THE PSALMS - Week 1

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

Unless you’re currently studying GCSE English Language, there won’t be many who can simply read this famous introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and explain it’s meaning.

Poetry, as a form of art, is notoriously tricky to understand and often laden with imagery, analogy and word play. Even as native and fluent English speakers, we might not be equipped to understand Keats, Wordsworth or Duffy. You probably need an English degree to be able to interpret some of our older poets like Chaucer- I studied some of the Canterbury Tales for A-Level English and we had to read from a translation from ‘old’ English into modern English.

Poetic language is a complex thing.

So, as we approach the collection of Psalms, we should assume that we won’t understand them fully initially. These are poems written in an ancient language and in an ancient culture. Just because our bibles have them translated into modern English, it’s hard to convey how much meaning can be lost in translation.

Yet, herein lies one of the beautiful aspects of scripture. Even without some commentary or deeper understanding on the Psalms and their writers, these poems continue to speak to many Christians all around the world. The wonderful power of poetry is so often it’s ability to speak to the heart of the reader uniquely. As with much art, there is an element of subjectivity in how we read poetry, and the Psalms are no different.

These poems are emotional (maybe a little too much so in some cases?!) and very human in their feel. We can connect to them in ways that we might struggle to connect personally with other parts of scripture. And so, it is a delicate balance for me in these reflections – my hope is to offer some extra insight into the world of the Psalmists and explore these amazing short texts in different ways, whilst allowing for plenty of breathing room for you to read and enjoy them from your own perspectives.

For the study of Psalms, I would argue that we need a specific hermeneutic (approach to interpreting and understanding a text). Whilst reading John or Exodus these past months, we can explore their stories with a historical perspective, or a Jesus-centred perspective, or a linguistic perspective. Other books of the bible can be examined in contrast with others of a similar genre or from a similar time period. These Psalms are poetic, but not in the same way that we can find poetry used littered throughout other biblical books. Some texts have poetry as a way of communicating some truth or idea, but the Psalms work slightly differently as they are, broadly speaking, expressions and outworkings of what is happening in that particular moment for the writer. David, writing a Psalm about being hunted by his enemies, is, in theory, writing that whilst being hunted by his enemies! That’s why so many Psalms are so raw and emotive.

But there is plenty of theological meat to sink our teeth into across the 150 Psalms in the canon (maybe I’ll do a bonus blog about the non-canonical Psalms 151-155…)

Here, I’ll offer a brief introduction to the background of the Psalms (you can count what you’ve just read as a first half of the reflection!) and try to give us some framework for beginning to approach the collection of Psalms.

Thus far, I’ve spoken only of poems. But the English word ‘Psalms’ comes from a Greek word ‘Psalmoi’ which means ‘songs to the accompaniment of stringed instruments’. The original name for this collection is the Hebrew word תְהִלִּים or Tehillim, which means something like ‘Praises’ or ‘Songs of Praise’. The Psalms are often songs, intended to be accompanied by music.

That, in and of itself, blows my mind. What a massive part of the Psalm tradition that has been lost. I’ve been enjoying reading the first Psalms this week, but to know they should sound a certain way and not to know what that is grieves me. It also makes sense that one would write in a different style when it’s intended to be accompanied by music. But while we have lost this aspect of the Psalms, the idea of pairing the words with music has provided musicians throughout the ages with a rich stream of source material with which to create. Classical composers like Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn all utilised the Psalms, as have more modern musicians like U2, Bob Marley and Johnny Cash.

Others of the Psalms are poems in ways which are not obvious to us. Today (Friday 5/4), the daily readings were Psalms 9&10. These two, together, make an acrostic poem, with (almost) every line starting with the next consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Naturally, that doesn’t come across in English, and doesn’t necessarily impact what is being written – though there must be some limitations due to the format.

Of the 150 Psalms we have included in our Bibles, 50 are anonymous, 73 attributed to David, 12 to Asaph, 10 to Sons of Korah, 1 to Moses, 1 to Heman the Ezrahite, 1 to Ethan the Ezrahite and 2 to Solomon. Even if that is all accurate, which scholarship contends, then that is a diverse group and it’s understandable that we would get some who wrote in different styles to the others. David, seemingly musical by nature, wrote lots of song Psalms. Others might not have fancied turning their hand to songwriting.

All of this is to say that there is more than meets the eye with the Psalms. We can read them through our own lenses, but each has it’s own story – some known better than others.

In the coming reflections, we can think about some possible categorisations of the Psalms, some of the language used (what is ‘Selah’?) and much more! So, for now, let’s enjoy embarking on this journey into the Psalms together and prepare ourselves for an adventure into a unique and special biblical collection.