahweh and that of David. In verses 15 and 16 the king
and the throne are those of Yahweh; in verse 19 the king is David, a neat
statement that kinsghip in Israel must always be regarded as derivative from
that of Yahweh, who remains the true king (see on Psalm 109).
2. The Prophecy to David
This poetic celebration of the promise of an
eternal dynasty receives its classic prose formulation in 2 Sm 7, when Nathan
comes and delivers the word of the Lord to David. In this psalm, however, we
have the main elements of Nathan's promise without the later accretions
regarding the Temple - for that much-loved passage was re-used and brought up
to date generation after generation. The version in the psalm may, therefore,
well be earlier than the prophecy of Nathan, at least in its present form. It
has been suggested that it goes right back to the tenth century.
It is Yahweh (v. 21) who picked out, found and
anointed his own choice of servant. The story is given, as so much of the early
story of David, in two versions, either as the 'sweet singer of Israel' whose
playing soothed the black moods of Saul (1 Sm 16), or as the stone-slinging
giant-killer of whom it was sung, 'Saul has killed his thousands and David his
tens of thousands' - hardly the best method of soothing Saul's jealousy (1 Sm
17-18). At the centre of the promise is the assurance of adoption, and the
poetic title, 'highest of the kings of the earth'.
The permanence of the promise is much stressed,
with a constant 'always' (v. 22, 29), 'for ever' (v. 23, 30, 37, 38), and the
four consecutive uses of 'never' of vv. 34-36. At the centre of this
protestation of everlasting divine fidelity comes the contrast of human
infidelity, the hypothesis that the human king may fail. But this is closed by
the repeated assertion that, though he will be punished, the promise will never
3. Lament for the Monarchy
After this build-up of God's everlasting
promise the reversal is all the more startling. The reversal is rammed home by
two pairs of stanzas (vv. 39-42, 43-46). The pairs correspond, first the
physical, then the psychological evidence: his crown is in the dust (v.
40), his throne on the ground (v. 45); he is the taunt of his
neighbours (v. 42), disgrace heaped upon him (v. 46). Finally,
two stanzas, each containing a question to Yahweh (vv. 47 and 50) and a
reminder (vv. 48-49 and 51-21).
This lament is surely the heart and purpose of
the poem, to which all has built up, bringing out the paradox of Yahweh's
inalienable fidelity and yet his failure to keep the promise to the dynasty of
4. Date of the Psalm
At what moment in time should it be placed? H-J
Kraus, in his brilliant Commentary on the psalms (1978, ET Augsburg
Press, 1989) points out that 'your servant' in v. 51 can hardly be other than
the king. Earlier in the poem it has been 'my/your servant David' (v. 4, 21);
can the servant now be someone else? So the poem might be a lament over King
Josiah, killed at Megiddo in 609 BC. But 'the servant' of the lament (vv. 40
and 51) must surely be the speaker; so is the poem placed in the mouth of the
king only dramatically? The detailed analysis of vocabulary by V. Vanelli[27]
suggests that the language is closer to Jeremiah, Lamentations and Job, so that
the poem would fit well in the time of the Exile.
That was the time when Israel was desperately
questioning how it was that the promise could have gone wrong. The answer is
basically two-fold. A partial answer was that Israel's infidelity left Yahweh
no choice but to bring the kingship to the dust, even at the price of profaning
his Name (see on Psalm 8, section 4). It would, in fact, be the occasion of a
renewal, expunging reliance on the institutions of Israel in monarchy, cult and
priesthood, when Yahweh would take the heart of stone from their bodies and
give them a heart of flesh instead (Ezek 36. 25-27; Jer 33.31-33). The
Christian, however, can see that the full answer lies only in the Messiah of
David's line.
Psalm 131
1. Form
The psalm falls neatly into two equal halves,
vv.1-10 and 11-18, the first concerned with David's oath for God, the second
with God's oath for David. The parallels are closely elaborated:
v.1 Yahweh...David v.11a Yahweh...David
vv.3-5 Oath
formula vv.1b-12 Oath formula
vv.7-8 Rest
offered by David vv.13-14 Rest accepted by Yahweh
v.9a Priests
clothed with justice v.16a Priests clothed with salvation
v.9b your
faithful ring out their joy v.16b her faithful ring out their joy
v.10 David...your
anointed v.17 David...my anointed
The two halves are, so to speak, bolted
together by the verb shub='turn away' in v. 10b, stressing Yahweh's
lasting fidelity (literally, 'do not turn away from your anointed), and v. 11b
(literally, 'he will not turn away from his word').
2. Historical Background
The historical background to the psalm is that
wonderful, reassuring moment when David brings the Ark up to Jerusalem. It
signified a turning-point in the history of Israel. The Ark of the Covenant was
always a symbol of God's presence with Israel. God's presence in the midst of
Israel was what made the nation special, what distinguished it from all other
nations, and this presence was - ever since the time in the desert - in or at
the Ark. The Ark itself was not precisely the place of God's dwelling, but
rather the Ark was the footstool (as v. 7 confirms): above the Ark was the
'mercy-seat', a gold platform flanked by great winged creatures, so a throne or
footstool for Yahweh (Exodus 25.20-22). The Ark had the function of the bull in
many Canaanite representations of Baal: Baal, the thunder-god, is represented
standing on the back of a bull[28].
In the Ugaritic texts the God El (from whom the Hebrew word for God, 'Elohim'
comes) is called 'the Bull, El, my Father'; that is, the God himself could be
represented as a bull. So the Ark was carried into war to bring terror on
Israel's enemies and reassurance of God's protection to Israel's own warriors.
When the Ark fell into the hands of the Philistines this was
both a national disaster and a national disgrace, marked by the heart-broken
symbolic name given to Phinehas's son, Ichabod or 'Where is the Glory?' (1 Sm 4.22). To the child's mother the loss of the Ark
features larger than the death in same battle of both her husband and her
The Ark was no easy trophy for the Philistines,
and got its own back by inflicting them all with piles. After a few months they
decided to get rid of their uncomfortable guest, put it on an ox-cart and left
the inspired cows to shamble up to the (Philistine) border-town of Beth
Shemesh. There it again brought havoc to the inhabitants until they ushered it
off a few miles more to the (Israelite) border-town of Yearim, where it rested
- neglected? Twenty years later David remembered it and brought it up with
great ceremony to his new, personal capital of Jerusalem. At the end of the
event David distributed bread, dates and raisin-cakes to the crowds, which may
be the reference of v. 15b. Shrewd dynastic move, perhaps, by that clever
to hijack the Ark into his own city, and so make Yahweh his lasting ally. But,
motivation apart, it was the decisive moment which made Jerusalem what it has
since remained, the symbol of God's presence in human history and beyond.
How does Psalm 131 stand against this
background? According to Mitchell Dahood (Psalms, Doubleday 1970, vol 3,
p. 241) 'this royal psalm appears to have been composed in the tenth century as
part of the liturgy for the feast when the ark was carried in procession to
Jerusalem'. The author of the Books of Chronicles appears to think the same,
for vv. 8-10 are quoted in that exaggeratedly liturgical account of the
installation of the Ark, 2 Chr 6.41-42. This is at least strong evidence that
the psalm already existed at the time of the writing of Chronicles. For others
(e.g. H. Gunkel) it seems to have been composed for the annual feast of the
dedication of the sanctuary. The major difficulty about this theory is that
there is no clear evidence in the Bible for such an annual feast; it is deduced
chiefly from the existence of such a feast in Mesopotamia, and then is used to
explain several psalms (see p. 19-22).
There is no evidence in the Bible that David
ever made the promise given here, not to rest until he had found a
dwelling-place for the Lord. It is only a reasonable poetic deduction from
David's rejected offer in 2 Sm 7 to build a 'house' for the Lord and from his
fulfilled resolution to bring up the Ark to Jerusalem. An important indication
of the date of the psalm is the form of the oath in v.12. Unlike the oath in 2
Sm 7 and Psalm 88, the oath here is no more than provisional, 'if they
keep my covenant'. This suggests that the version of the oath may come from a
time after the fall of the Davidic dynasty, when they had in fact not kept the
covenant. Indeed it fits perfectly the exilic theology of the Deuteronomic
History, so aware of the repeated failure of Israel and the need for repentance
and forgiveness. Therefore, although the structure of the psalm makes clear
that Yahweh's oath courteously answers David's oath, these oaths are only
introductory, and the stress of the parallelism is on the place of rest (vv. 7
and 14; the parallel is more exact than appears, for the same Hebrew word is
translated in the Grail version 'place of rest' and 'resting-place').
