Psalms

Hebrew poetry does not rhyme, and whether it has metre at all is still argued. Proposals have been made for counting stressed syllables or words per line, and none has won the field. What is not in doubt is the engine: the line pair. A psalm advances in short paired lines, and the relation between the two halves is where the meaning lives.

Robert Lowth gave this its name in his Oxford lectures on the sacred poetry of the Hebrews, published in Latin in 1753. His term was parallelismus membrorum, the parallelism of members, and he sorted it into three kinds: synonymous, where the second line says the same as the first; antithetic, where it says the opposite; and synthetic, a catch-all for everything else. Every student who has had one lesson on the Psalms has heard this. Most stop there, and stopping there turns a real discovery into a slogan: Hebrew poetry says everything twice.

It does not. James Kugel argued in 1981 that the second line almost never simply repeats the first, and proposed reading the pair as a single movement: A, and what is more, B. Robert Alter, in 1985, described the second line as intensifying, specifying, escalating or carrying the first forward into consequence. Test it on Psalm 1:1. The Hebrew verbs are walk, stand and sit, and the BSB renders the middle one as "set foot on the path of sinners", between "the counsel of the wicked" and "the seat of mockers." Walk, stand, sit: a passer by becomes a resident. Wicked, sinners, mockers: the company gets worse as the posture gets more settled. Nothing there is said twice.

Adele Berlin, writing the same year, showed that the pairing operates at more levels than meaning: grammar answers grammar, sound answers sound, a word calls its habitual partner. Alongside that runs the terseness. Hebrew poetic lines are very short, often three or four words, and they leave things out on purpose. A verb in the first line frequently does duty for the second, which has no verb of its own. English has to supply what Hebrew was content to imply, which is one reason our translations are always longer than the originals.

There is craft above the line as well. Several psalms are acrostics, beginning successive lines or stanzas with successive letters of the alphabet: Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 145, and Psalm 119 most elaborately, twenty-two stanzas of eight verses each. Psalms 9 and 10 form a damaged acrostic across the pair, which is one argument that they were once a single poem. Notice what all this means practically. Rhyme and sound do not survive translation, but parallelism does. That is why the Psalms travel into every language on earth and still sound like poetry.

Hermann Gunkel, early in the twentieth century, asked what kind of thing each psalm is, on the assumption that a typical form implies a typical occasion. His categories are still the working vocabulary: hymns of praise, individual laments, communal laments, individual songs of thanksgiving, and royal psalms, with smaller groups for wisdom, Zion and pilgrimage. Sigmund Mowinckel pressed the question further into the worship of the temple and reconstructed an annual festival at which God's kingship was celebrated. Gunkel's forms are widely accepted; Mowinckel's festival remains a hypothesis, argued over because the evidence for it is largely inferred from the psalms themselves.

Learn the shapes and you can read any psalm faster. A hymn calls for praise, gives reasons introduced by a word meaning for or because, and renews the call: Psalms 100, 103, 145 to 150. A thanksgiving song looks back on a specific rescue and tells the story of it: Psalms 30, 34, 116. A royal psalm concerns the king: 2, 18, 20, 45, 72, 89, 110, 132. Zion songs sing the city: 46, 48, 84, 122. Enthronement psalms announce that the LORD reigns: 47, 93, 95 to 99. Wisdom and torah psalms teach: 1, 19, 37, 49, 73, 119.

A caution about the royal psalms in the BSB. Hebrew has no capital letters, so every capitalised He, His, Me and Your in an English psalm is the translator's reading, not the text. The BSB capitalises pronouns it takes to refer to God or to Christ, and in the royal psalms that settles a question the Hebrew leaves open. In Psalm 2 it prints "His Anointed One", "My King" and "Kiss the Son, lest He be angry" with capitals, which reads the king as the Messiah from the first line, and Psalm 2:12 involves a second decision besides the capitals; in Psalm 72:11 it prints "May all kings bow down to him" in lower case, which reads the king as a human ruler. Both readings are held by serious interpreters. One says these psalms were first sung of the Davidic king of the day, in the extravagant language of ancient court poetry, and were later read as pointing beyond him; the other says they were messianic from the outset, as the New Testament's use of Psalm 2 in Acts 4:25-26 and Hebrews 1:5 suggests. The BSB prints "Kiss the Son" with no footnote, but the Hebrew words are nashqu bar, and bar is a hard word. One reading takes it as the Aramaic word for son (it is the word in bar enash, "son of man", in Daniel 7:13), which suits a psalm addressed to foreign kings and an enthroned son in verse 7, and which is how the King James Version and the BSB render it. The other takes it as the ordinary Hebrew bar meaning pure or sincere, as in Psalm 24:4, so that the line means something like worship or do homage sincerely; its supporters ask why the poet would switch to an Aramaic word for son when he has just used the Hebrew ben in verse 7. Its critics reply that kiss then has no object, and that an adverb meaning purely is an odd way to finish the command. The ancient versions did not read it as son: the Greek and the Vulgate have the sense of taking hold of instruction (drasasthe paideias, apprehendite disciplinam), Jerome's later translation from the Hebrew has "adorate pure" (worship purely), and some modern scholars emend the text to a line about kissing his feet. Compare several versions side by side on Bible Hub to see how many ways it has been taken. Treat the capital letter, and the word Son itself, as the BSB's decision on a live question, not as evidence. The same goes for Psalm 22:16, where the BSB prints "they have pierced my hands and feet" and its footnote shows it follows the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, the Vulgate and the Syriac against most Hebrew (Masoretic) manuscripts, which read "like a lion at my hands and feet."

