Here is Episode 4 of the Psalmcast, looking at Psalm 147:13-21. My guest reader is Barbara from the chantblog!
https://soundcloud.com/user-657912221/ep004-psalm-147-yrc-christmas-1
The image for this episode is a snow-covered statue of Jesus the Good Shepherd from Baden-Württemberg, Germany by 4028mdk09
I will be back with more regular blog content as well, but things are particularly crazy with work, wrapping up some side-projects by the end of the year, and general holiday craziness with the family…
Hi, I’m Derek Olsen, creator of St. Bede Productions. I’m an Episcopal layman with a PhD in New Testament and a passion for the intersection of Liturgy and Scripture. Welcome to Episode 3 of the St. Bede Psalmcast, a podcast about the psalms in the Revised Common Lectionary, reading them in the context of the Sunday service and alongside the Church Fathers. Usually, I am talking about the psalm appointed for the upcoming Sunday but since canticles are scheduled in the psalm slot both last Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent, and this upcoming Fourth Sunday of Advent, I’m doing a general introduction to the Psalms as a way to introduce both this book of the Bible we’re studying and how I intend to approach it within this podcast.
Last time, I talked about two main topics, the lectionary context or why we read the psalms we do in the Sunday service, and the interpretive context or what we look for in them to help us interpret the psalms. This week, I’m going to talk about historical readings of the psalms and about a thematic interpretation of them.
Since we’re not the first Christians to read the psalms, what insights have others found within this text before we came along?
In case you’re wondering, this is a huge question. And by “huge” I mean that entire bookcases can and have been written on the psalms and on how they have been read in the church throughout our twenty centuries. There’s no way we can or should try to talk about all of this material, and so I’m choosing to focus in on a particular small slice of the Church’s interpretation. I’m focusing on a guy named Cassiodorus who was a sixth century political figure who retired from public life in order to start his own monastery on his family land in southern Italy.
Cassiodorus was living and working in a very precarious time with a lot of very touchy political currents swirling around; he essentially served as prime minister to what was left of the Roman Empire in the West under the Visigothic kings just around the time that the emperor of the Roman Empire in the East, ruling from Constantinople decided that it was time to take the empire back. The Visigoths had some fairly strong negative feelings about this plan and took steps to protect what was theirs including killing Roman bureaucrats whom they suspected of helping out the Byzantine Emperor. In fact, this was the fate of Boethius, who held one of the high roles that Cassiodorus took right after him. Boethius, like Cassiodorus was a learned Roman, thoroughly educated in rhetoric and philosophy, who—in the time that he was imprisoned and awaiting execution for possibly conspiring with the Byzantines—wrote a book called the Consolation of Philosophy which was to become the most important work of philosophy to come out of this time and place and which was widely read and very influential throughout the Middle Ages. I highly recommend reading it if you haven’t.
In any case, Cassiodorus got out before he lost his head and spent somewhere around a decade in Constantinople where he wrapped up his political affairs and started writing his big commentary on the Psalms. When he sat down to write, he had a whole host of books around him, though. Helpfully in one of his later works, he tells us exactly what he was reading while he was working: “Blessed Hillary, blessed Ambrose, and blessed Jerome have treated some of the psalms, but blessed Augustine in a scholarly manner more fully treated all. ” He also goes on to mention “the short book of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, that he sent to Marcellinus as a sweet refresher after his illness…In it [Athanasius] gives various kinds of advice and reveals the excellence of that work in an edifying discussion that comfortingly mentions the various misfortunes of mankind and their remedies. ” In a very real sense, then, Cassiodorus is collecting in one tidy package the main interpretive tradition of the West with a dash of the East, and—furthermore—brings a monastic perspective mixed into it as well. So while he name-checks these guys, he’s also reading John Cassian, the great writer of Christian spirituality from the fourth century, and the desert fathers partly through Athanasius and his writings and brings their sensibilities to the text as well. As a result, this is the angle I’m going to be coming from—the early interpretive tradition of the West on the psalms with a particular focus on how the monastic tradition received and used them.
Drawing on this tradition, the Church Fathers saw three major things going on in the Psalms. First, they saw them as models of not just Christian prayer but Christian life as a whole, and believed that they had a special charism for healing and transforming the soul. This aspect is really brought out in the second half of Athanasius’s Letter to Marcellinus. Athanasius starts this section by insisting that the psalms are intended by God to teach us a particular pattern of life:
The whole divine Scripture is the teacher of virtue and true faith, but the Psalter gives a picture of the spiritual life. And just as one who draws near an earthly king observes the formalities in regard to dress and bearing and the correct forms of words lest, transgressing in these matters, he be deemed a boor, so he who seeks to live the good life and learn about the Saviour’s conduct in the body is by the reading of this holy book first put in mind of his own soul’s condition and then supplied with fit words for a suppliant’s use.
