The Book of Psalms, also known as the Psalter, is sometimes called the hymnbook of ancient Israel. This isn't meant as a metaphor. Untranslated terms such as selah--untranslated because the meaning is lost--recur and seem intended to signal a musical interlude or some other liturgical direction. So the individual psalms were aids to public worship, elements of a liturgy. They are used for that purpose to this day, and a churchgoer who reads through them might as a result find much that is familiar, even known by heart on account of a thousand recitations, and will be surprised to learn that the words come directly from the Psalter. For example, here is a portion of Psalm 51:
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence,
and take not thy holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of thy salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit.
Perhaps even an outsider may sense here an incantatory power that is achieved again and again within the 150 psalms that comprise the Psalter. The most common source for the effect is, I think, a combination of solemnity, simplicity, and human feeling. Colleges offer courses with titles such as "The Bible as Literature," which, were it not for the Psalter, would be more susceptible to charges of special pleading.
The tone of lofty dignity is not, however, maintained from front to back of this hymnbook. The base specimens contribute to deplorable Old Testament themes--for example, the violent hatred of enemies, which is usually joined to the notion that God should and will assist in their slaughter. From Psalm 137:
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, "Rase it, rase it! Down to its foundations!"
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who requites you
with what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!
It is a fond claim of fundamentalists that the Bible inculcates a single message, or at least that it doesn't contradict itself, but really there is no way to reconcile the petition for the skulls of the foe's infants to be crushed against rocks with the commandment to love one's enemies. At least contemporary politicians have options when mining for biblical texts friendly to their preexisting inclinations.
Scholarship on the Psalms has performed a mighty taxonomic labor, with the result that all 150 may be filed within a half dozen or so phyla. There are hymns (calls to worship, such as #100); royal psalms (for celebrations related to coronations, a king's wedding, a military victory, etc.: #2, 45 and 110 are examples); psalms of thanksgiving (a worshiper exhorts fellows to heed a personal narrative of deliverance, as in #30, 32, and 34); psalms of trust (among others, the justly famous 23rd, which has not been altogether ruined by the profusion of calligraphic renderings in service of kitschy Christian art); and liturgies (a grab-bag for the most boring ones, so far as I can tell).
I've left out of the above classification system the psalm of lament, which is the single most prevalent type: a full 50 of the 150 psalms qualify as either a communal lament (worshipers petition for relief from a national affliction) or a personal lament (an individual calls to God from "out of the depths" of his suffering). These psalms seem to me to be of particular interest, mainly on account of the way in which they peculiarly mix very aggressive complaints against divine justice with faith in God's saving action. Of the personal laments, Psalm 22 is probably the best known, since according to the crucifixion accounts in two gospels (Mark and Matthew) Jesus, on the cross, cried out its famous first words:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
The 22nd, though long and meandering, includes the essential elements of the personal lament, which may however be seen most clearly in the stripped down thirteenth:
How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me for ever?
How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
lighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;
lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him";
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
But I have trusted in thy steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
That is the whole psalm, a template for the individual lament, a skeleton on which to hang elaborations, the absence of which here direct attention to the essential form. The four-fold "How long" is a variation on "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?": both are complaints, brash and deficiently reverent but born of desperation, lodged against God's injustice. The petitioner insists upon his pain and also upon an answer, a justification. But then everything slides away quite unsatisfactorily. The petitioner's desperation is not made more impressive by the disclosure that its evident source is a version of, "What will other people think?" And what of the apparently invisible transition between the second and third stanzas? The petitioner had demanded that God answer him but in the end folds his hand even though there's been no answer. If the sudden memory of God's past bountiful dealings with him resolves the whole issue, then how is it that he put this history out of his mind for long enough to suffer the agony described in the first two stanzas?
But these are perhaps the complaints of a rationalist. Psalms follows Job in the Bible and I didn't find the final resolution to that righteous man's questions very satisfactory, either. To close on a conciliatory note, however, it is at least satisfying that in the religious practice of ancient Israel the darkness and disorder in human life is recognized--it's the subject matter of a third of the Psalter. Whereas in contemporary America the practice of religion often seems roughly analogous to another healthy lifestyle choice, like doing yoga, one more tool to get ahead and not fall into the hole out of which God's people cry to him in fifty of the psalms.
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