And then the largest group by a wide margin. Laments, individual and communal together, make up roughly a third of the Psalter, more than any other category. Psalms 3 to 7, 13, 22, 42 and 43, 51, 69, 77, 88, 102, and at the communal level 44, 74, 79, 80, 83 and 137. Sit with the arithmetic for a moment. If a congregation sings only praise, it is using a minority of its own prayer book, and it has quietly taught its members that the language God has actually given them for the worst weeks of their lives is not fit for church.

The lament has a recognisable anatomy: an address to God, a complaint, a petition, and a vow of praise. The complaint is usually directed at three parties at once, and the psalms feel no need to keep them tidy: God has forgotten me, my enemies are mocking me, and my own bones are wasting away. The petition comes with reasons pressed on God, often reasons drawn from his own reputation or promises. Then, in most laments, a turn: the mood shifts and the sufferer speaks of confidence before anything has visibly changed. Joachim Begrich suggested the turn reflects a priestly oracle of salvation spoken between the petition and the praise, and a few psalms do preserve what looks like such an oracle, as in Psalm 12:5. The suggestion is attractive and cannot be proved.

Psalm 88 is the exception that earns its place. It has the address and the complaint and the petition, and it never turns. Its last word in the Hebrew is darkness. A canon that contains Psalm 88 has already decided that a prayer which ends in the dark is still a prayer. That is a permission most congregations have never been told they have.

The Psalter is not a pile. It is divided into five books, each of the first four closing with a doxology: Psalms 1 to 41, 42 to 72, 73 to 89, 90 to 106, and 107 to 150, with the final Hallelujah psalms serving as the close of the whole. A line in Midrash Tehillim draws the obvious inference: Moses gave Israel the five books of the Torah, and David gave Israel the five books of Psalms. Whether or not the fivefold division was designed to echo the Torah, it was certainly noticed early.

The seams carry signs of editing. Psalm 72:20 says, "Thus conclude the prayers of David son of Jesse," and yet psalms of David appear again in Books 4 and 5, which tells you the note closed a collection rather than the book. Psalms 1 and 2 have no headings and work as a paired doorway: the first on the two ways and the torah, the second on God's anointed king. Gerald Wilson argued in 1985 that these joins are deliberate and that they tell a story. Royal psalms stand at the seams, 2, 72 and 89. Book 3 ends with Psalm 89 staring at the wreckage of the Davidic covenant, asking where the promises to David have gone. Book 4 answers by going behind the monarchy: Psalm 90 is the only psalm ascribed to Moses, and the enthronement psalms that follow insist that the LORD reigns, whether or not a son of David does.

Wilson's reading has been enormously influential and is not unanimous. Critics object that an anthology assembled over centuries will show patterns whether or not anyone intended them, and that some of the proposed story is read into the joins rather than out of them. The honest position is that the Psalter shows real evidence of purposeful arrangement, especially at the seams and in the opening and closing, and that how much narrative weight the arrangement can bear is still being tested.

One movement, though, nobody disputes. Lament dominates the early books and praise gathers at the end. Book 5 gives us the Egyptian Hallel sung at Passover, Psalms 113 to 118, the Songs of Ascents for pilgrims, 120 to 134, and then five Hallelujah psalms to finish, ending in Psalm 150 with a poem that contains no request at all, only instruments and breath. The book that began with a man meditating alone ends with everything that breathes praising God.

Do not mistake that for a graph that only goes up. Psalm 137, with the rivers of Babylon and the dead children, sits in Book 5. So does Psalm 143. The Psalter arrives at praise without pretending it got there cheaply, and a student who prays it in order rather than by preference will feel the cost of the ending.