So—he’s saying here that if you want to know how Jesus wants you to live, the psalms will teach you about your soul, then give you the words to pray and to conform your life most closely to God’s will. Then, he does a quick run through the psalms, hitting certain ones and talking about what kinds of words they give us and what spiritual and general life situations they are particularly good for. He’s tapping into a thread here which goes deep into monastic practice. Evagrius Ponticus gives a long list of psalm verses to meditate upon in various circumstances; John Cassian sprinkles these liberally throughout his writings and this is the way Athanasius depicts Antony the Great, the father of monks, as he undergoes his trials in the desert—with a phrase or verse from the psalms on his lips at every turn. This was the path of life for the first desert monks; they would memorize the psalms and be constantly going over them as they went about their simple daily tasks. This is a thread through monastic tradition that reformers would continually go back to. Thus you get the very simple rule of Abbot Romauld for his Camaldolese order from the eleventh century which is very much a return to the desert practices; here’s the entire brief rule:
Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms — never leave it.
If you have just come to the monastery, and in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want, take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind.
And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.
Realize above all that you are in God’s presence, and stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the emperor.
Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.
I don’t think there’s a whole lot to add there: the path you must follow is the Psalms—never leave it. This is the essence of St. Benedict’s Rule boiled down through the lens of the desert and put into bullet points. (Because the line there about “standing in the presence of God” is not only echoing what Athanasius just said, but is also riffing off chapters 19 and 20 of Benedict’s Rule on how you should pray the psalms in the Divine Office.)
Alright, so that’s the first major piece: the psalms as a source of deep wisdom on the pattern of the spiritual life.
A second major piece is that the psalms were understood as a microcosm of Holy Scripture. That is, if it shows up in the Bible, it shows up in the psalms. Athanasius likes to use the image of a garden here:
Each book of the Bible has, of course, its own particular message—[and he goes on to list what some of those are]— Each of these books, you see, is like a garden which grows one kind of special fruit; by contrast, the Psalter is a garden which, besides its special fruit, grows also some of those of all the rest. [And then he goes on to connect a wide variety of psalms to events in the historical books of the Old Testament.] You see then, that all the subjects mentioned in the historical books are mentioned also in one Psalm or another; but when we come to the matters of which the Prophets speak we find that these occur in almost all.
Here, of course, Athanasius is talking about witnesses to Christ, and he offers another long section where he connects the psalms up to a long list of items from the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. We’ll come back to this in a moment. So the psalms really do act as a microcosm. They contain all of the major genres of Old Testament writing from histories, to wisdom sayings, to legal material, to prophetic curses and destruction oracles, as well as promises of hope and salvation, and also both represent and prefigure a host of New Testament themes—recalling that the New Testament quotes more from the Psalms than any other book of the Old Testament.
The notion of the psalms as a microcosm was critical. Remember how much of the world was illiterate up until the time of the printing press. Most of the first monks, the desert fathers, didn’t know how to read. It’s a paradox to say that they based their entire lives on and around Holy Scripture when they couldn’t read—but they could memorize, and they did memorize. By hearing it read aloud by the few who could read, the monks—and other Christians throughout the ages too—would memorize the psalms so that they could constantly rehearse them, going over them constantly in their minds. (And when monks started learning to read in the medieval West they started with the psalms. The word for being literate was psalteratus—knowing your psalms.) So, if the psalter was understood as a comprehensive selection, kind of a Cliff Notes/Reader’s Digest Condensed Edition of the whole Bible, then that whole collection was of the size that it could be memorized by anyone who really put their mind to it and they would know that they had the heart of Scripture in mind.
But it didn’t just go one direction either. As M. J. Toswell writes about St. Bede, no matter what biblical text he was interpreting, his first mental stop was always at the psalms. So not only were the genres and themes of the Bible contained in the psalms, but the memorized and interiorized psalms themselves became a lens through which to look at the rest of Scripture. So that’s the second major piece: the psalms as the distillation of Scripture.
Third, the Church Fathers saw the Psalms as the clearest possible expression of the thoughts and feelings of Christ himself. If the Gospels communicate the outward being of Jesus, then the psalms communicate the inner being of Jesus. One of the ways they got there was by focusing on the person of David, by tying the psalms directly and tightly to him as a person, and then as a prophetic type of Jesus. So David both foreshadowed Jesus as the messianic king, and was his direct ancestor since Jesus was literally from the line of David. Because of this connection, because of the prevalence of the “I” language in the psalms, especially those psalms that contain things that connect to the text of the Gospels themselves, the psalms were understood as prophetic outpourings of Jesus own thoughts, prayers, and feelings.
By the time you get to Cassiodorus, you have a certain nuance on this because—let’s face it—we don’t want to connect everything that the psalms say directly to Jesus. There are some bits in there that ought to make us uncomfortable, and that we do want to distance some from the thoughts of Christ. So, one of the things that Cassiodorus focuses on in his thorough reading of the psalms is taking up whose voice is saying which lines. He’s actually borrowing some techniques from the interpretation of drama, here, almost envisioning the psalms as Classical plays and determining who has which speaking parts. Cassiodorus tends to split things up between a cast of three characters: David the prophet, Christ, and the Church. So, a lot of psalms are connected with just one of these. For instance, Psalm 25 which we covered in the first show, was entirely a psalm spoken by the church. Others, like Psalm 22, are put entirely in the mouth of Jesus. But then you’ve got something like Psalm 18 where he says this:
This psalm cannot be allotted to a single spokesman. In the first section, the prophet speaks, giving thanks because God’s devotion has deigned to free him from serious dangers. In the second, the Church speaks. Before the Lord’s coming she endured countless calamities, and subsequently He took pity on her. He granted her the healing of the holy incarnation, and by the gift of baptism He gathered the Christian people from the whole world. In the third part [of the psalm], the voice of the Saviour glides in like the dew of mercy. Here His strength and power are described with most beautiful allusions. In the fourth, the words of the Catholic Church again emerge, and the gifts of the Godhead are praised with great joy.
