An Intimidating Psalm

Psalm 119 is kind of infamous, isn’t it? It’s by far and away the longest of them all, yet by reusing its Law/Torah vocabulary systematically in each new stanza, it gives us that feeling we get where a public speaker turns a five-minute point into a thirty-minute talk. (Those of you who were at the same public function as me last night, any resemblances to the speaker there are purely coincidental.)

In my latest biblical quest, that of reading our canonical books in the Greek Old Testament (OT) or Septuagint (LXX), I have been making heavy weather of reading the Psalms, proving unable to keep up with the teaching schedule in my Psalms subject just completed at Melbourne School of Theology. I’ve been lodged just in Psalm 119 for two weeks, just finishing this morning.

It still is not an easy psalm. Just how deliriously joyful can the study of the Law be? For one thing, we probably need to broaden our understanding of ‘law’ and the similar terms used so often in the psalm. Another of this often reused set of words is, well, ‘word’, and perhaps that isn’t a bad one to focus on. The thing prized here is not just the set of prescriptions contained in our Pentateuch between Exodus and Deuteronomy. It is really “every word that comes from the mouth of God,” that is, every indication of his nature, his will, and his attitude toward us. It assumes that God has taken the trouble to let us know what he thinks of us and what he wants from us. And that’s inherently precious, and naturally to be celebrated. It’s a claim that God reaches out to us across the vast ontological gulf that naturally separates us. That’s a source of hope.

Beyond that important principle, which can help us understand a potentially inscrutable psalm, I have found a few things that help me appreciate it more:

1. This I knew already, but half the fun of this psalm on a literary level is its acrostic acrobatics. Each stanza has eight lines, and in Hebrew, each of those eight lines begins with the Hebrew letter designated in the heading. This involves some linguistic tricks that, I’m sorry to say, only Hebrew readers really get to enjoy.
2. Along with the parallelism that is so obvious within each verse, I notice that pairs of neighbouring verses often closely parallel one another, needless to say with plenty of Hebrew word fun along the way. Here are verses 169 & 170:
   • Let my cry come before you, O Lord;
   • Give me understanding according to you word!
   • Let my plea come before you;
   • Deliver me according to your word.
3. The psalm is a microcosm of every other psalm genre. There is praise, of course, but there is lament over suffering, pleading for intervention, expressions of confidence, ‘imprecations’ or cursing of evil people, thanksgiving for God’s intervention and help, in a word all the different kinds of discourse we find elsewhere in the psalms. I won’t list examples, being under time pressure (as always), but read a few lines and you’ll see what I mean.
4. On a similar note, the psalm is very personal. V. 149 pleads, “Hear my voice, Lord, according to your mercy, and in keeping with your judgment, let me live” (from the Greek). It’s all like that: intimate, raw and real, notwithstanding the device of mentioning God’s ‘law’ by some synonym in every verse.
5. As a curiosity, I don’t actually know how we got our English numbering system; I have a vague sense that the number shapes are thanks to Arabic somehow. But I noticed that the LXX used what looks like a final-form sigma for six, then a zeta for seven, then an eta for eight. That can’t be coincidental, can it? But I’m revealing a gap in my education there. Someone better informed can add a comment telling us all where our numbers come from.
6. Finally, the Greek of the psalm keeps using the term ‘melete‘ (with a long last ‘e’), which means something like study or close scrutiny. “Your commandments are my melete,” says v. 143. For me, one of the best ways to relate to God is through Bible study and reading, but I worry that that might be some poor egghead substitute for real, spiritual interaction with God, which leads me to a final comment.

I think that one reason that we struggle to appreciate this psalm might be, aside from a much lower tolerance of repetition than an ancient Jew, that we read the ‘law’ references in Pharisaic terms. “The letter kills,” we feel, “but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). This expresses a tension inherent to the spiritual life of the Christian, and the pendulum of church practice has swung between these two extremes. But Psalm 119 reassures us that the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The letter is capable of serving the spirit as well as resisting the spirit.

Studying your Bible can be a spiritual act, a devotional thing to do, a window on the will of God. It need not be a dead letter.

Lift Us Up Where We Belong

An Appeal to Worship Leaders and Writers of Worship Songs

I’m a little envious, I have to admit, of the kind of ecstasy I see people experiencing around me in the worship time at church. It looks amazing. If it’s legal, I don’t mind getting some myself. But no, I would gladly concede, ecstasy is one emotion that’s appropriate for people drawing near to God, though arguably there might be times when abject penitence or a sort of shock might be equally apt.