Furthermore, the language of vv. 17-18 is commonly that of the exilic and later
prophetic writings (e.g. Jer 33.15; Ezek 29.21; Zc 3.8; 6.12 for v. 17a, 'I
will make the horn of David sprout'). The promises must therefore be understood
not of the historical dynasty of David but of his eschatological, messianic
It is not by chance or by mistake that the
psalm is placed among the psalms of pilgrimage to Sion (see p. 96). The
emphasis is on the presence of God in Jerusalem, on the priests clothed with
justice or salvation and on the joy of the pilgrims. David's oath to bring the
Ark to Jerusalem is a dramatic enhancement of this, as is also the chorus from
Ephrata (v. 6, an alternative name for David's home-town of Bethlehem).
3. Two Christian Reflections
a. The presence of God in the Ark and
eventually in Jerusalem was what made Israel a people special to the Lord. It
was their reassurance of their choice by God, whence the shattering character
of the loss of the Ark to the Philistines and of the destruction of the Temple.
The Gospel of Matthew, written as it is with Jewish traditions in mind, insists
in the same way on the presence of Christ in his new community of the new
Israel. Thus at the beginning of the Gospel the child Jesus is given the
symbolic name Immanuel or 'God is with us' (Mt 1.18),
and at the end the risen Christ in full power and splendour promises his
presence among the disciples until the end of time (Mt 28.20). These two
bracket the Gospel. The presence of Christ in his Church is, further, a theme
which recurs again and again in the course of the Gospel. In his editorial
touches to the story of the Calming of the Storm (Mt 8.23-27, compare Mk
4.35-41) Matthew represents the boat as the ship of the Church, which is safe
as long as Jesus is present. In the Walking on the Water (Mt 14.22-33) it is
when Jesus enters the boat that the wind drops. In the chapter on the community
a central teaching is 'when two or three are gathered together, I am there
among them' (18.20). It certainly seems likely that Matthew is representing the
presence of Christ in the new Israel as being on the same level as the presence
of God in Jerusalem.
b. Jerusalem, sanctified by the presence of the
Ark, becomes in the thought of Israel the symbol and goal of God's presence in
the world. It is in the Temple that the prophet Isaiah experiences God's
awesome presence and glory, as the cloud filling the Temple (Isaiah 6). The
tragedy of the Exile is expressed by Ezekiel's vision of the Glory of the Lord
leaving the Temple (Ezek 10.18-22); once the Glory of the Lord had left the
Temple, Jerusalem had lost its heart. Similarly the restoration after the Exile
is described in terms of the re-sanctification of Jerusalem:
When the Lord has washed away the filth of
Zion's daughters
and with the wind of judgement and the wind of
cleansed Jerusalem of the blood shed in her,
Yahweh will create over every house on Mount
and over all those who assemble there a cloud by
and by night smoke with the brightness of a
flaring fire,
for over all will be the Glory as a canopy and
tent to give shade by day from the heat,
refuge and shelter from the storm and the rain (Is
The final chapters of Ezekiel embody the hope
of Israel in Exile with a blue-print for the restored Jerusalem and its Temple,
climaxing in the final line, 'The name of the city in future must be
"Yahweh-is-there"' (Ezek 48.34). Throughout the history of Judaism, right into
modern times, Jerusalem is the symbol of peace, rest and contentment, the City
of Peace and the goal of all longing. The Jewish good wish or blessing, 'Next
year in Jerusalem!', is understood not so much
literally and geographically as expressing a wish for all good things,
prosperity and contentment. This was already the magnetic power of Jerusalem in
ancient times. The historian Josephus (who does tend to exaggerate numbers)
estimates that over a million pilgrims flocked to Jerusalem regularly from all
over the Diaspora for the Passover. It is this which gives such joy to the
Psalms of Ascent, as the pilgrims gather from the lands of their exile to the
safety and brotherhood of Jerusalem.
In the New Testament, too, Jerusalem becomes the
symbol of the final goal, Luke already gives a very
special place to Jerusalem. His gospel begins and ends there, the second half
being dominated by Jesus' final pilgrimage to die a prophet's death and to
manifest himself again to his followers at Jerusalem. The first and ideal
Christian community in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 1-7) takes its
starting-point from Jerusalem, a centre of unity, prayer and fraternity, and
the scene of the first martyrdom for Christ. It is from Jerusalem that the
faith spreads to 'the ends of the earth'.
This symbolism is most explicit in the two
final chapters of the Book of Revelation. In imagery heavily dependent on that
of the third part of Isaiah and on the final chapters of Ezekiel, the author
describes the messianic, eschatological Jerusalem, the city of salvation, where
all nations will gather to worship the Lord, bathed in his light and in his
glory. There God will make his home, and all sorrow will be gone. The city will
not need the sun or the moon, for it will be lit by the radiant glory of God
and the Lamb will be a lighted torch for it. The river of paradise will flow in
it, bringing light and plenty, and every yearning will be fulfilled.
1. Jesus is called in the gospels 'son of
David'. Do these psalms show this to be an apt title? Why? |
2. Do these two psalms show the same or a different attitude to the
promises of God? |
Psalm 92 The
Lord of the Seas
1. Genre
This psalm falls equally well into the two
categories of nature/creation-psalm and royal psalm for Yahweh, ideally
combining the two. It is certainly a psalm about the superiority of Yahweh over
the created universe, and especially over the sea, which featured so ominously
in the Canaanite mythology. It retains much of the fine simplicity of Canaanite
verse, particularly in three ways,
1. The unbroken occurrence of tricola (grouping
by three elements or lines, instead of the more usual Hebrew dual parallelism)
in each verse,
2. Complete lack of definite article (which did
not exist in Ugaritic, the primitive language of Canaan)
3. Repetition of words from one line to another
with a single new element (see on Psalm 28, section 1b). So verse 3-4 runs:
v.3 They
have lifted, the rivers, Yahweh,
They have lifted, the rivers, their
They have lifted, the rivers, their
v.4 Than
the voices of many seas,
the splendour of
breaking seas,
the splendour is
exalted of Yahweh.
The sound of these verses in Hebrew, with their
striking triple rhythm and repeated sounds, is so strong and so fitted to the
surging of the waters that it must be reproduced here. Note especially in v. 3
the repetition of the swishing 's' and the lift of the
final syllable, and in v.4
the hollow booming of the final '-im'/ '-am' /
v.3 Na-su
na-ha-rot Yahweh
Na-su na-ha-rot qo-lam
Ya-su na-ha-rot dak-yam
v.4 Mi-qo-lot ma-yim ra-bim
a-dir mish-ba-re
a-dir ba-ma-rom Yahweh.
At the same time the psalm celebrates the
kingship of Yahweh, as Psalms 46 and Psalms 95-98. It has been suggested that
this psalm is an introduction to the collection consisting of the latter four
psalms. Earlier in this century attempts were made to associate these psalms
with an annual festival of the harvest, the autumn New Year festival combined
with a celebration of the re-coronation of Yahweh (see p. 19-22).
2. Shape
Contrasting with the turmoil of the surging
waters at the centre of the poem is the majestic firmness of Yahweh at
beginning and end.
First, the translation. Regretfully, I must depart from the Grail
translation of v. 5 in two respects. The 'decrees' intrude strangely into the
poem at this point; there has been no mention of commandments or directions
given, and such a thought-world fits better the exilic period when the Law
became important than it does the early Canaanite/Ugaritic sphere. In Ugaritic
the word translated 'decrees' means 'throne'. Similarly the idea of 'holiness'
becomes important also in the exilic period; the word can also, and better, be
understood as a collective noun, 'the holy ones'. This yields the idea,
frequent in the Bible (e.g. 1 Kgs 22.19, or Isaiah's vocation-experience in Is
6) and elsewhere, of God surrounded by his courtiers, his 'holy ones'. With
other smaller adjustments, v. 5 therefore reads in a way which coheres better
with the rest of the poem:
Truly your throne stands firm.
In your temple your holy ones will praise you
O Lord, until the end of
Then the shape may be more clearly seen.