Most psalms carry a heading. Thirty-four in the Hebrew have none, and Jewish tradition calls those the orphan psalms. The headings do several different jobs, and it helps students to separate them. Some name a genre: mizmor, a song with accompaniment, maskil, miktam, tefillah, a prayer. Some are performance notes: to the choirmaster, with stringed instruments, and tune names that we can translate but no longer hear, such as The Doe of the Dawn at Psalm 22 and Do Not Destroy at Psalms 57 to 59. Some name a person. And thirteen attach the psalm to an episode in David's life, as Psalm 51 does to the aftermath of Bathsheba.

Seventy-three psalms in the Hebrew are headed le-David, and the Greek translation adds a dozen more, which is itself worth noticing: the attributions were still growing after the Hebrew collection had settled. The Great Psalms Scroll from Qumran arranges the later psalms in a different order and includes compositions not in our Psalter, so in some circles the shape of the book was still fluid in the last centuries before Christ.

Now the preposition. The BSB, like most English Bibles, prints the heading as part of the psalm, "A Psalm of David" at Psalm 13:1 and "A prayer of Moses the man of God" at Psalm 90:1, which quietly picks the sense "of" and presents it as fact. The Hebrew letter lamed prefixed to a name can mean by, for, to, belonging to, concerning, or in the style of. Le-David can therefore mean composed by David, or dedicated to David, or belonging to a Davidic collection, or written for the Davidic king to pray, or about David. This is not a modern evasion invented to avoid saying David wrote them; it is what the preposition does everywhere else in Hebrew.

Two positions are held by serious readers. The first takes the headings as part of the canonical text, early, and often historically dependable, and notes that the New Testament treats Davidic authorship as load bearing: Peter argues from David's authorship of Psalm 16 in Acts 2, Jesus from David's of Psalm 110 in Mark 12, Paul from David's of Psalm 32 in Romans 4. The second takes them as editorial additions of varying date, pointing to the growth of the attributions between the Hebrew and the Greek, and distinguishes attribution from authorship without denying that David wrote psalms; 2 Samuel and Amos both remember him as a musician.

Brevard Childs proposed a reading in 1971 that both sides can use. The historical notices, he argued, function as early interpretation: they tell you how to pray the psalm by placing it in a life. Whether or not Psalm 51 was composed in the week after Nathan's visit, its heading instructs you to pray it as a man who has done something unforgivable and has nowhere else to go. That is a gain, not a loss, and it is the part of the debate a pastor can use on Sunday.

Psalm 137 ends, in the BSB, "Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks." Psalm 58:6 asks God to "shatter their teeth in their mouths." Psalm 109 runs for most of a chapter asking that a man's days be few, his children fatherless and his wife a widow. Psalm 69 asks that their eyes be darkened and their table become a snare. Psalm 139, a few verses after the loveliest thing ever written about being known by God, says (verse 22): "I hate them with perfect hatred." These are not marginal verses. They are in the church's hymn book.

Three common escapes should be named and refused. The first is omission. When the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours was revised after the Second Vatican Council, Psalms 58, 83 and 109 were left out along with a number of individual verses; plenty of Protestant hymnals and lectionaries have done the same thing without announcing it. The second is allegory: the enemies become vices, and Augustine often reads them that way, which lets the psalm be prayed but at the cost of what it says. The third is supersession, the claim that this is simply Old Testament ethics that Jesus cancelled. That one is hardest to sustain, because Paul quotes the curse of Psalm 69:22-23 in Romans 11:9-10, Paul curses in Galatians 1, and the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6 ask how long before their blood is avenged.

C. S. Lewis faced them squarely in Reflections on the Psalms, in a chapter he called simply The Cursings. He refused to soften the language: the hatred is there, undisguised, and he says plainly that we would be wicked to approve it. But he also refused to feel superior to it, observing that the ferocity grows from a conviction that wrongdoing genuinely matters, which is more than can be said for the modern shrug. Lewis holds two things at once, and the discomfort of his position is a mark in its favour.

Others read them more positively. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his little book on the Psalms as the prayer book of the Bible, argued that Christ prays these psalms with us and for us, that the vengeance they ask is God's to execute and not ours, and that it fell in the end on Christ himself. Erich Zenger, in a study whose title asks whether this is a God of vengeance, read them as the speech of victims: people with no power at all, refusing to accept atrocity as normal, handing the case to the only judge available to them. On his reading the alternative to the curse is not forgiveness. It is the sword, or silence.

Whatever position you land on, notice the features nobody disputes. These are prayers, not plans; the psalmist asks God to act and does not act himself. They appeal to a judge, which means they concede that judgement is not theirs. They are almost always the speech of the weak against the strong, which is why it is usually the comfortable who are most offended by them. Psalm 137 speaks as deportees who remember what an army did to their city and their children, and asks that the same be done in return. Teach that, and teach the difficulty alongside it. A student who has been handed a Psalter with the hard pages glued together has not been given the Psalter.