The Book of Psalms

Why should we study the book of Psalms?

The book of Psalms is filled with the songs and prayers offered to God

Their expressions of praise, faith, sorrow, and frustration cover the range of human emotions. Some of the Psalms dwell on the treasure of wisdom and God’s Word. Others reveal the troubled heart of a mourner. Still others explode with praise to God and invite others to join in song.

The book of Psalms is filled with the songs and prayers offered to God by the nation of Israel.

Their expressions of praise, faith, sorrow, and frustration cover the range of human emotions. Some of the Psalms dwell on the treasure of wisdom and God’s Word. Others reveal the troubled heart of a mourner. Still others explode with praise to God and invite others to join in song.

What type of Psalms are represented in this collection?

Hymns. In this type of psalm, the whole congregation praises God for His works or attributes.

Community complaints. In these psalms the whole nation voiced its complaints over problems it was facing, such as defeat in battle, famine, or drought

Individual complaints. These psalms are like the community complaint except that they were prayers given by one person instead of the whole nation. The reason for the prayers might be that the individual was sick, hounded by enemies, or in need of confessing personal sin

Individual songs of thanksgiving. In these psalms an individual praises God for some saving act

Royal psalms. These psalms deal with the king and the royal house. Subcategories include: wedding songs, sung at the marriage of the king (); coronation songs (); prayers for victory, chanted when the king went to war (); votive psalms, perhaps sung by the king at his coronation as a vow to be faithful and upright ().

Torah psalms. These psalms give moral or religious instruction (; ). Subcategories include: testimony songs, in which the psalmist used his personal experience of God’s salvation to encourage the hearer (); wisdom songs, in which the psalmist instructed the hearer more in practical wisdom similar to that in Proverbs than in the law ().

Oracle psalms. These psalms report a decree of God

Blessing psalms. In these psalms a priest pronounced a blessing upon the hearer(s)

Taunt songs. These psalms reproach the godless for their vile behavior and promise that their doom is near ().

Songs of trust. In these psalms the psalmist may face difficulty but remains assured of God’s help and proclaims his faith and trust ().

What is a Hebrew Psalm?

Hebrew poetry is found repeatedly in The Old Testament. (5 as an example) Even its narratives are graced here and there with a couplet or a longer sequence of verse to make some memorable point, and its prophecies predominantly take this form. While the Psalms are the main body of poems in Scripture, and were given (with Job and Proverbs) a distinctive system of accents by the Massoretes to mark the fact, they are themselves surrounded by poetry and rooted in a long and popular poetic tradition.

By its suppleness of form, Hebrew poetry lent itself well to this widespread use. A proverbial saying, a riddle, an orator’s appeal, a prayer, a thanksgiving, to mention only a few varieties of speech, could all slip into its rhythms almost effortlessly, for its metre was not parcelled out in ‘feet’ or in a prescribed arrangement of strong and weak syllables, but heard in the sound of, say, three or four stresses in a short sentence or phrase, matched by an answering line of about the same length. The lighter syllables interspersed with the stronger were of no fixed number, and the tally of strong beats in a line could itself be varied with some freedom within a single poem. There was room and to spare for spontaneity.

But the fundamental characteristic of this poetry was not its external forms or rhythms, but its way of matching or echoing one thought with another. This has been described as thought-rhyme, but more often as ‘parallelism’, a term introduced by Bishop Robert Lowth in the eighteenth century.

What are some of these characteristics we see in Hebrew Poetry?

We’re going to move from the smallest parts to the largest parts of a Hebrew poem, and the smallest unit we can call “colon.” A colon is a subunit of a line. are a pair of Cola. Cola is the plural form of colon. You can have a monocola, bicolon, tricolon, and on a occasion, a quatrain.

Line - is a unit that’s comprised of one or more cola. , “The Lord is my shepherd”—colon. “I shall not want”—that is a colon. Put the two together. It comprises one line.