Corresponding to one another, and contrasting with the
tumultuous and shifting waves are v. 1d, 'the world you made firm, not to be
moved' (the same word as was used in Ps 45.3 of the mountains toppling into the
sea) and v.5a 'your throne stands firm'. The poem, then, is built on the
contrast between the constant but frustrated and impotent shifting of the
waters whom God has defeated, and the serene majesty
of Yahweh who gives stability to the world.
3. The Kingship of God - a concept develops
a. During the Babylonian exile
The theme of the kingship of God takes on a new
dimension during this period, a notable expansion from the conception of God as
king over the natural world through the control of nature. The exile raises the
question whether indeed God is still king. All the institutions on which Israel
relied had been annihilated, the Temple, the cult, the royal dynasty. Was
Yahweh really king if he could not protect his people
and ensure their stability?
Hark, from the daughter of my people the cry
for help,
ringing far and wide throughout the land,
'Is Yahweh no longer in Zion, her king no
longer there?' (Jer 8.19)
If God has allowed his people to be dragged
into exile, his kingship of the world is seriously questioned. But the message
of the return is re-assuring. According to Deutero-Isaiah, God is to become
king by the return to Zion:
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of
the messenger announcing peace,
of the messenger of good news who proclaims
and says to Zion, 'Your God is king!' (Is 53.7)
The excitement of the return and of the renewal
of God's kingship is palpable in such passages as Jeremiah 3.17 or Micah
3.12-13; 4.7, or Zephaniah 3.15:
Yahweh has repealed your sentence. He has
turned your enemy away.
Yahweh is king among you, Israel,
you have nothing more to fear.
b. After the return from Exile
But again the excitement came to be
disappointed. The return from the Exile developed into a harrassed and
depressed existence in the impoverished Holy Land, surrounded by enemies, and
increasingly oppressed by the great empires of Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid
Syria. The dominant note of spirituality after the return from exile is not
confidence in the kingship of Yahweh, but is marked by two quite different
features. The first is awareness of sin and constant need of repentance (e.g.
the Book of Baruch), the second that the poor and unfortunate are the favoured
of Yahweh, indulged by God's special care and blessing (see p. 50). The lowest
point came with the Maccabean persecution, when the Syrian King Antiochus IV
attempted to wipe out all Jewish religious observance.
It was under the pressure of these adverse
political and economic conditions that the kingship of Yahweh came to be seen
again in a new light, in less material terms. Not only did the apocalyptic
literature develop, which, in terms of coded and splendid imagery, promised
deliverance from oppression by enemies and a glorious future for Israel, but
also a new concept of the kingship of God began to prevail, centred upon
holiness and the kingship of God through the reign of 'justice', or the prevalence
of the divine values seen in the Law. This becomes visible especially in the literature of
the first century before Christ, for example the so-called Psalms of Solomon
(not in fact Solomonic, but hymns of the Pharisaic school, see p. 14). It is
now not so much a political kingship as a kingship of righteousness and
Behold, O Lord, and raise up for them their
king, the son of David,
at the time you appointed to reign over Israel
your servant,
and cleanse Jerusalem of the nations which are
trampling her down in destruction,
in the wisdom of righteousness to expel sinners
from your inheritance,
to smash the arrogance of the sinner.
He shall gather together a holy people whom he
shall lead in righteousness (17.21-26).
c. The kingship of God in the preaching of
Jesus came to proclaim the kingship of God, and
from the beginning of his proclamation it is clear that a time of crisis and
decision has arrived. Indeed, even before Jesus began his proclamation, the
Baptist was proclaiming that the axe had been put to the root of the tree, that
the Messiah was about to come, winnowing fan in hand, to separate the grain
from the chaff. Jesus' message was subtly different, for he saw his task as one
of fulfilment. He explains the type of fulfilment by explaining to John's messengers
from prison (Mt 11.2-6) that his miracles of healing fulfill the prophecies of
Isaiah 35 and 61, 'the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the poor have the good news
brought to them, etc'. By his 'teaching with authority' (that is, no mere
repetition of traditional teaching) he showed how Judaism must be renewed if it
was to express the kingship of God, again and again cutting through the web of
superficiality and casuistry to the basic principles of God's Law. As Matthew
three times expresses it, 'What I want is love not sacrifice'.
In some sense Jesus saw the kingship of God as
already realised in his coming, though the exact sense of 'The kingship of God has
drawn near' has been endlessly disputed: is it merely near or is it
present? He undoubtedly saw it as in some sense realised and perfected by his
self-offering and vindication: 'In truth I tell you, there are some standing
here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with
power' (Mk 9.1). The claim is echoed most strongly in Luke: at the Last Supper
Jesus says 'I shall never again drink wine until the kingdom of God comes' (Lk
22.18), and immediately drinks from the Chalice of the New Covenant. At the
trial scene he says, 'From now on the son of man will be seated at the
right hand of God' (Lk 22.69). There is a tension between the two time-zones:
the kingship of God is both already present and yet to be completed in the
future. There is an urgency of decision springing from the presence of the
kingship of God in the proclamation of Jesus - everyone must make an act of
commitment for or against the kingship of God - and yet the completion is still
in the future. Perhaps this tension is best considered (if not resolved) by the
mind-set of the Fourth Gospel: the gospel is one great judgement-scene, in
which the presence of Jesus is a challenge. All those who encounter Jesus judge
themselves either by accepting or by rejecting him. 'The hour is coming - and
now is - when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and all who hear
it will live' (Jn 5.25). This is the fulfilment of the kingship of God.
d. The kingship of God in Paul
In Paul the language of the kingship of God is
rare. But the teaching is nevertheless present. In the earliest of all his
letters, First Thessalonians, Paul teaches that
At the signal given by the voice of the
Archangel and the trumpet of God, the Lord himself will come down from heaven;
those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise, and only after that
shall we who remain alive be taken up in the clouds together with them, to meet
the Lord in the air (1 Thess 4.16-17).
This is the language of a royal triumphal
procession, when a city goes out to greet the arrival of a visiting emperor and
accompanies him through the triumphal arch at the city gate in splendour and
pomp. Such language was drawn from the imperial cult, but the thought is rooted
in the biblical concept of the kingship of God, except that the monarch is here
the Lord Jesus in the place of the Lord God. The completion of this triumphal
procession is seen in a later letter,
After that will come
the end, when he will hand over the Kingdom to God the Father, having abolished
every pricipality, every ruling force and power. For he is to
be king until he has made his enemies his footstool, and the last of the
enemies to be done away with is death (1 Cor 15.24-26).
1. Write a short piece on the development of
the idea of the kingship of God (use NJB and McKenzie). In a post-monarchical
world is the concept too outdated to be meaningful? What about 'shepherd'? |
2. Gather together and comment on the different images of water which
we have met in the Psalms. |
Psalm 94 The
Word of the Lord
1. Structure
The psalm seems to fall fairly abruptly into
two parts, the first three and the last two stanzas. The first three stanzas
are in the classic form of a hymn of praise, twice repeated: an exhortation to
praise (an imperative), followed by the reasons for so doing (introduced by
v.1 Come...
v.3 for
a mighty God is the Lord (the 'for' is
omitted in the Grail version)
The reason for praising is already summed up in
'mighty God'. God is to be praised as the creator who made heights and depths,
sea and land.
v. 6 Come...
v. 7 for
he is our God
The reason for praising is summed up in 'our
God'. God is to be praised as the God who made and chose Israel, the flock of
his pasture.
The last two stanzas form a prophetic warning.
We should suppose that the words attributed to Yahweh are thought of as
pronounced by a Temple prophet. Such prophets existed in the Temple worship
beside the priests (1 Chr 25.1-2; Jer 5.30-31; 23.11), the successors of the
groups of prophets who first roamed the country (1 Sm 10.5-13) and then became
attached to the royal entourage (1 Kgs 22.5-7). These verses are concentric,
focussing the attention on the centre:
v. 7d If[30]
today you would only listen!
v. 8 'harden
not your hearts
v. 9b they
tried me though they saw my work
v. 10b their
hearts are astray'
v. 11b If they will enter my rest!
The link between the two parts of the psalm is
the concept of the work of God, manifested in God's creation and God's choice
of Israel. Both of these are seen as going unrecognised by those who hardened
their hearts at Massah and Meribah. The double name 'Massah and Meribah'
(meaning respectively 'trial' and 'contention/quarrel') was given to the place
on Sinai where the people of Israel finally - after already one revolt about
water at Marah (Exodus 15.23) - took issue with Moses about water (Exodus 17.7)[31].