So he’s got this whole play thing going on where it’s passing back and forth between different speakers and such. And that’s one way he makes sense of the I/you/we language that we see so much in the psalms. That’s the third major approach to the psalms, then, that the Church Fathers took—that it reveals the thoughts and feelings of Jesus and opens up his heart and mind for our imitation and practice so that we too can acquire the mind of Christ by grounding ourselves in the psalms.
That having been said, I also need to take a moment and point out a problem here. A lot of psalms—especially individual laments—talk a lot about enemies, the wicked, the treacherous, and so on who are persecuting or trying to kill the psalmist. Now, if you make the speaker Jesus, then the natural and obvious identification of these enemies is “the Jews.” And, as a result, in Cassiodorus, in Athanasius, in Augustine, you see a lot of hate directed at “the Jews.” This is a direct result of the “us” and “them” language that occurs throughout the psalter. So—there’s a virulence encoded into the very basic heart of this fundamental pattern of Christian spirituality that we have to name, be aware of, and say “no” to. Can you keep that idea of Jesus as the one speaking and praying the psalms, and not make “the Jews” the bad guy and lapse into anti-Semitism? Absolutely. But we’ve got to be aware of the problem too. I’m sure will get deeper into this as we go along, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for.
So, as we address each psalm I’m going to ask “How do we read this psalm on this day?” I’m going to be asking how the words on the page come to life and gain specific meaning in relation to what’s going on around them. When I do this, I’m tapping into both modern scholarly theories of reading and interpretation but also into the long practice of the Christian past.
Modern literary types—and my approach is more literary than anything else—tend to locate the home or key meaning of a given text not in the text itself, but in the reading of a text within a particular reading community. Now—let me just say—phrasing things this way can make some Christians start to get really nervous.
When I was raised, as a Lutheran, I was taught that a text of Scripture had one meaning and that the meaning of the text was stable so that we could get doctrines from it, and we could all know and agree on true doctrine because it was what the biblical text plainly said. Modern biblical scholarship, which also rose out of Protestant and especially Lutheran roots, for a long time also held to this notion: there was one correct meaning of the biblical text and that was the one thing that the human author intended when he wrote it down. Thus, to interpret the Bible correctly meant to uncover the historical circumstances in order to understand what that one author meant at that one point in time.
How, then, can we talk about finding a meaning within a community and still be able to hold that the Bible is the authoritative inspired Word of God? A passage from 2 Timothy often gets thrown around when we talk about interpretation and inspiration so let’s just glance at that for a moment: “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17, NRSV). So—what’s the point? That we be built up so that we can do every good work. The purpose isn’t the text, it’s the people. The purpose is the community. We read the Old and New Testaments of the Bible within the Body of Christ in order that every single member of the Body of Christ can be led more deeply into the Mind of Christ, so that we can witness to a hurting world that God—and especially what he has done for us in the person of Jesus Christ—loves us (each one of us), loves the whole human family, loves the whole creation which he made, and is reconciling it all back to himself, and recalling us all to the principles of mercy, justice, and love in which, by which, and for which everything was created. That’s what we’re about. That’s why we read this book. So that as individuals and as communities we can reflect the truth of God’s love and the reconciliation brought through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection in how we live, in how we work, in how we love, in how we speak. And if we’re not doing that; if that’s not what we’re focused on, then we need to give up on this book and go read Moby Dick or something…
So, we read the Bible together and it comes alive as we read it together in a community, a community bound together by the sacraments—in being baptized into Jesus, in the Eucharist as we take the Body and Blood of Christ into ourselves as physical and spiritual sustenance—and as we interpret it as we live it out in all the various places that we go.
If we want to get all technical again, the phrase I really like to hang on to is the idea of the sensus plenior. That’s the term that the French Roman Catholic scholar Henri de Lubac and his friends brought back in the mid-Twentieth century to talk about the fullness of meanings within the biblical text. There isn’t just one true meaning, there isn’t even just one way to read, but there are multiple readings of each passage and they mean and matter as they help us to live into being the loving people of God.
We’re out of time or else I’d talk you through how John Cassian lays this out for us in the Conference on Spiritual Knowledge from Abba Nesteros which is the fourteenth conference found in Book II of John Cassian’s Conferences. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, and to some of the other things that we’ve been talking about so you can look at those if you’d like to.
So, to recap—as we engage each psalm, we will look at it in the context of everything that’s going on around it: that it’s being read or sung within a Eucharist, that it’s relating to the other texts and materials appointed for that particular day that occurs within a particular season of the church year and especially that this is all occurring in the middle of a community that has been drawn together by and for the love of God.
