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What must be said, however, is that the Psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, nor even sermons.
Most emphatically the Psalms must be read as poems; as lyrics, with all the licences and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry.
“parallelism”; that is, the practice of saying the same thing twice in different words.
For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
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But in beauty, in poetry, he, and St. Jerome, the great Latin translator, are beyond all whom I know.
A man can’t be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.
the Christian pictures the case to be tried as a criminal case with himself in the dock; the Jew pictures it as a civil case with himself as the plaintiff. The one hopes for acquittal, or rather for pardon; the other hopes for a resounding triumph with heavy damages.
In most places and times it has been very difficult for the “small man” to get his case heard. The judge (and, doubtless, one or two of his underlings) has to be bribed. If you can’t afford to “oil his palm” your case will never reach court.
We need not therefore be surprised if the Psalms, and the Prophets, are full of the longing for judgement, and regard the announcement that “judgement” is coming as good news.
We are all in the same boat. We must all pin our hopes on the mercy of God and the work of Christ, not on our own goodness.
The writers of the Psalms do not do this. They look forward to “judgement” because they think they have been wronged and hope to see their wrongs righted.
There is also in many of the Psalms a still more fatal confusion—that between the desire for justice and the desire for revenge.
At the outset I felt sure, and I feel sure still, that we must not either try to explain them away or to yield for one moment to the idea that, because it comes in the Bible, all this vindictive hatred must somehow be good and pious.
These poets lived in a world of savage punishments, of massacre and violence, of blood sacrifice in all countries and human sacrifice in many.
But this is one of the rewards of reading the Old Testament regularly. You keep on discovering more and more what a tissue of quotations from it the New Testament is; how constantly Our Lord repeated, reinforced, continued, refined, and sublimated, the Judaic ethics, how very seldom He introduced a novelty.
Against all this the ferocious parts of the Psalms serve as a reminder that there is in the world such a thing as wickedness and that it (if not its perpetrators) is hateful to God. In that way, however dangerous the human distortion may be, His word sounds through these passages too.
As Dr. Moffatt translates it: “None can buy himself off. Not one can purchase for a price from God (soul’s ransom is too dear) life that shall never end.”
It seems quite clear that in most parts of the Old Testament there is little or no belief in a future life; certainly no belief that is of any religious importance. The word translated “soul” in our version of the Psalms means simply “life”; the word translated “hell” means simply “the land of the dead”, the state of all the dead, good and bad alike, Sheol.
Sheol is even dimmer, further in the background, than Hades. It is a thousand miles away from the centre of Jewish religion; especially in the Psalms. They speak of Sheol (or “hell” or “the pit”) very much as a man speaks of “death” or “the grave” who has 110 belief in any sort of future state whatever—a man to whom the dead are simply dead, nothing, and there’s no more to be said.
The Pharisees, and apparently many more, believed in the life of the world to come.
For the truth seems to me to be that happiness or misery beyond death, simply in themselves, are not even religious subjects at all. A man who believes in them will of course be prudent to seek the one and avoid the other. But that seems to have no more to do with religion than looking after one’s health or saving money for one’s old age. The only difference here is that the stakes are so very much higher.
Later, when, after centuries of spiritual training, men have learned to desire and adore God, to pant after Him “as pants the hart”, it is another matter. For then those who love God will desire not only to enjoy Him but “to enjoy Him forever”, and will fear to lose Him. And it is by that door that a truly religious hope of Heaven and fear of Hell can enter; as corollaries to a faith already centred upon God, not as things of any independent or intrinsic weight.
And notice here the strange roads by which God leads His people. Century after century, by blows which seem to us merciless, by defeat, deportation, and massacre, it was hammered into the Jews that earthly prosperity is not in fact the certain, or even the probable, reward of seeing God.
This helps to remind us at the outset that Judaism, though it is the worship of the one true and eternal God, is an ancient religion. That means that its externals, and many of its attitudes, were much more like those of Paganism than they were like all that stuffiness—all that regimen of tiptoe tread and lowered voice—which the word “religion” suggests to so many people now.
Every temple in the world, the elegant Parthenon at Athens and the holy Temple at Jerusalem, was a sacred slaughterhouse. (Even the Jews seem to shrink from a return to this. They have not rebuilt the Temple nor revived the sacrifices.)
The Temple was the place of sacrifice, the place where the essential worship of Jahweh was enacted.
The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance.
Thus when the Psalmists speak of “seeing” the Lord, or long to “see” Him, most of them mean something that happened to them in the Temple.
They long to live all their days in the Temple so that they may constantly see “the fair beauty of the Lord” (27, 4). Their longing to go up to Jerusalem and “appear before the presence of God” is like a physical thirst (42). From Jerusalem His presence flashes out “in perfect beauty” (50, 2). Lacking that encounter with Him, their souls are parched like a waterless countryside (63, 2). They crave to be “satisfied with the pleasures” of His house (65, 4). Only there can they be at ease, like a bird in the nest (84, 3). One day of those “pleasures” is better than a lifetime spent elsewhere
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All Christians know something the Jews did not know about what it “cost to redeem their souls”. Our life as Christians begins by being baptised into a death; our most joyous festivals begin with, and centre upon, the broken body and the shed blood. There is thus a tragic depth in our worship which Judaism lacked.
In other words, this poem is not, and does not pretend to be, a sudden outpouring of the heart like, say, Psalm 18, It is a pattern, a thing done like embroidery, stitch by stitch, through long, quiet hours, for love of the subject and for the delight in leisurely, disciplined craftsmanship.