A secondary link between the two parts of the psalm is the concept of entry
into God's rest: entry into God's sanctuary to praise him in the first part,
and failure to enter into God's rest of Canaan in the second.
2. Date
The psalm has been dated, somewhat hesitantly,
to the period at the end of the monarchy or during the exile. The reflections
on creation (vv. 4-5) are neither particularly close to the ancient Canaanite
myths nor especially redolent of the new realisation at Babylon of the
universal power of God as creator. The consciousness of sin would lead to the
same solution: it is present, but does not yet show the drama and horror of the
contrition present in so many writings of the exile and after.
3. The Flock that is Led
by his Hand
Sheep and goats are the commonest of all
animals in biblical lands, no doubt because of their ability to find some
sustenance from apparently barren land just beyond the edge of civilisation.
They often function as a unit of currency in large transactions. The image of
God as shepherd, so widespread in the Psalms, is common throughout the pastoral
lands of the near east. The accent is always on the shepherd's loving care for
the sheep (Psalm 22), but quite often also on the stupidity of the sheep, their
unpredictable behaviour and their unwillingness to be controlled (Psalm 77.57).
Palestinian sheep yield nothing to European sheep in their propensity to run
the wrong way, and lambs do not long remain white-fleeced and cuddly (though
this trait too can be used, 2 Sm 12.1-4). So God's justified severity in
punishing his people is described in terms of a cheap sell-off of unwanted
sheep for slaughter (Psalm 43.12-13).
In the Bible the shepherd is normally God, an
image given special point by the exodus-journey, in which God led his people
like sheep across the desert (Psalm 77.52-54). The return from Babylon is also
often described in the same terms (Isaiah 40.11; 49.9-12). However, David,
originally a shepherd, is seen as the divinely-appointed shepherd of God's
people, God's own lieutenant (Psalm 77.70-72). Human rulers as shepherds form
an image used effectively by Ezekiel in his strictures against the self-seeking
shepherds of Israel. This passage also promises that God will 'raise up one shepherd, my servant David, and put him in
charge of them to pasture them; he will pasture them and be their shepherd'
(Ezek 34.23). This opens the way to the imagery of the Messiah as the good
4. Psalm 94 and the Letter to the Hebrews
The Letter to the Hebrews frequently applies to
biblical texts the pesher-technique which is familiar from Qumran. This
consists in taking a biblical phrase - usually from the Prophets - and
actualising it of the present-day. The Qumran texts normally use a formula,
quoting the text and adding, 'Interpreted, this refers to...'[32]. The Letter to the Hebrews uses the technique without the
formula, making direct, working application to the situation envisaged. It is
one of the few occasions in the New Testament when this pesher-technique is
applied at length.
The interpretative application of Psalm 94 in
Hebr 3.7-4.11 forms the basis of the Letter's teaching that Israel's travels in
the desert never reached a satisfactory end, a real place of rest, so that the
People of God is still on pilgrimage towards the real place of rest. The
passage takes the 'Today' of Psalm 94.7 and reflects on it from different
points of view, using the word, occurring five times in this passage, almost as
a sort of mantra. It forms a basis for any theology of the sanctification of
the present day. With the repeated 'today' offered by the daily challenge of
hearing God's voice in an actualisation of Psalm 94, the Letter combines the
'today' of the seventh day of creation. So the complete and satisfying divine
rest, which Israel is called to share, is illustrated from the seventh-day rest
after God's act of creation, the exemplar of the 'Today' which remains the
object of hope for the believer.
'The Exodus was the basic experience of
Israel, to which the nation continually looked back.' Sum up: how does the
Exodus feature in the Psalms you have studied? How did it colour Israel's
view and experience of God? |
Psalm 109 A Royal Coronation
This is a difficult psalm. It is of great
importance for Christians, since it is quoted in the New Testament more than
any other psalm. The first difficulty is to establish the original text, for
the Greek version differs considerably from the Hebrew. The psalm was, of
course, composed in Hebrew, but the Hebrew texts which we have date only from
the ninth century AD. The Greek translation (known as the 'LXX' or 'Septuagint'
because of the legend that it was completed by 70 scholars, each of whom
simultaneously but independently produced an identical translation) was made
nearly a thousand years earlier, so reflects a Hebrew text nearly a thousand
years nearer the original[33].
The most extreme of the differences between Hebrew and LXX comes in v. 3, which
R. Tournay considers the most obscure verse in the psalter ('Le Psaume CX',
RB 67 [1960], p. 11). A second difficulty is interpretative: the psalm
contains several obscure allusions which now escape us. A third difficulty is
theological: was this divine promise ever fulfilled?
1. Genre - A Royal Psalm
A large group of psalms can be classified as
royal psalms (2, 17, 19, 20, 44, 71, 88, 100, 109, 131, 143) because they are concerned
with the earthly king in Jerusalem. Of these four (2, 71, 109, 131) could be
coronation-songs. There is, however, also a group of psalms which celebrate the
kingship of God (46, 92, 95-98, 144) and more which equivalently celebrate
God's throne (9, 46, 88, 102). This reveals the double aspect of kingship in
From the first suggestion of human kingship in
Israel (1 Sm 8) the feeling was clear that to have a human king in Israel was
an infringement of Yahweh's kingship over Israel. To have a king was to become
like other nations, whereas the special property of Israel was precisely that
it was unlike other nations in having the special immediate authority and
sovereignty of Yahweh[34].
In the end the need for a human king was reluctantly accepted as a political
and military necessity. Israel could no longer hold out against the advances of
the Philistines without some permanent ruler. But Samuel, in acceding to the
demands for a king, points out the abuses which will inevitably follow (1 Sm
8.11-18). Nevertheless, the two first kings were very much God's own
appointment, since God guides Samuel's search for the monarch and instructs
Samuel to anoint him (Saul in 1 Sm 10.1, and David in 1 Sm 16.12). It is,
therefore, a kingship which is delegated by God. David particularly makes much
of the fact that the king is the Lord's anointed (for example, in his reverent
treatment of Saul, 1 Sm 24.7; 26.16; 2 Sm 1.14). David continues to show his awareness
of his dependence on God for his kingship by making his capital, Jerusalem -
won by his own band of soldiers, led by the courageous and brutal Joab (2 Sm
5.6-10) - the seat of the Ark and so God's own capital (2 Sm 6 - David, that
scheming and ambitious politician, is, of course, well aware of the advantage
to himself of thus hallowing his own capital city). In turn, God's own
patronage of David continues to show, when Nathan is sent to refuse David's
suggestion of building a house or Temple for Yahweh: it is Yahweh who builds a
'house' for David, not vice versa, and the result is the great promise of a
dynasty in 2 Sm 7.11-13
Yahweh tells you that he will make you a house.
And when your days are over and you fall asleep with your ancestors, I shall
appoint your heir, your own son, to succeed you and I shall make his royal
throne secure for ever. I shall be a father to him and he
a son to me.
The tragedy of the monarchy was the failure of
the kings to remain true to this vocation as God's viceroy, first by David's
adultery and weakness towards his own family, and later by the almost continual
failure of his successors - with one or two exceptions, like Josiah - to lead
the people in fidelity to Yahweh. Nevertheless, the kings of Judah continued to
rely on the promise made through Nathan. By contrast to the northern kings of
Israel, whose succession changed kaleidoscopically, the dynasty of the southern
kingdom of Judah remained firm and stable. This forms the background of the
royal psalms.
2. An Enthronement Psalm
The psalm falls obviously into two halves, vv.
1-3 and 4-7, each beginning with the announcement of a divine declaration (In
the Grail translation 'the Lord' renders the Hebrew divine name, Yahweh,
so that the Hebrew Adonai has to be rendered 'my Master' instead of the
usual 'my Lord'). The first half announces the adoption of the king, the second
its consequences.
Much of the ritual, organisation and court
ceremonial of the Israelite monarchy was taken over
from Egypt. It is common in the royal sculptures of Egypt to find
representations of the king seated at the right hand of god (v.1b), and
throughout the near east conquered foes are represented as forming a footstool
for the king (v. 1c): the footstool of Tutankhamen's throne has foreign
captives prostrate, their hands bound behind their backs. The second of these
is common enough in Israel, but there is no parallel in the Old Testament for a
king or any other human being to be seated at the right hand of God. The
nearest parallel is Ps 60.8 ('May he ever sit enthroned before God'),
but this is a very different matter and easily admits of interpretation as the
king being dependant on God. The revelation expressed in v. 1 of this psalm
therefore stands out starkly. The nearest, but inadequate, parallels are the
son of man in Daniel 7.14, who receives power from the One of Great Age, and
Wisdom in the hymn of creation in Prov 8.30,
I was beside the master-craftsman
delighting him day after day,
ever at play in his presence.