So, that was the conclusion to our quick two-part overview of the Book of Psalms. Hopefully that gave you a better sense of what we’re reading, how we’re reading it, some things to look for as you read, and a sense of the companions with whom we’re going to be reading it as we go along. Enough of the introduction stuff—for the next show we’re going back into the psalms, I believe, with Psalm 147.
If you enjoyed today’s show, please tell your friends about it and leave a review on iTunes to help more people find it. You can find more of my thoughts at www.stbedeproductions.com and follow me on Twitter. Until next time, I’m Derek Olsen for St. Bede Productions. The path you must follow is in the Psalms—never leave it.
This the second half of the Introduction to the Psalms that we started last week in Episode 2. In this episode we discuss reading the psalms alongside the Church Fathers, and how we go about reading the psalms within the context of the Church.
https://soundcloud.com/user-657912221/ep003-intro-to-the-psalms
The image is from Michael Pacher’s Altarpiece of the Church Fathers completed in 1483, and depicts several of the commentators mentioned by Cassiodorus: St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and St. Ambrose. (St. Augustine and St. Gregory are shown here.)
Here is the text of the Letter of Athanasius to Marcellinus
Here is the Brief Rule of Abbot Romuald
And, as promised, a link to John Cassian’s, Conferences: Abbot Nesteros on Spiritual Knowledge
Recommended Books:
Athanasius : The Life of Antony and the Letter To Marcellinus
John Cassian: The Conferences (Ancient Christian Writers Series, No. 57)
Augustine’s psalm commentary is six volumes long in the latest modern edition! It can be found and read for free here at the New Advent website, though.
This is a good intro to how Augustine interpreted the psalms: Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (Radical Traditions)
The commentaries by Cassiodorus are in three volumes and can be a hard slog at times. While I like him, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend getting them unless you really want to! I’m including them here for the sake of completeness, though.
Hi, I’m Derek Olsen, creator of St. Bede Productions. I’m an Episcopal layman with a PhD in New Testament and a passion for the intersection of Liturgy and Scripture. Welcome to the St. Bede Psalmcast, a podcast about the psalms in the Revised Common Lectionary, reading them in the context of the Sunday service and alongside the Church Fathers. Ordinarily, we’d be talking about the psalm appointed for The Third Sunday of Advent in Year C which this year falls on December 13th, 2015. However, according to the Episcopal edition of the Revised Common Lectionary, the psalm slot is occupied by a canticle from Isaiah, not a psalm! As much as I love the canticles, I’ll save them for later and keep my focus on the psalms for now.
Since this is a by-week for the psalms, I’d like to take this opportunity to do a general introduction to the psalms, a sort of whirlwind tour of this book of the Bible that we’re going to spend some time talking about. One last word of warning… I tried to keep my usual format here and talk about four major things: the liturgical context, the interpretive context, the historical readings, and a thematic reading, but I realized pretty quickly that there was just too much to say to do it all as one show. So, this is going to be a two-episode encounter. Today, I’m just going to cover the liturgical context and the interpretive context, then I’ll try to cover the historical readings and the thematic readings next week.
So, why are psalms appointed here, in the Sunday service, for particular days?
In order to answer this question properly, we need to talk about how readings were historically selected for worship services. By the time that things shook out into a fairly stable pattern across the Christian West—by about the sixth century or so—there were two major kinds of services. There were the prayer offices, then there were the Eucharists. At the heart of the prayer offices was the repetition of the psalms. Complicated schedules were laid out so that all 150 psalms were prayed through every week–and some psalms showed up a lot more than that. In the monasteries and cathedrals—the intentional liturgical communities of the West—the psalms were literally at the center of their experience of the worship of God and permeated their thinking.
It’s no surprise, then, that we find the psalms in the Eucharistic worship of the church as well. These days, we have a three year lectionary that appoints four different items for every Sunday: an Old Testament reading, a psalm, a New Testament epistle reading, and a Gospel reading. Back in those days, they had a one-year cycle that only contained two readings. The first one was called the Epistle and usually was from one of the letters of the New Testament—but not always. On the fasts the church would take the reading from the Old Testament, usually one of the Prophets. The second reading was always from one of the four Gospels. So where were the psalms? The answer is that they were being sung! Not only were readings and prayers appointed for Eucharist, but there were also a series of chants that were fixed in a cycle according to the church year.
We’re familiar with singing hymns in our Sunday service; they weren’t. Hymns were sung at each hour of the Daily Office, not in the Eucharist. Instead, the main singing consisted of the chants.
The introit started the service; the gradual and the alleluia came between the Epistle and the Gospel (and in Lent and Advent were replaced by the tract); the offertory was sung before the Eucharist, and the communio was sung while the priest and anyone else were receiving the Eucharist. These chants were almost always direct citations from Scripture and were almost always taken from the psalms.
When the English Reformation came, most of these chants were swept away but the first Book of Common Prayer appointed an introit psalm alongside the Gospel and Epistle to start off the service. This was too much for some reformers, though, and in the second prayer book, published just three years later, the psalm was taken out. This doesn’t mean that psalms disappeared from the worship service, of course, the English church kept the singing of the psalms at Morning and Evening Prayer and we also have to remember that the hymnals used in Sunday services only contained metrical psalms for many generations.
