Introduction to the Psalms

The Prayers of the Psalter

Henry Wansbrough

Foreword

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

Contents

1. The Psalter - an Open-Ended Collection 7

1. What is a Psalm?

2. Parallelism

3. Metre

4. Word-thrift

5. Imagery

6. Psalms found elsewhere

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 Collection

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 heaven

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 descendants

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]}, e.g.

‘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 41.9)

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 chiasmus

‘The sabbath was made for man // not man for the sabbath’ (Mk 2.27).

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 27).

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 Hebrew^{^[5]}, 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 Ploughman:

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 thew

That somewhere curded, onewhere sucked or sank...

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 stone’.

(‘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 words

‘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 them,

your ears listen to the prayer of the poor made in hope.

Your judgements over all the earth are merciful,

your love for the seed of Abraham, the sons of Israel.

You train us as a first-born, only son,

to turn an obedient soul from the darkness of ignorance.

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 highest,

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 path

unless God instructed them by the command of his servants.

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 sea,

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 death,

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 deep,

for all their wisdom shall be swallowed up in the midst of the howling seas,

as the abysses boil above the fountains of the waters.

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) interchangeably.

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 lamentation.

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.

Chapter Four - Psalm Commentaries

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 Law:

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 psalm:

a. (v.1-2) the blessed

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)

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 sun-god^{^[7]}. 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 God

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 them^{^[9]}, 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 begun.

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 quicklime.’

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 refuge

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 1.69)

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 totter

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 earth.

After my awakening he will set me close to him,

and from my flesh I shall look on God (Job 19.25-26).

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

7 I 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 wind.

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 Egypt,

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. 385)

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. 21)

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’, 87.18),

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 Passion.

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 teaching.

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 karibou).

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 deliberate.

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 fell

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 Lord’.

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 majesty,

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 apparition^{^[16]}.

The second half (vv. 5-9) is concentric in its pattern:

Cedars

Mountains

Fire

Desert

Oaks

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 instruction...

Prov 4.1 Hear, my children, a father’s instruction...

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 life,

the years of the wicked will be cut short.

Only 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 verses.