V.3 is thoroughly obscure in the Hebrew; even
the text is uncertain. The Grail version wisely follows the LXX, though one of
the remaining difficulties is provided by the last three words 'I begot you',
which are in the LXX and only in some manuscripts of the Hebrew. The difficulty
is that the psalmist should be speaking, whereas suddenly God takes the word,
introducing an idea from the very similar Psalm 2.6-7:
It is I who have set
up my king on Sion my holy mountain.
I will announce the decree of the Lord. The
Lord said to me,
'You are my son, today I have begotten you'.
The Egyptian court language adopted clearly
included the idea that at the king's accession to the throne he is adopted by
God; the relationship is already expressed in Nathan's oracle, 'I shall be a
father to him and he a son to me'. The process of the birth and rearing of the
monarch from the gods but through the persons of royal parents is illustrated
by a whole series of scenes on the Temple of Hatshepsut at Karnak, described in
detail and with illustrations by Othmar Keel[35]
(The Symbolism of the Biblical World, p. 247-256). The divine but royal
conception of the king is described thus:
The picture cycle begins with a portrayal of
the assembly of the gods, at which Amon-Re [the sun god] makes known his love
for the future queen mother. In another picture Amon himself communicates his
intention to the king. Scene 3 depicts Amon on his way to the queen. Scene 4
depicts a preliminary high point, discreetly and delicately portraying the
conception of the future king. The god and the queen are seated on the sign for
'heaven'. The left hand of the god rests in the queen's right; her left hand
tenderly supports his right, which extends the life-sign toward the queen's
nose. The text indicates that Amon-Re enters the queen in the form of the reigning
Being the son of a god obviously is not thought
to exclude human parentage, so that from this point of view the psalm could be
addressed to a historical king in Jerusalem.
The second part of the psalm (vv. 4-7) is
neatly parallel to the first, beginning this time not with a revelation but
with a solemn oath from Yahweh. It spells out some of the consequences of the
adoption/investiture described in the first part: the king is to be priest,
conquering warrior and judge. It also contains two probable allusions to
Jerusalem, which suggest that it may be an enthronement-psalm for David
himself. The first of these is in v. 4. Here the difficulty is that the king
never seems to have functioned as priest, so that it is odd that he is
proclaimed a priest for ever. It is true that when the Ark is being brought up
to Jerusalem King David dances before the Ark wearing a linen ephod which could
be construed as the forerunner of the later High Priest's ceremonial ephod. It
is true also that on occasion both David and Solomon bless the people (2 Sm 6.18; 1
Kgs 8.14). However, it is questionable to what extent these actions were
regarded as priestly in the strict - or at any rate the later - sense of the
priesthood. The solution may lie in a closer look at Melchizedek. Melchizedek
was the legendary king of Salem in the oddly detached story of Gn 14. A later
king of Jerusalem, who appears in the time of Joshua (Jos 10.1, 3) has the
similar name 'Adonizedek'; 'zedek' in both names means 'justice', and the two
words 'melchi'='my king' and 'adoni'='my lord' are not much
different. Perhaps the psalm is simply saying that David has taken over the
role of the priest-king of Jerusalem, which was played by the Jebusite kings of
Jerusalem, though in fact the kings of David's line never exercised this
priesthood. Both David's dancing before the Ark and the blessings given by
David and Solomon would fall well within this role. Already, then, it would be true
that priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek was different from
priesthood according to the order of Aaron.
The second allusion to Jerusalem comes in the
obscure detail of v. 7, 'he shall drink by the wayside'. This may be understood
of the royal coronation-procession. At Solomon's accession the new king is
taken in procession to the spring Gihon, a sparkling spring of clear water
which still wells up and flows merrily away on the east side of Jerusalem. We
are not told what Solomon did there during the accession-ceremony, but he will
surely have drunk from its waters. This may have been part of the traditional
enthronement of kings of Jerusalem.
3. Date
The date of this psalm is, not surprisingly, as
disputed as its meaning (see the bewildering variety of views laid out by
Leslie C. Allen in Psalms 101-150 [Word Biblical Commentary no 21, 1983,
pp. 83-85]). Some of the factors mentioned suggest the ancient times of David
or soon afterwards, and some scholars accept this date. Other scholars consider
that the exalted language used of the king can never have been intended for any
historical monarch, but envisage the Messiah, when, in the centuries
immediately before the pre-Christian era, messianic hopes were burgeoning.
4. Christian Interpretation
The widespread use of this psalm in the New
Testament demands consideration on three levels:
a. In the gospels (Mk 12.35-37 and parallels)
Jesus uses the opening verse of the psalm as a conundrum for the scribes, the
learned interpreters of scripture. This conundrum relies on the acceptance -
unquestioned in Jesus' day - of the Davidic authorship of the psalms. If David
calls the Messiah 'Lord', the Messiah cannot be a descendant of David, for a
descendant cannot have greater dignity than an ancestor. The answer indicated
is surely that the Messiah is more than merely David's descendant.
In the scene of the trial of Jesus before the
High Priest, it is surely this text to which Jesus alludes in his answer to the
question, 'Are you the son of the Blessed One?' Jesus replies, 'You will see
the son of man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming on the clouds
of heaven' (Mk 14.62) and the enormity of his claim forces the High Priest to
cry Blasphemy. The paradox of Jesus' answer is that he claims to be both seated
and coming. This paradox is best reconciled if he is understood to be
referring to the Chariot-Throne of God, described in Ezekiel 1, and already a
centre of devotion and mysticism (see the Fragment on the Divine
Throne-Chariot, in G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 21968,
p. 212-213), held to be describing - in so far as it could be described - the
very essence of God's sacred majesty. On this mobile throne Jesus can be both
seated and coming. But for a mere human being to claim to share with God this
awesome Chariot-Throne is indeed a spine-chilling blasphemy.
b. In the early Christian kerygma the opening
verse is used several times to convey the vindication of Jesus at his
resurrection. This is the allusion which is intended by such expressions as
'seated at God's right hand'. In his speech at Pentecost (Ac 2.34-35) Peter
uses it to show that, since it was not fulfilled of David, who never went up to
heaven, it must refer to Jesus as Messiah. Paul (1 Cor 15.25) uses the later
part of the verse to show Christ's triumph over death, both for himself and for
all Christians: 'For he is to be king until he has made all his enemies his
footstool, and the last of the enemies to be done away with is death, for he
has put all things under his feet'. The Captivity Epistles extend this
to show that Christ is superior to every force imaginable: '...the power which
he exercised in raising him from the dead and enthroning him at his right hand
in heaven, far above every principality, ruling force, power or sovereignty, or
any other name that can be named, not only in this age but also in the age to
come' (Eph 1.20-21; cf. Col 3.1). The psalm therefore constitutes one of the
earliest ways of proclaiming the vindication of Jesus and his exaltation at his
resurrection. The empty tomb is only one of the ways in which this vindication
is expressed, stressing the bodily nature of the resurrection, the raising of
the whole person. The Gospel of John concentrates on the 'exaltation' and
'glorification' of Christ in the hour of his Passion and Resurrection. The hymn
in Philippians 2 expresses the same through the homage of all creation and the
conferral of the Name which is above every name. The use of Psalm 109 perhaps
centres the attention on the work of the Father in this establishment of Christ
'at the right hand'.
c. The Letter to the Hebrews uses the opening
of the psalm to establish Christ's exalted position above even the angels (Hebr
1.13; 8.1), but concentrates principally on Christ's priesthood, and so on v. 4
of the psalm (Hebr 5.6, 10; 6.30; 7.3, 17, 21). In an argument typical of
Jewish exegesis at the time (and so particularly effective to the recipients of
the letter) the author argues that the verse receives its fulfilment in the
priesthood of Christ[36].