So—what changed? How did we get to where we are now? In the mid-twentieth century, change was on the way. The Roman Catholic Church convened the second Vatican council between 1962 and 1965, and one of the key changes was a move away from the one-year cycle with its two readings to a greatly expanded three-year cycle with four appointed texts from Scripture—the scheme that we are used to now. The way the system works is that in the main seasons—Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter—the Gospel reading sets the tone and the Old Testament and the Psalm are selected deliberately in relation to themes in the Gospel. Now—exactly what those themes are is not always apparent! Indeed, some connections only work if you have some inside information, and that’s part of what I’m trying to do with this podcast: to give you the tools to see what those connections are and why and how they work. This whole connection business is important in the long green seasons too based on which track of the Revised Common Lectionary your church decides to use.
Again, in the main seasons, the first lesson and Psalm are keyed to the Gospel. One of the summer tracks maintains this approach. The other option disconnects them and reads through particular sections of the Old Testament that have some reference to the Gospel of the year. Thus, in Year C when we’re reading the Gospel of Luke, this track reads through the prophets as Luke and the prophets share a common concern for social justice. In Year A when Matthew is read, this track reads through the Law as Matthew is more hooked into the Jewish legal tradition than the other gospels. In Year B with Mark, it reads the histories to connect with Mark’s history. Now, this matters for us because when this track is chosen, the Psalm is selected to match themes in the Old Testament reading not the Gospel.
So, to recap, the Psalms have had a key role in Christian worship in the West ever since we’ve had records. Currently, the Psalms are chosen each Sunday to match the Gospel reading unless the continuous track is chosen in the summer in which case it matches with the Old Testament lesson.
Now, is there other information we need to help us understand what’s going on?
The book of Psalms is unique within the Bible. It’s a collection of 150 poems—and, right there we have two things to talk about. The first is the numbering, the second is the word “poems”; I want to look at each of these in turn.
In most any Bible you’ll come across there are 150 psalms. However, there is disagreement on their exact breakdown. Clearly, the original language of the Psalms was Hebrew. However, that’s not how the Early Church encountered them. While the first followers of Jesus may have read Hebrew, many of the first Christians were Hellenized or Greek-speaking Jews (like the apostle Paul), and within the first few generations the church was almost entirely composed of non-Jewish Gentiles whose common language was Greek. As a result, when the Church read the Old Testament, they read it in Greek following a translation called the Septuagint that was done by members of the Jewish community in Alexandria in Egypt starting in the third century BC and which was fully finished by about the year 132 before Christ.
The translation in the Septuagint is different from the Hebrew text in two important ways. First, the Septuagint contains more superscriptions which are little context notes at the start of the psalms about who wrote them or what situations they refer do than the Hebrew text does. In particular, Psalms 145-149 appear to be attributed to Haggai and Zechariah. Second, the numbering between the Greek and the Hebrew versions is slightly different. This is really important because when the Latin versions appeared (and there are two main versions of the Latin—the Romanum and the Gallicanum) they were based on the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew and they followed the numbering found in the Septuagint, and not the Hebrew. While St. Jerome did do a translation of the Hebrew text of the psalms, it didn’t really catch on—the Gallicanum became the standard and that’s what showed up in the Latin Vulgate Bible used through the Middle Ages. When the Reformers like Martin Luther started translating the Bible into their own tongue, they used the Hebrew numbers so the numbers you see in most Bibles and in today’s Book of Common Prayer follow the Hebrew scheme, but old historical and Roman Catholic sources us the numbering scheme of the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate instead. Here’s the basic rule: the numbers are the same until you get to 9, then the Latin sources are behind the Hebrew by one. So, Psalm 22 gets mentioned in Latin and old Roman Catholic sources as Psalm 21, Psalm 23 becomes Psalm 22 and so on. There’s a little bit of weirdness in the low one-hundreds but generally that rule works—subtract one from the Hebrew to get the Septuagint and Latin number—up until Psalm 147 when everything comes back together just in time for everybody to agree at 150. And then there’s an extra Psalm 151 that a few Greek and Latin texts tack on, but we’re going to totally skip that for now. So—if you remember, last time we talked about Psalm 25 and yet the Vespasian Psalter labeled that as Psalm 24—this is why, the numbering difference between modern English based off of Hebrew and medieval Latin based off the Greek Septuagint.
I also mentioned that the Psalms are poems, and I should say a little bit about that. Poems, generally, tend to have a set of common characteristics. First, they tend to not run on and on and on and on like regular writing or prose does, instead, they tend to be shaped into a set of more or less balanced lines. Second, they tend to use elevated diction, which is the English majors’ way of saying “fancy words.” Third, they tend to have an unusually high frequency of rhetorical devices or figures of speech. Fourth, they may make a particular appeal to feelings either directly or through the images and figures of speech that they choose to use. Fifth, there may be particular kinds of internal structures involving repetition of ideas or words. Sixth, they often use patterns of sounds as a structuring device. Common examples of this are alliteration—where words will begin with the same sound, assonance—where the middle parts of words sound alike, or rhyme where the ends of words sound alike. As you’ve probably realized by now, a lot of English poetry in the last several hundred years uses rhyme, preferring to end lines that way—but not every language or type of poetry does that. Even Old English poetry, for example, never used end-rhymes as a major feature and instead used alliteration all the time. Seventh, they frequently use rhythm within the line to give it a particular kind of cadence or beat when it’s read aloud or sung. Last and definitely not least, poetry invites its listeners to see the world a little bit differently; all of those previous factors come together to move us into a different head-space and invite us to experience things in a new way that we haven’t really seen before. It takes something ordinary like a vase or a flower or mouse or a crack in the wall and uses that ordinary thing to reveal some deep truth about life, the universe, God, and everything.