The Order of the Divine mind, embodied in the Divine Law, is beautiful. What should a man do but try to reproduce it, so far as possible, in his daily life? His “delight” is in those statutes (16); to study them is like finding treasure (14); they affect him like music, are his “songs” (54); they taste like honey (103); they are better than silver and gold (72). As one’s eyes are more and more opened, one sees more and more in them, and it excites wonder (18).
But I think we all see pretty well what the Psalmists mean. They mean that in the Law you find the “real” or “correct” or stable, well-grounded, directions for living.
They were tempted, since the Lord seemed deaf, to try those appalling deities who demanded so much more and might therefore perhaps give more in return. But when a Jew in some happier hour, or a better Jew even in that hour, looked at those worships—when he thought of sacred prostitution, sacred sodomy, and the babies thrown into the fire for Moloch—his own “Law” as he turned back to it must have shone with an extraordinary radiance. Sweeter than honey; or if that metaphor does not suit us who have not such a sweet tooth as all ancient peoples (partly because we have plenty of sugar), let us
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But in reality the Psalmists mention hardly any kind of evil more often than this one, which the most civilised societies share. “Their throat is an open sepulchre, they flatter” (5, 10), “under his tongue is ungodliness and vanity”, or “perjury” as Dr. Moffatt translates it (10, 7), “deceitful lips” (12, 3), “lying lips” (31, 20), “words full of deceit” (36, 3), the “whispering” of evil men (41, 7), cruel lies that “cut like a razor” (52, 3), talk that sounds “smooth as oil” and will wound like a sword (55, 22), pitiless jeering (102, 8). It is all over the Psalter.
The Psalmists, who are writing lyrics not romances, naturally give us little landscape. What they do give us, far more sensuously and delightedly than anything I have seen in Greek, is the very feel of weather—weather seen with a real countryman’s eyes, enjoyed almost as a vegetable might be supposed to enjoy it. “Thou art good to the earth . . . thou waterest her furrows . . . thou makest it soft with the drops of rain . . . the little hills shall rejoice on every side . . . the valleys shall stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing” (65, 9–14).
But of course the doctrine of Creation leaves Nature full of manifestations which show the presence of God, and created energies which serve Him. The light is His garment, the thing we partially see Him through (104, 2), the thunder can be His voice (29, 3–5). He dwells in the dark thundercloud (18, 11), the eruption of a volcano comes in answer to His touch (104, 32). The world is full of his emissaries and executors. He makes winds His messengers and flames His servants (104, 4), rides upon cherubim (18, 10), commands the army of angels.
Another result of believing in Creation is to see Nature not as a mere datum but as an achievement. Some of the Psalmists are delighted with its mere solidity and permanence. God has given to His works His own character of emeth; they are watertight, faithful, reliable, not at all vague or phantasmal. “All His works are faithful—He spake and it was done, He commanded and it stood fast” (33, 4, 9). By His might (Dr. Moffatt’s version) “the mountains are made firm and strongly fixed” (65, 6). God has laid the foundations of the earth with perfect thoroughness (104, 5).
In the great Psalm especially devoted to Nature, from which I have just quoted (104),1 we have not only the useful cattle, the cheering vine, and the nourishing corn. We have springs where the wild asses quench their thirst (11), fir trees for the storks (17), hill country for the wild goats and “conies” (perhaps marmots, 18), finally even the lions (21); and even with a glance far out to sea, where no Jew willingly went, the great whales playing, enjoying themselves (26).
It is the same in 147, 9; though the raven was an unclean bird to Jews, God “feedeth the young ravens that call upon him”. The thought which gives these creatures a place in the Psalmist’s gusto for Nature is surely obvious. They are our fellow-dependents; we all, lions, storks, ravens, whales—live, as our fathers said, “at God’s charges”, and the mention of all equally redounds to His praise.
I did not see that it is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men. It is not of course the only way. But for many people at many times the “fair beauty of the Lord” is revealed chiefly or only while they worship Him together.
I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game—praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars.
The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.
This does not mean, as it can so dismally suggest, that it is like “being in Church”. For our “services” both in their conduct and in our power to participate, are merely attempts at worship; never fully successful, often 99.9 per cent failures, sometimes total failures. We are not riders but pupils in the riding school; for most of us the falls and bruises, the aching muscles and the severity of the exercise, far outweigh those few moments in which we were, to our own astonishment, actually galloping without terror and without disaster.
The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”. But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
But this of course is not the way in which they have chiefly been used by Christians. They have been believed to contain a second or hidden meaning, an “allegorical” sense, concerned with the central truths of Christianity, with the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and with the Redemption of man. All the Old Testament has been treated in the same way.
The Book of Job appears to me unhistorical because it begins about a man quite unconnected with all history or even legend, with no genealogy, living in a country of which the Bible elsewhere has hardly anything to say; because, in fact, the author quite obviously writes as a story-teller not as a chronicler.
He then explained, from “Moses” (i.e. the Pentateuch) down, all the places in the Old Testament “concerning Himself” (Luke 24, 25–27). He clearly identified Himself with a figure often mentioned in the Scriptures; appropriated to Himself many passages where a modern scholar might see no such reference. In the predictions of His Own Passion which He had previously made to the disciples. He was obviously doing the same thing. He accepted—indeed He claimed to be—the second meaning of Scripture.
Christ has ascended into Heaven. And in due time all things, quite strictly all, will be subjected to Him. It is He who having been made (for a while) “lower than the angels”, will become the conqueror and ruler of all things, including death and (death’s patron) the devil.