The argument of the letter is to show those who still hanker after the Temple
liturgy that the sacrifices and the priesthood of the old dispensation,
according to the levitical ordinances, are ineffective, and are superseded by
Christ's priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek. The point of contact
is dual, resting doubly on the fact that Melchizedek appears only once in Gn
14, without any reference to his ancestry. The recipients of the letter may be
imagined as asking how Christ, not descended from Aaron, could be a priest at
all. Melchizedek's priesthood, it is therefore argued, is not dependent on his
ancestry. The same is true for Christ's priesthood, for which Melchizedek's
constitutes a precedent. Secondly, Melchizedek's single appearance in Genesis
is reinforced by Psalm 109's 'priest for ever' to contrast with the
repeated sacrifices of transitory levitical priests.
Christ's 'power to save those who come to God through him is absolute, since he
lives for ever to intercede for them' (Hebr 7.25). There is no need for
repeated sacrifices since he was perfected 'once and for all by offering
himself' (Hebr 7.27-28).
1. In the course of this study of the Psalms
considerable reference has been made to non-Israelite literature, Egyptian,
Canaanite, Mesopotamian. How developed was their
understanding of God? What did it contribute to Israel's understanding of
God? |
2. Explain and justify the widespread use of this Psalm as the first
at Sunday Vespers. |
Psalm 118 The
Law and Love
1. Form
This is by far the longest and formally the
strictest of all the psalms, a poem of 22 stanzas composed in an acrostic, that
is, each of the eight lines of the stanza begins with the same letter of the
Hebrew alphabet, and the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. There are other such
acrostic poems in the psalter (Ps 24[37],
36, 110,111; see p. 49), but none in which the same letter begins eight
consecutive verses. It is this which makes it such a tour de force.
A brief word might be permitted about these
letters. The Hebrew letters (and eventually Latin or European script) are
derived from Egyptian pictograms. In their development they do not seem to have
minded changing direction or angle, and, with this proviso, many remain
recognisably the same as their originals.
a aleph, was originally an ox's head; the wavy horns are still visible on the
Hebrew letter and on the Latin capital A, though now at the bottom of
the letter.
b beth, was originally
a house; it has lost its left-hand wall, but otherwise in Hebrew continues to
resemble a primitive square, flat-roofed house.
l lamed, was originally an ox-goad ('lamed' yields the
word 'to teach'). In Greek it turned over L; in the Latin alphabet it again changed
In almost every verse (v. 122 is an exception)
some word occurs which denotes God's law. The word 'Law' itself is very
important, occurring in the first verse and at the beginning of four other
stanzas. However, the principal expression for 'word' (dabar) also
occurs in the first verse of eleven stanzas, and a poetic equivalent, also
meaning 'word' ('imrah), in the first verse of 15 stanzas. This
statistic, combined with the other statistics for the frequency of these
expressions, shows that the psalmist considers the Law not so much a
commandment to be observed as a word or revelation to be understood. Other
expressions used are 'will', 'ways', 'commands', 'statutes', etc, commonly ten
different words. The pattern of their use is not strict, some occurring more
often than others, and certainly not each of them appearing in each stanza. The
repetition of these words gives a sort of mantra effect to the recitation of
the psalm, and this is surely the overall effect intended, rather than a strict
differentiation between the various words used. The psalmist continuously turns
over these expressions meditatively and lovingly.
The psalm opens with a
beatitude, 'Blessed are those whose way is blameless' (also v. 2:
'Blessed are those who observe his instructions'), which links it to Psalm 1.
In the commentary on that psalm it was suggested that originally these two
psalms were first and last in the collection, psalms 119 and following being
added later. However, by contrast to Psalm 1, which is descriptive, from v. 4
onwards, this psalm is a prayer, being addressed constantly to God.
2. A Character-Study of the Psalmist
A remarkable and attractive character-study of
the psalmist has been done by R.E. White ('The Student's Psalm?' in Expository
Times 102 [1990], pp. 71-74), in which the psalmist is seen as a young man,
full of 'artless, unconscious egotism' because he uses 'I' or its equivalent,
'your servant', over one hundred times. He is eager to learn from the Lord,
though he considers himself wiser than all his teachers, and he several times
mentions (ruefully?) the need to study and meditate all day long. A 'young idealist',
he is impatient of compromise and realises that he must and does suffer for his
devotion to the cause. Another youthful trait which might be added is that the
author betrays no historical sense: he regards his teaching as coming direct
from Yahweh, without mention of Moses or other human teachers or any mention of
the historical process of revelation.
This attractive picture is only one side of the
coin. The psalmist has learnt from his predecessors, so that the psalm may be
considered an 'anthological' piece, that is, it is full of reminiscences of
other Books of the Bible. 'Though princes sit plotting against me' (v. 23) or
'I shall speak of your will before kings' (v. 46) are archaisms more suited to
Jeremiah (36.1-2) than to the situation of the psalmist. Similarly 'When will
you sentence my oppressors? For me the proud have dug pitfalls' (vv. 84-85)
seem to be reminiscences of Jer 15.15 and 18.20-22. It is, therefore, not the
psalm of a fresh and unlettered young man, full of enthusiasm and originality, but rather a Wisdom
prayer (and it is a prayer for Wisdom throughout), in which the riches of the
Bible stand behind every verse, e.g. 'I treasure your promise in my heart' (v.
11) or 'I rejoiced to do you will as though all riches were mine' (v. 14) is a
personalisation of Prov 3.13-15:
Blessed are those who have discovered wisdom,
those who have acquired understanding.
Gaining her is more rewarding than silver,
her yield is more valuable than gold
To give another example, important and recurrent
is the spirit of repentance, 'Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I
keep your word... It was good for me to be afflicted, to learn your statutes'
(vv. 67, 71). This appropriates to the psalmist the constant biblical theme
that God's punishment is therapeutic, as in Hosea 6.1 ('Come, let us return to
Yahweh; he has struck us and will bind up our wounds') or Deuteronomy 8.2
('Remember the long road by which Yahweh your God led you for forty years in
the desert to humble you, to test you and to know your inmost heart'). In
short, a line of cross-references could be given for almost every verse of this
psalm. It does not, of course necessarily follow that the psalmist is
consciously quoting from the scriptures; it is equally possible that, at least
in many of the instances, he is so steeped in the wisdom of the scriptures that
he alludes to them unconsciously. The importance of this is that the psalm sums
up marvellously almost every theme of the individual spirituality of the Bible
- the individual spirituality, not the public spirituality, for there is no
mention of covenant nor of the public cult of
sacrifice and Temple.
3. The Heart of the Psalm
To a modern mind the constant combination in
the psalm of Law and love seems strange: few of us spend much affection on
traffic wardens. To the Israelite, however, the situation was entirely
different: the Law was the supreme manifestation of love, and in two ways.
a. The Law was intimately connected with the
Covenant. On Sinai, when God made Israel his people by the Covenant, he had at
the same time given them the Law. This was a moment at which Israel did not yet
exist as a nation; they were only a miserable group of runaway slaves,
reluctantly following Moses and his wild aspirations, only too ready to give up
and return to the leeks and garlic of Egypt - and slavery. The giving of the
Law was therefore part and parcel of Yahweh's supreme act of love in creating
his people to be a people who were his very own, a special possession, closer
to him than any other nation was to its gods. On Israel's side obedience to
that Law was the response in love to the divine initiative and the expression
of gratitude, a way of clinging to every aspect of God's own love.
b. The Law was also a revelation of God's
nature. It was a Law which showed Israel how God wished his people to behave,
indeed, how Israel must behave if it was to associate with God. Partners in a
covenant (such as marriage, a frequent image of God's covenant with Israel)
must accommodate their style of life to each other's. Accordingly, then, the
Law revealed much about God, the divine values of fidelity, forgiveness,
respect for every person. The Law calls upon Israel to imitate God. The cry is
constant, 'Be holy, as I am holy', and Israel is repeatedly encouraged to treat
others as God treated them in Egypt: 'You will treat resident aliens as though
they were native-born, and love them as yourself - for you were once aliens in
Egypt. I am Yahweh your God' (Lv 19.34). The Law, then, revealed God's nature,
and obedience to it is an expression of love because it brings the Israelite
closer to God.
The value of recognising the anthological[38]
nature of Psalm 118 is that this makes clear that the psalmist is embracing not
merely the revelation on Sinai, but the continuing revelation which has been
going on in the Bible, giving gradually fuller knowledge of God and of his
workings with humanity - so how humanity must respond to God.
