The Christian Use of the Psalter. Whitham Arthur Richard
the Psalms ever the first Temple, or is it always the second? Such problems still wait an answer. Again, there are difficulties inherent in Hebrew thought. It is intensely concrete and personal, in contrast with our more usual abstractions and generalities. The Psalmists speak habitually of "the wicked" and "the ungodly," where we should more naturally speak of the qualities rather than the persons. They ignore, as a rule, immediate or secondary causes, and ascribe everything in nature or human affairs to the direct action or intervention of God. Thus a thunder-storm is described:
There went a smoke out in His presence:
And a consuming fire out of His mouth,
so that coals were kindled at it.
And thus a national calamity:
Thou hast shewed Thy people heavy things:
Thou hast given us a drink of deadly wine.
Such ways of describing God's work in Nature or His providence are partly, of course, due to the fact (often overlooked by the half-educated) that the Psalms are poetry and not prose. For the same reason inanimate objects are personified: "the earth trembled at the look of Him," "the mountains skipped like lambs"; the mythical "Leviathan" appears both as a title of Egypt (lxxiv. 15) and as an actual monster of the deep (civ. 26). God Himself, again, is spoken of in language that might seem more appropriate to man. He is "provoked," and "tempted." He awakes "like a giant refreshed with wine." He is called upon, not to sleep nor to forget, to avenge, to "bow the heavens and come down."
Nor do the Psalms in their literal meaning rise always above the current and imperfect religious conceptions of their time. The moral difficulties involved in this will be considered a little later, but it may be interesting to point out here some examples which bear on the progressiveness of revelation in the Old Testament by which heathen ideas became, under God's guidance, "stepping-stones to higher things." The Psalms seem sometimes to speak as if "the gods of the heathen" really existed and were in some way rivals of the God of Israel, universal and supreme though He is acknowledged to be. They are spoken of as "devils" as well as idols. They are called upon to "worship Him" (cf. cvi. 36, xcvii. 7, 9, cxxxviii. i).
Again, the Psalmists' horizon is, for the most part, limited to this present life, which is regarded as if it were the chief, almost the only, scene in which moral retribution would be worked out. And occasionally there appears the primitive Hebrew idea of the after-world as the vague and gloomy Sheol, like the shadowy Hades of Homer, where the dead "go down into silence," where, instead of purpose and progress, there is but a dawnless twilight, the land "without any order" of Job (xlix., lxxxviii., cxv. 17).
And yet the more one studies and uses the Psalms in the light of other Scriptures and the Church's interpretation, the more it is found that these partial, at first sight erroneous, conceptions have still their practical value for Christians. There is nothing in them that is positively false, and they suggest, on the other hand, aspects of truth which we tend to forget. Thus in the instances given above, by "the gods of the heathen" the Christian may well be reminded of the continued existence and influence in the heathen world of the powers of evil, of the malignant warfare that is still being waged by "principalities and powers" against light and truth. The ancient conception of the shadowy abode of the dead has also its value. Even the Lord Himself could speak of the night coming "when no man can work" (John ix. 4), and such Psalms as the 49th and the 115th may serve to remind us that this life is a time of work and probation in a sense that the life after death is not, that the grave cannot reverse the line that has been followed here nor put praises in the mouth of those who have never praised God "secretly or in the congregation" in this world. And again, the "present-worldliness" of the Psalter may well point the duty of Christians in respect of what they see and know around them here. Many are content, while repeating pious phrases about heaven, to ignore the fact that this present human life is the great sphere of Christian activity, and that whether the Church is able to regenerate human society here or not, it is her business to try to do it, as fellow-workers with Him—
Who helpeth them to right that suffer wrong:
Who feedeth the hungry.
Have we not a remarkable witness to the continuity of the Holy Spirit's teaching, and to the fact that not "one jot or one tittle" of the law is to remain unfulfilled, in the way that these apparent imperfections and limitations of the Psalter fall into their place in connection with the later revelation?
Another obvious difficulty of the Psalter lies in the frequent obscurity of connection between verse and verse, in the rapid transitions, in the uncertainty as to the sequence of thought, or the meaning of the Psalm as a whole. This difficulty, as it bears upon the liturgical use of the Psalms, has been increased by the abolition of the antiphons, which in the pre-Reformation offices certainly helped at times to suggest a leading thought, or to guide the worshipper as to the Church's intention in the recitation of this or that Psalm. (Note C, p. 104.) Sometimes indeed, the connection between the verses of a Psalm is really very slight, more a matter of suggestion or association than of logic. Such is the case in "proverbial" Psalms, like the 33rd, 34th, and 37th, or the 119th. But in others it is well worth the effort to gain a continuous view of the Psalm as a whole. A simple commentary will give this, or even sometimes the R.V. alone, or the headings in the A.V., such as the very suggestive one prefixed to the 110th: "1 The kingdom, 4 the priesthood, 5 the conquest, 7 and the passion of Christ." (Note D, p. 106.)
There are also difficulties caused by a real obscurity in the Hebrew, or by mistranslations. Here, again, a comparison with the R.V. is of great value. The meaning of the 87th springs to light at once when we read "This one was born there," instead of the mysterious "Lo, there was he born," etc. The Psalm refers not to the birth of the Messiah, but to the new birth of individuals out of the heathen races who thus become citizens of Sion. "So let indignation vex him, even as a thing that is raw" (lviii. 8), becomes certainly more intelligible as "He shall take them away with a whirlwind, the green and the burning alike" (a metaphor from a traveller's fire of brushwood, blown away by a sudden wind); and even if "the beasts of the people" remains still obscure in Ps. lxviii. in the revised translation, its "why hop ye so, ye high hills?" is more significant when it is read—
Why look ye askance, ye high mountains:
At the mountain which God hath desired for His abode?
Sometimes the alteration of a single word makes the difference between obscurity and sense, as in xlix. 5, where "the wickedness of my heels" becomes intelligible as "iniquity at my heels"; or in Ps. xlii., where "Therefore will I remember thee concerning the land of Judah and the little hill of Hermon" is made clear at once by the substitution of "from" for "concerning." The verse is the cry of the exile, who, far away in northern Palestine, among the sources of the Jordan, yearns for the Temple and its services, which he is no longer able to visit.
Doubtless the reasons which prevented the older version of the Psalms being changed in the Prayer Book in the seventeenth century, when other passages of Scripture were revised, still hold good. Neither A.V. nor R.V. are so well adapted for music, nor have they endeared themselves to the worshipper by daily use. Those who have time and opportunity may discover for themselves more exact meanings or clear up difficulties by private study. But even those who have not may find that there are better uses of the Psalter than a merely intellectual grasp of its meaning. Possibly an occasional obscurity may even have a humbling or awe-inspiring effect on the mind. The strange version of the Vulgate of Ps. lxxi. 14, though incorrect, is not without its point:
Quoniam non cognovi litteraturam,
introibo in potentias Domini.8
Learning by itself can never lift the soul on the wings of devotion and worship. The unlearned, Christ's "little ones," have in every age found a voice that spoke to them in the liturgy of the Catholic Church, even though its accents were inarticulate, and its message music rather than words. Such considerations may prevent us distressing ourselves because something, perhaps much, in the Church's book of praise is unintelligible and must remain so.
Two
"Inasmuch as I know not man's learning, I will enter into the mighty works of the Lord."