So—the psalms have these characteristics. They’re definitely poems. Some of them (if not most) were definitely used as songs as well. But here’s the thing: we have no idea what the tunes were. We have no idea what they sounded like. We’re not even entirely sure how Ancient Hebrew was pronounced. Furthermore, Christians have been reading, hearing, and praying the psalms in translation for the past almost two thousand years. That means that some of the cool poetic features that were written into the psalms are lost to us. “Patterns of sounds as a structuring device”, “rhythm within the line”, even “elevated diction—fancy language” doesn’t always survive across languages. However, that having been said, most of the translators knew that they were working poetry and even if the Hebrew sound, rhythm, and verbal texture got lost, many translators tried to incorporate some of these aspects from their own tongue, whatever that may be. As one of my friends likes to remind me, translation is an artform of its own and a translated object—especially a translated poem—is a new work of art in its new language. We certainly see that with the psalms and its why certain translations have gotten so much love over the years. The King James Version is obvious example here. Ask someone to say Psalm 23 and chances are, it’ll be the King James. Certainly in my Anglican tradition the Coverdale translation also has a special place because of the beauty and rhythm and poetical goodness that Coverdale stuffed in there. This is the version you find in the English and American Books of Common Prayer up until the latest American edition.
Now—one of these aspects of poetry is really important for understanding and appreciating the psalms, and that’s the one about internal structures that have repetition. In fact, some scholars would argue—and I think they’re right—that this is the foundational aspect of Hebrew poetry especially for Christians who are consistently encountering the text in translation. This is parallelism. This is where two or more lines are deliberately set in relationship with one another to make one complete thought. One is antithetical parallelism. This is where the psalmist will come at a thought from two different directions, one positive and one negative. So—we had a couple of these in Psalm 25:
“Remember not the sins of my youth and my transgressions; *
Remember me according to your love and for the sake of your goodness, O Lord.”
Both of these are coming at how the psalmist wants God to remember him; don’t remember me that way, remember me this way. Sometimes it looks like the first line states something, then the second says the opposite, and sometimes that actually is the case, but often it’s a little more nuanced than that.
Here’s another:
“Let none who look to you (God) be put to shame; *
Let the treacherous be disappointed in their schemes.”
So in this one, the psalmist is drawing a contrast between those who trust in God and the treacherous. These two kinds of people are clearly set up as being different kinds of folks, but you can’t just say that the two lines are opposites either. Well—we’ll see more of this and play with it more later throughout the psalms.
If antithetical is one kind, another major kind of parallelism is synonymous parallelism. So synonyms are two words that more or less mean the same thing, and that’s what this is to: when you have two lines that more or less mean the same thing. And we can even get more particular here. These are some synonymous parallels that really do try to mean exactly the same thing just with different words. Then, there are some that do something different to make it more pointed and to focus the meaning. Again, if we look back at Psalm 25, the first verse has both of these kinds of synonymous parallelism!
So:
“To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul;
My God, I put my trust in you;”
This is saying the same thing two different ways so this is static because the meaning stays the same.
Now—watch this carefully—here’s the next part of the verse:
“Let me not be humiliated,
Nor let my enemies triumph over me.”
So, the first line is just talking about humiliation which is kind of a broad term. There are lots of ways to be humiliated. Like—being out in public and suddenly realizing you forgot to put pants on. Or slipping on a banana peel in front of everybody. Those fall under “humiliating”, right?
But the second line takes that idea and focuses it: “Nor let my enemies triumph over me.” So, we’re moving from a general idea of humiliation to focus on one particular kind of humiliation, being beaten by enemies. And that could still take quite a lot of forms too, but it takes the general idea and narrows it down. This is dynamic because we’re moving somewhere, we’re going from the general to the specific. There are other ways this can happen too, but this is a very common one.
Ok—that’s all I want to say about parallelism for now. Let’s not get too deep in the weeds here. But, I want you to know it’s there, I want you to start looking for it and noticing it. I may not bring it up all the time, but it’s one of these key features this is always lurking there when we read, sing, and pray the psalms. And for me, one of the places where I find the deepest insights is asking some of the parallel questions. What is the thing that these two verses are really trying to get me to wrestle with? If they’re coming from two different directions, what’s that thing in the middle that the psalmist wants me to focus on? Or, are these two lines actually saying the same thing, or is there motion here that is moving me in a particular direction or way of thinking?