But whatever the strong emotion, it isn’t how I arrive at church. Like many others, I have to rouse three or four bodies as sleepy as mine out of bed on a Sunday morning and make sure they get in the car at home and back out at church before the sermon’s over. It doesn’t induce a state of meditation, let alone ecstasy. And if my eyes are shutting, that might not be ecstasy either, though I don’t mind if people think so. Sometimes I just can’t keep them open.

We want to worship. Please remind us why it’s so right. What was it again, that God has done?

A Sample of Australian Psalms Scholarship

The college for which I teach, Melbourne School of Theology (MST), publishes a rather new journal called Paradosis, devoted to biblical and theological topics. Its second volume, published in 2015, was dedicated to the Psalms, and is now available on our college website.

The best-known authors featured from a scholarly point of view are probably John Olley (Vose Seminary, Western Australia) and Michael Theophilus (Australian Catholic University, Melbourne). Also featured are articles by Edward Woods, author of the Deuteronomy volume in the Tyndale OT commentary series and editor of the volume, Katy Smith (Bible College of South Australia), John de Hoog (Reformed Theological College, Geelong, Victoria), Gillian Asquith (also MST), David Cohen (Vose Seminary) and myself.

So there’s no Susan Gillingham or J. Clinton McCann, but you might find it a worthwhile read, particularly if you’re looking for insights on a particular psalm. Specially featured psalms include 89, 119, 137 & 148. Why not have a browse?

Volume 2 of MST’s Bible & Theology Journal

This volume is on the Psalms, and is available at http://www.amazon.com/Paradosis-Vol-2-Studies-Psalms/dp/0992476348. There’s some great material in there by a range of Aussie biblical scholars and budding scholars. Straight from my home institution, Melbourne School of Theology.

An Attempt at a Master Diagram of Interesting Features of the Psalms

I’m not entirely happy with this yet, and in fact it isn’t complete, but it’s at a stage of “proof of concept”. It’s a master diagram of Psalms in Prezi arranged like one of those broken-up-world globe map projections:

https://prezi.com/gr8muwf70jel/psalms-master-diagram/

For those interested in technical production details, I produced the world template in one Inkscape document and the coloured content in another. Inkscape is a free, open-source vector graphics program. But Prezi doesn’t recognise the normal vector graphics (SVG) format, so I had to open the finished product in Adobe Illustrator (very new for me, and maybe not permanent, though a better-known vector graphics program, probably the best-known of all). Then I exported it in Adobe Flash format (SWF), which Prezi recognizes, and opened the file from within a new prezi, adding nothing else bar the title. The convoluted process is thanks to Inkscape’s usefulness as a graphics editor, whereas Prezi is very limited that way, and the fact that vector graphics do not lose resolution no matter how far you zoom into them, and are ideally suited to a zooming interface like Prezi.

But, if the result doesn’t help anyone comprehend (in this case) Psalms, all the playing around is in vain. So critical feedback is welcome!

A Sermon on Music in Worship: “Worshipping in Song”

Some of this is more suggestive than detailed text, but it will give you some idea of what I spoke about at my home church, Kilsyth South Baptist Church in eastern Melbourne, this morning.

I feel I need to add a caveat. Speaking in church about worship is a bit like speaking in church about prayer. You’re normally going to have a sense of your own shortcomings in the same area. Certainly true for me on this occasion!

The link for the prezi online is: https://prezi.com/czzhib-lcf3_/worshipping-in-song/

If you’d like a downloaded form, the pdf may be found at http://1drv.ms/1e8GR9V. Here’s the embedded form:

I haven’t forgotten the creation book series…more to come on that.

A Stable and a Shaken World: A Sermon Outline and Study of the Hebrew Word ‘mwt’

I spoke on this ‘shaking’ idea in the Psalms recently, focusing on occurrences of the Hebrew verb ‘מוט (e.g. Psa 46:3)’.  Some of the folk present have asked for access to the PowerPoint resource, so here ’tis.

Notes:

1. The second slide acts as a master, with each of the nine boxes linked to more specific content centred around a relevant passage from the Psalms or Isaiah.  Every slide has a small icon to permit navigation back to this master slide.
2. The screen concerning Psalm 104 and comparing it to verse 1 contains a link to a Word document which outlines the full text of Psalm 104.  I will include this separately, below.