CM328 Preaching the Psalms Formatting in Modern English Translations

Now, most of the time in modern printed Bibles (English translation) the publisher is going to indicate to you the nature of the line and the cola. The first colon is always going to be on the left side margin, and the second colon is going to be indented one tab. So you can easily see a line because you will have left-hand margin, indentation, and as soon as you go back to the left-hand margin, you know you’re at the beginning of the next line.

Strophes are simply groups of closely related lines. You might think of a strophe in poetry in the same way that you think of a paragraph in prose. A paragraph is a group of closely related sentences, and a strophe is a group of closely related lines.

Just like lines can be grouped together into larger units that we call “strophes,” strophes can also at times be grouped together into yet larger units that we call “stanzas.” Most Hebrew poems are not going to have stanzas because it takes a certain length of poem in order to have enough material in it to be able to batch strophes together into stanzas, but on occasion you do, and understanding the stanzas and the strophes really does help you understand the flow of the poem. (Example - , it is divided into 2)

As mentioned, Hebrew Poetry uses what has been termed Parallelism. Parallelism is correspondence. What Hebrew poets do is create correspondences between the cola of a poetic line. The first colon we’ll call [colon A]. The second colon we’ll call colon B, and there are correspondences that the poet will create between these two cola.

Two types of Parallelism we can’t see in translation.

Sound

Grammatical

The one level of Parallelism we can see - “Meaning”. There are many types of this found in the Psalms that we will see as we study.

Imagery - No doubt one of the reasons why Hebrew poets—as poets throughout the world—use imagery is the way images touch our emotions as well as engage our minds. In fact, John Calvin referred to the book of Psalms as “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.” Calvin said that there’s not an emotion that we can feel that doesn’t come to the surface in the book of Psalms. Everything that we feel we can find articulated in one psalm or another.

No doubt one of the reasons why Hebrew poets—as poets throughout the world—use imagery is the way images touch our emotions as well as engage our minds. In fact, John Calvin referred to the book of Psalms as “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.” Calvin said that there’s not an emotion that we can feel that doesn’t come to the surface in the book of Psalms. Everything that we feel we can find articulated in one psalm or another.

The imagery, in particular, is what the poets use to touch our emotions. They use imagery to grab our emotions, and once they’ve grabbed our emotions, then they engage our minds. Often, it is the image that captures the emotions and then leads us to think. We feel, and then we think. And as we feel something about the psalm, it then engages our mind to think more deeply about the message of that psalm.

CM328 Preaching the Psalms Imagery That Connects

The images that ancient Hebrew poets use—like the images that modern poets use—are pictures of concrete actions. They’re pictures of concrete things. They come out of everyday life. This is why we so readily connect with the book of Psalms because it’s filled with images from everyday life. I dare say that the average reader of the OT connects with the book of Psalms more readily than, say, the book of Ecclesiastes or the book of Exodus or the book of Ezekiel. The images come out of everyday life, and so we have a natural connection with the language of the psalms.

But what explains why we so readily connect with the psalms also presents a challenge for us. Because while the images come from everyday life, they come out of an ancient everyday life and not our own. They come from an ancient world and not our world. So, we have to become detectives. We have to investigate the ancient world in order to rightly understand the ancient images.

The images that ancient Hebrew poets use—like the images that modern poets use—are pictures of concrete actions. They’re pictures of concrete things. They come out of everyday life. This is why we so readily connect with the book of Psalms because it’s filled with images from everyday life. I dare say that the average reader of the OT connects with the book of Psalms more readily than, say, the book of Ecclesiastes or the book of Exodus or the book of Ezekiel. The images come out of everyday life, and so we have a natural connection with the language of the psalms.

But what explains why we so readily connect with the psalms also presents a challenge for us. Because while the images come from everyday life, they come out of an ancient everyday life and not our own. They come from an ancient world and not our world. So, we have to become detectives. We have to investigate the ancient world in order to rightly understand the ancient images.