Alright, so—one hundred-fifty poems. There are lots of different ways to break them down or to split them into chunks. The editors—whoever put them all together (and we don’t know when that happened although evidence suggests that it was probably after the Exile, maybe in the fourth or third century Before Christ—deliberately put them into five books probably to suggest a parallel with the five books of the Law. Another way to break them up is that there are some clear collections based on the titles. (We don’t have the titles in the Book of Common Prayer’s psalter; that’s the one thing I don’t like about this edition…) Some are connected with David, a bunch are connected with a Levite named Asaph and another with a Levitical group called the sons of Korah, then there are a number called songs of ascent.
The last way I’m going to mention (because there are more yet) is one that we’re going to talk about a fair amount and that’s by genre or literary type. While these are all poems, we have some groups of different kinds of poems. One list from a scholar named Lawrence Toombs is a good one: Laments, Hymns, Thanksgivings, Songs of Confidence, Hymns of Zion, Enthronement Psalms, Royal Psalms, Pilgrim Psalms, Wisdom Psalms, and Liturgies. And all of these different types have characteristics that define them and shape them. Of course there are some psalms that you can put into more than one category, but generally these are a good set of categories to have. We’ll explore these more thoroughly in the future as we get to them.
Look—there’s a lot more stuff I could say, but I’ll leave it at this point for now. To recap, the psalms are 150 poems. As poems, there are a variety of stylistic devices that include balanced lines, lots of rhetorical devices and figures of speech, and internal structures. Parallelism is a very important concept for Hebrew poetry and for the psalms in particular and there are a couple of major forms, antithetical parallelism where we’re at an idea from two different directions, static synonymous parallelism where we’re saying the same thing two different ways, and dynamic synonymous parallelism where we’re taking a thing and moving with it, either going deeper into it or moving it in a particular direction.
Please, don’t let some of the technical sounding stuff scare you off. These are just some of the basics that we’ve got to get through so that you can get the most you can out of the psalms. This was part one of a general introduction to the psalms; I’ll be back next week with part 2 and then we’ll get back to the psalms themselves after that.
If you enjoyed today’s show, please tell your friends about it and leave a review on iTunes. You can find more of my thoughts at www.stbedeproductions.com and follow me on Twitter (and there’s a link you can follow on my blog and in the show notes.) Until next time, I’m Derek Olsen for St. Bede Productions.
A piece appeared on the Covenant blog yesterday bemoaning the fact that we don’t have all of Psalm 95 printed in the Morning Prayer service. Personally, while I do have some sympathy for the position, I don’t find this nearly the issue the author does. Here’s the thing…
To those points, let me add the following…
First, the job of the Venite is to call us to prayer. This is what I’ve written previously on the Venite -as-invitatory:
At the heart of the concept of the invitatory is an invitation. The appointed texts urge those praying them to worship. Psalm 95 holds such a privileged place because it does it three times in rapid succession. It opens with a repeated call to worship in verses 1 and 2: “Come let us sing…let us shout for joy…Let us come…and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.” The call repeats in verse 6: “Come, let us bow down.” The other element of Psalm 95 that made is so attractive is found at the end of verse 7: “Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!” Although this passage logically goes with the next section of the psalm which gives the rebellion of the people under Moses as an example of what not to do, the Rite II Venite ends here. In addition to the call to come and worship, we are reminded to also listen and take heed of what God is telling us. The Rite I Venite preferred not to include any of the condemnatory section, but swaps in additional encouragement to praise from Psalm 96 and retains the notion that God is also coming to meet us in our worship.
Thus, when you’re looking at intention, the Venite does what it’s supposed to do. I do agree that it is stronger with the rest of the Psalm, but it still gets the job done.
What touched a sore spot for me in the article is the notion that the verses introduced from Ps 96 are mild and inoffensive. The irony of this is that the day before this article came out, I found myself pausing and appreciating just those words in the Venite because they helped reinforce the Advent concept and because starting each day with a remembrance of the Last Judgement is a fine thing to do.
Because—let’s recall—that is what those verses from Psalm 96 are fundamentally about.
Yes, they depict creation joining us in our morning praise, but the reason that the whole creation rejoices is because God is coming to set all things right and to enforce justice, righteousness, and equity upon the earth. That’s Last Judgement material, and we (yes, we) who consume and hoard such a disproportionate percentage of the goods of creation, ought to remember and feel a certain amount of trepidation about the choices we make on a daily basis that reinforce inequity on a global scale that Christ will come to correct…
So, yes, I too, would prefer the full Psalm 95 (and actually have it programmed that way in the breviary throughout Lent). However, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the shorter version; it does what it’s supposed to do. But—and this is probably my main point—if you believe that the verses from Psalm 96 are “less offensive,” you’re not reading them carefully enough.
I received word today from Forward Movement that they are getting ready to do a reprint of the St. Augustine’s Prayer Book that David Cobb and I revised. Before the presses start running, though, they wanted to make check if there were any uncaught typos or oddities that ought to be corrected in the next version.
Have you seen anything?
And, no, this isn’t the opportunity to revisit items put in or taken out, but to make sure that what is there is there correctly…
I’m working on a book project right now. It’s two-volume set for Liturgical Press. The first volume is a straight-forward historical work on the interpretation of the Psalms in the early Medival West with a particular emphasis on Cassiodorus. His three volume commentary was the central path through which monks of the first millennium learned the Psalms, learned how to read Scripture, and gained a basic understanding of the liberal arts. The working title is The Honey of Souls: Cassiodorus and the Interpretation of the Psalms in the Early Medieval West.