4. A Christian Perspective: Christ the Word
The psalmist's appreciation of the word as the
revelation of God's will and of his nature (see the earlier statistics for the
use of the expressions for 'word' in Psalm 118) finds not only its echo but its
fulfilment in the Johannine theology of the Word. The Prologue to the Gospel of
John presents the Word who is Christ as the fulness of the revelation of God.
In so doing, the evangelist, like the psalmist, links into the Wisdom tradition
of the Bible, in which Word and Wisdom alike represent the fulness of God's
action in the world.
God created by his word ('God said, "Let there
be light," and there was light', etc), and Isaiah shows the continuing
effectiveness of God's word at work in the world:
For, as the rain and the snow come down from
the sky
and do not return before having watered the earth,
fertilising it and making it germinate
to provide seed for the sower and food to eat,:
it will not return to me unfulfilled
or before having carried out my good pleasure
so it is with the word that goes from my mouth
(Is 55.10-11).
The whole appreciation by the psalmist of the
Wisdom tradition of the Bible, and such repeated expressions as 'the way of
your precepts' (v. 27), 'the way of your commands' (v. 32), prepares for those
great passages where the function of Wisdom as God's agent in the world is
Yahweh created me, the first-fruits of his
before the oldest of his works.
From everlasting I was firmly set,
from the beginning, before the earth came into
being. ...
When he assigned the sea its boundaries,
when he traced the foundations of the earth,
I was beside the master craftsman,
delighting him day after day, ever at play in his
delighting[39] to be with the children of men (Prov 8.22-31).
These passages are feeling their way towards
expressing a Wisdom which is God at work in the world, entirely dependent on
and yet not the same as Yahweh.
1. What would be your character-study
of the author of Ps 118? |
2. Write a short piece on the biblical view of the Law as a source of
life, using Ps 118, NJB, McKenzie, etc. |
Psalm 126 A Pilgrimage Song
1. Songs of Ascents
The psalm is one of the so-called 'Songs of
Ascents'. Each of the psalms from 119-133 is so labelled in its title (on the
titles, see below), but it is unclear what is meant by this. In Latin they are
called the 'Gradual Psalms', from gradus or 'step'. This interprets the
title by the vision of the eschatological Temple in Ezekiel 40.22, 37; the
vision prescribes a staircase of seven or eight steps up to the gate of the
A more probable meaning relates the 'ascent' to
the pilgrimage up to Jerusalem. It remained an ideal to make the pilgrimage to
Jerusalem three times a year for the three pilgrimage-feasts; one such
pilgrimage is described of the twelve-year-old Jesus in Lk 2, and the Jewish
historian Josephus tells us that there could be as many as a million pilgrims
in Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover (but Josephus is notorious for
exaggerating numbers). No doubt it was the possible adverse publicity, and
upset to the pilgrims which a repetition of Jesus' Cleansing of the Temple
would have caused, which led to his arrest just before the festival.
Jerusalem was a great centre of devotion. By
the first century it was already a pious custom for Jews to migrate to
Jerusalem for the evening of their lives, a custom which caused financial
strains on the community, and even a certain amount of unrest in the earliest
Christian community: there must have been a disproportionate number of widows
in the community, and complaints were made that the Hellenist widows were being
neglected in the daily distribution of food (Acts 6.1). Here they would find
respite from the unpopularity and even anti-Semitism suffered elsewhere. There
were large and flourishing Jewish communities still in Babylon and around the
mediterranean area, some so flourishing (e.g. Alexandria and Cyrene) that the
Jews were felt to be a threat by non-Jewish fellow-citizens. Jews were felt to
be unintegrated and clique-ish, a position which was forced on them by the
rules of ritual purity and by their refusal to participate in civic religious
ceremonies. The situation was made worse by their profession. Then, as in the middle ages, their religious principles barred them from a
number of trades, and banking had already become a favourite occupation. Bank
managers and other money-lenders always risk unpopularity. It was therefore
with a great sense of relief and of home-coming that returning pilgrims would
meet up with other groups of pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem.
The same sentiment of solidarity can be
experienced today. It is an ambition of many Jewish families to bring a child
to make Bar Mitzvah at the western wall of the Temple (injuriously nicknamed by
gentiles, unfamiliar with Jewish ways of prayer, the 'Wailing Wall'); any
bystanders are welcomed to participate in the extrovert joy of the occasion.
The songs of ascent are still often sung during the descent of an aeroplane to
Tel Aviv Airport.
A characteristic which runs through these
psalms of ascent is the limpid and clear imagery, which makes them favourite
psalms for many people. They are marked by a simplicity and affection for
Yahweh and for Jerusalem, his dwelling-place, which makes them moving and
memorable. Perhaps the most stable recurrent feature is confidence in Yahweh's
protection and his help (Ps 120; 126; 129).
2. The Titles of the Psalms
Each of the psalms, except the first two, has a
superscription or heading. These are given in many modern versions of the
Bible, e.g. RSV, NJB, NIV. (It should be noted, however, that the Grail
superscriptions are the product of the editors, and have no biblical
authority). A score of these exist only in the Greek version of the psalter,
not the original Hebrew, and some of the Greek headings differ from the Hebrew
ones. Neither the function nor the authority of the headings is clear, and some
of them are unintelligible to us.
Some of the headings provide liturgical
indications, often the type of poem. These include 'psalm' (e.g. 2) and 'song'
or 'poem' (e.g. 43). Another indication probably gives a secular tune used
(e.g. 21, 'to "the Doe
of the Dawn"; 44, 59, 68 and 79, all 'Lilies'; 57 'Do not destroy').
Another indicates the instruments used, e.g. 60 'for strings'. Many of them are
inscribed 'to/for the choirmaster', e.g. 74. A large group has personal
headings, 'to/for David', 'to/for Asaph, 'to/for the sons of Korah'. The exact
sense of the Hebrew particle l, here rendered 'to/for' is unclear. Are they
dedications, or indications that the psalms were to be sung by a particular
person or group?
A number of headings give a historical setting
for the psalm, principally in the life of David. So Psalm 3 is labelled 'To/for
David, when he was fleeing from his son Absalom', which is not inappropriate
since it expresses confidence in God on the part of the psalmist persecuted by
'even thousands of people, who are ranged on every side against me'. Famously,
Psalm 50 is related to David's repentance after his adultery with Bathsheba,
'To/for David, when the prophet Nathan had come to him because he had gone in
to Bathsheba'. These historical settings are unlikely to be correct. They fit
the putative occasion only moderately well. However, the principal difficulty
is that many of the psalms so labelled are (e.g. Psalm 50) almost certainly of
later composition. It is easier to account for them as historicizations on the
basis of David's reputation as a singer (to soothe Saul, 1 Sm 16.17; 18.10) and
as the founder of the Temple liturgy - though the Temple was not built until a
generation later.
Psalm 126 is labelled
hmlvl [read from right to
left!], that is 'to/for Solomon'. This may have several senses, possibly none
of them historically correct. Firstly, as we shall see, the psalm has close
links with the Wisdom Literature, which was reputed to stem from Solomon, as
author of many proverbs and renowned for his wisdom (1 Kgs 3; 10). Secondly, it
is concerned with building a house, which fits Solomon's building of the
Temple. Thirdly, 'his beloved' in v. 2 uses part of the name Yedidiah
('Yahweh's darling'),
given to Solomon by Nathan at his birth (2 Sm 12.25).
3. The Psalm
Psalm 126 falls into two halves, vv. 1-2 and
3-5, the first concerned with building a house (Hebrew: banah), the
second with the gift of children (Hebrew: banim). The verbal assonance[40]
makes a neat and attractive unity between the two halves. A further link comes
through the double-sense of 'house', which can also mean 'dynasty'. This
association of the two meanings is also called into play by the unforgettable
story of Nathan's prophecy to David in 2 Sm 7, which would be familiar to any
Israelite: David wanted to build a house (i.e. a Temple) for Yahweh, but Yahweh
replied that David had no business building a house for Yahweh, it was rather
Yahweh's business to build a house (i.e. a dynasty) for David, which he then
promised to do.
Each half of the psalm echoes, or is echoed by
- depending on the relative priority of the two works - a proverb from the
Wisdom Literature:
Prov 10.22 The
blessing of Yahweh is what brings riches,
to this, hard toil has nothing to add.
Prov 17.6 The
crown of the aged is their children's children,
the children's glory is their father.
The psalm could well be a meditation on these
two sentiments. In addition, each half of the psalm contains a strong
reminiscence of the story of Adam and Eve. The curse on Adam was to 'toil for
the bread you eat' (v.2), and the birth of children, 'the fruit of the womb'
(v. 3), immediately follows on.