Here is the Word file of Psalm 104:

Mini-Book Review: F. M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic

Okay, so it’s really old, published in 1973. This is one of those scholarly books that sits on the shelf of nearly every theological institution on the planet, but that is beginning to get a little dusty from disuse. It’s one of those books that any budding biblical scholar ought to have read, but some of us were like Linus in 1973, with our shorts nearly reaching the ground, and weren’t quite ready to read the works of scholars like Frank Moore Cross. So it has taken me a while to get to this.

But you ought to know that this is one of those books you ought to read if you want to understand the course of Old Testament scholarship in the last fifty years – one of Cross’s defining works, and thus a milestone for one of the leading scholars of the twentieth-century Albright school. It is a classic, a period piece, an effective marker of the state of anglophone thought on numerous Old Testament topics from Pentateuchal criticism and the Deuteronomistic History to the speciality of the Albright school, antique Hebrew poetry.

But remember…it is from 1973! It shouldn’t be read as contemporary research. But for the serious OT student with some introduction to critical issues, it should be read.

What Bible Chapters Internet Users Worldwide Search for Online

Global Bible Searches Infographic

Interesting for prominence of Genesis 1 & 2 as well as a range of Psalms, including unusual ones like Psalm 91!  The Psalms are ever-relevant, as are the Bible’s paradigmatic chapters about the beginning!

The Rage Against God

I’m borrowing the title of the Peter Hitchens book to highlight an interesting connection between a psalm and Daniel.  Having recently picked up some Aramaic, I was reading Daniel 6 in the wee hours (see my insomnia post!) and discovered a word in the Daniel-in-the-lions’-den story that also turns up, just once, in the Psalms in Hebrew.  The word is the verb ‘ragash‘, which appears in Psalm 2:1, in the gripping opening line, “Why do the nations rage?”  Being the only occurrence of this verb, its meaning is debated, but it seems to connote a crowd in tumult (see the cognate noun, used positively, in 55:15 (Eng. 14), to indicate a happy, noisy, chaotic crowd headed for worship at the temple.)

Well, the verb turns up three times in the lions’ den story, and in an interesting pattern.  In 6:7 (Eng. 6:6), the group that envies Daniel goes to the king, Darius, urging him to issue a decree that there be no worship for thirty days, except that directed to Darius himself.  We are led to understand this as an appeal to his ego.  Daniel learns of this, but maintains his three-time daily prayer routine towards Jerusalem (we are reminded of the programmatic, and possibly exilic, prayer of Solomon in 1 Kings 8), which makes him a sitting duck for the set-up, and his opponents in v. 12 (Eng. 11) come in in ‘ragash‘ fashion to catch him red-kneed.  When Darius learns of this development, he looks for a way to excuse Daniel, but now Daniel’s rivals in v. 16 (Eng. 15) ‘ragash‘ back into the king to remind him of his obligations to keep the irrevocable law of the Medes and Persians.  Into the lions’ den goes Daniel.

The third encounter in particular gives the reader the sense that the king is not in a strong negotiating position.  These plotting officials have the king pinned with his own strong piece, the legal force of his own edict.  He, like Daniel, is boxed in by them.  Thus the rhetorical force of this part of the story gives us a possible insight into the still-debated meaning of this elusive word.  In the English versions of Daniel 6, we are offered many alternative translations for ‘ragash’: ‘to come by agreement’ (ESV); ‘to go as a group’ (NIV); ‘[the conspirators] came’, says NRSV, giving the noun, ‘conspirators’, a little borrowed connotation from the verb, which may carry this sense in Psalm 2:1.  Somewhere I think I read, ‘stormed in’.  Perhaps that is the closest so far.  My sense is that it connotes the noisy, unruly approach of a group of persons with hostile, though hidden, intentions in this passage, though I don’t claim this with any dogmatism.  This seems to be the sense of the story, which justifies Daniel as courageously devout, and interestingly, absolves the Persian emperor Darius from any responsibility for Daniel’s plight, at the cost of making him seem disempowered.  Such an apologetic might have a real function in a Jewish community still living under Persian power.

So as in Psalm 2, not to mention in Esther, Daniel 6 finds “the nations raging” against the LORD still, and as in Psalm 2, this plotting and rebellion proves ultimately futile.  An interesting instance of how a rare Hebrew OT word lines up in meaning with its rare Aramaic counterpart.