The second volume is an explicitly confessional work that will engage how Cassiodorus and the Church Fathers interpreted the Psalms and what the modern Church can learn from them. How can a contemporary Christian read alongside the Fathers and still take into account the riches provided by the scientific study of the Scriptures and modern approaches to biblical interpretation? The working title for this volume is Psalming Christ: Learning to Pray the Psalms with Cassiodorus and the Church Fathers.
Now—while I was working on my dissertation and the work on prayer book spirituality (coming out early 2016; Scott Gunn swears to it!) I found sharing what I was writing on the blog to be a great help. I’m not at the writing stage yet, though–I’m still doing preliminary research, and it’s easy to let that stuff slip to the side ahead of more imminent therefore urgent deadlines. So, I’ve decided to go the public accountable route again with my reasearch by means of a podcast. I don’t know if this will work; I don’t know if it will last. But it’s a start!
I’ll be looking at the psalms as scheduled by the Revised Common Lectionary. I’m hoping to put out an episode every two weeks, posting on Tuesday before the upcoming Sunday. The format is pretty simple: I’ll look at the lectionary context, the general interpretive context, and historical readings (with a focus on Cassiodorus for obvious reasons), then provide a thematic reading that tries to pull it all together.
Of course, I owe a big thank you to Kyle Oliver, Holli Powell, and Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale for their advice on putting even a basic podcast like this one together.
So—without further ado: the St. Bede Psalmcast
https://soundcloud.com/user-657912221/ep001-ps-25-yrc-advent1
Thanks again to my crack Production Assistant Greta for reading the psalm! I’ll be looking for other readers for other psalms as things develop…
Here is the link to the Gradual Albiense, the French chant book I mentioned with the decorated page (which is also the feature illustration of the track).
Here is a link to the psalm in the Utrecht Psalter with its illustration. (Yes, the umbering is different. We’ll talk about that next time…)
I mention iTunes—it’s not on iTunes yet. Hopefully that’ll occur at some point in the near future!
Now—in something completely unrelated to prayer book revision plans, I have a new post up at Godspace. This one is a musing around the concept of pilgrimage, and my way into it is a brief meditation on the Voyage of St. Brendan the Navigator. If you’ve not encuntered this text before, I’d urge you to do so. It’s quite fascinating. I have a feeling I will drill into it quite a bit deeper at some point in time.
But that time is not now.
Too many other plates in the air at the moment…
After seeing a tweet from Ruth Gledhill, I clicked through to this sobering article about Chichester bishop George Bell.
My first thought was, of course, “October 3rd, George Kennedy Allen Bell, Bishop of Chichester, and Ecumenist, 1958.“
Bell was one of the figures added into Holy Women, Holy Men in 2009 and brought from there into A Great Cloud of Witnesses. If you do the math, you’ll note that he was included 51 years after his death. Historically there has been a “waiting period” on including people in our calendar of commemorations; usually the criteria mention 2 generations and/or 50 years. On of the reasons for such a waiting period was to give sufficient time for scandals to air out. HWHM was significant for the number of recent entries who hadn’t fulfilled this waiting period. There is a certain grim irony, then, that Bell technically met the criteria even though not all of the facts were yet out in the plain light of day.
I don’t know what we’re going to do about Bell yet. GCW is not an official church document since it was only “made available.” Since it hasn’t been printed yet, I’ve sent a note to the powers that be indicating that we need to think through what ought to be done here. My vote is for removing Bell.
But—this raises bigger issues that still need to be addressed. Are there more revelations like this still yet to come from some of our 20th century inclusions? Are there skeletons like this in the closets of some of our earlier choices? One of the central differences between GCW and HWHM was that we explicitly altered GCW to say that it wasn’t a sanctoral calendar and therefore the issue of sanctity was formally off the table. But, as many argued at General Convention, it will likely be viewed as a sanctoral calendar informally.
What do we do here to address this issue and to address wider and deeper issues about grace, merit, sanctification, and models of the sacramental life?
When M was competing in the Triathlon Age-Group Nationals in Milwaukee this summer, the girls and I popped into the museum of art there on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Because they were remodelling most of the collection was inaccessible, but there were a collection of photos from items that are housed there.
This one in particular caught my attention.
This is “Saint Francis in his Tomb” by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán, sometimes referred to as the Spanish Caravaggio (no surprise that I like him, then!). Most of his work is on religious subjects; he has several paintings of Francis, one in the St. Louis Museum of Art very similar to this one, but I like this one best. Francis’s face is almost wholly in shadow, his attention squarely fixed on the skull he holds, and the stance of the right foot (no…left foot; thanks, Fr. J-J!) depicts him advancing directly toward us.
The power of the work, for me, rests in the tension between the depth of contemplation and the solemn inevitability. It welcomes us to a side of Francis which feels deeply true but rarely acknowledged.
(ETA: There’s an arresting simplicity in the overall composition. There’s a central brown scalene triangle imposed on a background divided vertically in half into light and dark with the darkness occupying central positions in the central triangle as well. The visual simplicity and structure adds a great deal to it.)