Finally, the link between Psalms 126 and 127
must be the reason for their being placed consecutively. Both centre on the
strength given to a house by children and on the fertility of the womb as a
blessing of the Lord. Both reflect on the reward for toil imparted by the Lord.
Further verbal links are less clear in translation, but unmistakable in the
1. Each is divided in two by the Hebrew word
often translated 'Behold' (in 126.3 translated 'truly'; in 127.4 translated
2. Each uses the classic blessing-formula
'blessed are those who...' (in 126.5 translated 'O the
happiness of the man who'; in 127.1 translated 'O blessed are those who'). This
beatitude-form is familiar from other psalms, e.g. Psalm 1.
Make your own commentary either on Psalm 127
or on Psalm 136, preferably both. |
Alter, R The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York 1985)
has very sensitive material on the psalms from a
literary and poetic viewpoint
Dahood, M Psalms
[Anchor Bible Commentary] (New York, 1966-70)
very learned and concentrates on words, explaining
everything by Ugaritic parallels
Drijvers, P The Psalms
ancient and simple, but still useful on literary types
and other introductory matters
Gillingham, S. The Poems and Psalms of the Hebrew Bible
(Oxford, 1994)
an excellent, rounded introduction
Keel, O The Symbolism of the Biblical World: ancient near
eastern iconography and the book of psalms (New York, 1997)
illustrations and descriptions which provide useful
Kraus, H-J The Psalms (Augsburg Press, 1989)
a translation of his massive 2-volume 1961
commentary - detailed and useful
Pritchard, J.B. Ancient Near
Eastern Texts relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 31969)
includes ancient prayers from Egypt and Mesopotamia (=ANET)
Sabourin, L The Psalms, their origin and meaning (New
York, 1974)
discusses each of the psalms, but very briefly - not
well thought through
Stuhlmueller, C.P. Psalms [Old Testament
Message] (Michael Glazier, Wilmington, 1983)
two volumes of commentary on each psalm - some
prayerful reflections
Vermes, G The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Pelican,)
the best source for the Qumran 'psalms' and other
comparative Qumran material
Westermann, C The
Psalms, structure, content and message (Minneapolis, 1980)
a standard work with many good points
Index of Psalms commented
psalm page
1 23-25,
2 23,
71, 88
8 26-29
14 30-31
15 57
17 34-39
18 26
21 40-44
22 84
23 21,
24 92
25 51
27 10-12
28 10-12,
26, 54
32 10,
33 51-54
36 9,
37 51
38 55-58
39 9-10
40 71
41 10
45 11,
59-61, 68
46 20
47 68-69
psalm page
48 57
60 87
71 9,
77 62-63,
81 12,
84 17
86 68-70
87 57
88 71-73
93 9
94 21,
95 21
98 21
103 13,
26, 54
104 54,
105 65-67,
109 86-91
110 13,
51, 92
111 51,
117 12
118 23,
51, 71, 92-95
126 96-98
131 21,
139 42
146 8,
150 11,
Index of Matters principally
acrostics 51,
Alter, R 24
anti-Semitism 96
Ark 21,
30-31, 74-76
Baal 48,
Babylon 19,
20, 45-46, 52
beatitudes 24,
53, 92
Ben Sira 57-60
Book of Life 58,
Canaan 8,
13, 19, 26, 31-32, 38,
45-48, 64-65, 68, 74, 78-79
chaos 20,
countryside 50,
60, 66. 83-84
creation narratives 28
Crucifixion 43
cult 19
David 19,
33, 34-39, 51, 62, 71-75, 87-89
Dead Sea 60
desert wanderings 65-66
Deuteronomic history 64
Egyptian myth 31,
40, 51, 72, 87-88
enemies 41
flood 20,
45-46, 59
go'el 37,
58, see 'Saviour'
Gunkel, H 17
Hebrews, Letter to 85, 90
hesed 35,
38, 67, see 'love'
Hopkins, G. Manley 11-12, 46
Immanuel 61,
Isaiah 15,
21, 32-33, 36, 42-43, 49, 53,
58, 60-62, 78, 81, 83, 86, 96
Jeremiah 8,
41, 66, 73, 93
Jericho 13
Jerusalem 60,
62, 68-70, 74-76, 87-89, 96-98
Job 37,
46-47, 50, 53, 55-56, 75
Jordan 13
justice of God 67
Kingship of God 20-21,
43, 72, 78-79, 81
Law 60,
63, 92
life after death 56-57
liturgy 19,
love 35,
67, 71, 93
Lowth, Robert 9
Maccabees 58,
Marduk 20,
Mesopotamia 31,
40, 69
metre 11
Mowinkel, S 20
name of God 28-29,
Negeb 50
New Year Festival 20, 78
Nicodemus, gospel of 32
Oxford 84
parallelism 8-9,
Passion of Jesus 43
poetry & prose 8
poor 52
praise 53
Psalm 151 14
Psalms of Solomon 14, 80
Qoheleth 55-56,
Qumran 25,
31, 34-39, 43, 85, 86,90
salvation 36,
Saviour 67
Servant of Isaiah 40-43
sheep 84
Sheol 38,
shepherd 84
Sinai 48,
66, 69, 83-84, 94
Sion see 'Jerusalem'
Solomon 19,
31, 89, 97
sons of God 45-46
storm 48-50
Tabor, Mount 72
Temple 19,
28, 30, 68-70, 75, 83
thanks 53
theophany 37
Tiamat 46
titles of psalms 97
trees 50
Ugarit 19,
49, 76, 80-81
voice of God 47
water 59-60,
79, 83, 89
Westermann, C 21
Wisdom 23,
51-52, 60, 63
word-thrift 12-13
zedaqah 67
[1]Probably the most readable and serviceable
introduction to the whole field is given by Lawrence Boadt, Reading the Old
Testament (Paulist Press/Fowler Wright Books, 1984). To work through this,
simultaneously reading the biblical books, would be a most valuable experience.
[2]E.g. X. Léon-Dufour, Dictionary of Biblical
Theology (Geoffrey Chapman, 1984), Johannes B. Bauer, Encyclopedia of
Biblical Theology (Sheed & Ward, 1970). Perhaps the most useful single
volume is J.L.McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (Geoffrey Chapman,
[3]James L. Kugel, whose book The Idea of
Biblical Poetry (Yale University Press, 1981) provides a valuable study of
parallelism, complains at this nomenclature, since 'Here is nothing
antithetical whatever' (p. 14) because the positive and negative create
agreement rather than contrast. Kugel's initial example (p. 2) is a helpful
instance of different kinds of parallelism:
O Lord, avenging God // avenging God, appear!
Arise, Judge of the earth, // give the proud
what they deserve!
How long, O Lord, shall the wicked // how long
shall the wicked triumph?
They bluster with arrogant speech; // the
evil-doers boast to each other (Ps 93.1-4).
In the first
and third lines a phrase is repeated, but each time the second half advances
over the first. In the second line each half begins with an imperative, the
second half being more detailed than the first. The fourth line gives examples
of the behaviour of the wicked, the second half more specific than the first.
[4]The Poems and Psalms of the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 81
[5]German also might be described as a lapidary
language, one of its geniuses being to permit concatenation of words, for
example the succinct expression for 'times for rehearsal in preparation for the
liturgy of Trinity Sunday':
[6]See p. 55. See also G.H. Wilson, 'The Use of
Royal Psalms at the "Seams" of the Hebrew Psalter' JSOT 35 (1986), pp.
[7]Most conveniently available
in Ancient Near Eastern Texts, ed. J.B. Pritchard (Princeton, 1950), pp.
370-371. The most appealing
of these include:
v. 6, 10 You wrapped
it with the ocean like a cloak, the waters stood higher than the mountains. You
make springs gush forth in the valleys, they flow in
between the hills.
cf. You set a Nile in
heaven to descend for them and make waves upon the mountains, like the great
green sea, to water their fields in their towns.
v. 11-12 They give drink to all the beasts of the
field, the wild-asses quench their thirst. On their banks dwell the birds of
heaven, from the branches they sing their song.
cf. Their wings are
stretched out in your praise.All beasts spring upon their feet. Whatever flies
and alights, they live when you have risen for them.
v. 20-1 When you spread the darkness it is night, and all the beasts of the forest cree