Psalms — themes & analysis

The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has organised the collection into three broad movements that recur across the whole book: psalms of orientation, psalms of disorientation, and psalms of new orientation. Psalms of orientation — Psalm 1, Psalm 8, Psalm 19, Psalm 145, much of the wisdom and creation material — articulate the world as it is meant to be: ordered, just, beautiful, the work of a wise creator. Psalms of disorientation — the great laments and the imprecatory psalms — articulate the world as it sometimes appears to those living in it: cruel, silent, dominated by the wicked, with God either absent or present and not acting. Psalms of new orientation are not a return to the first naïveté but the gratitude of someone who has come through disorientation and discovered, on the far side, that the world is held by something the disorientation could not finally negate.

What is striking, by the standards of religious literature anywhere else, is the proportion. More than a third of the Psalter is lament. Disorientation is not the exception; it is the largest single mode of address. The book takes for granted that a person who actually prays will, in the course of a life, spend long stretches in each of these registers, and it provides language for each. It does not ask the reader to graduate from disorientation, as if mature faith would have moved past it. It assumes that mature faith continues to use Psalm 88 alongside Psalm 100, and that the same person who sings the one will, in another season, need the other. This is what most religious poetry since the Psalter has been unable to sustain. Most later religious poetry tilts toward orientation or stages a single dramatic transition through disorientation to new orientation. The Psalter does not graduate. It just keeps the full keyboard available.

Where to follow it: Psalm 1 (the two ways), Psalm 22 (forsaken — and pivot), Psalm 88 (no pivot — darkness only), Psalm 100 (pure praise).

More than a third of the Psalter is lament, and the form is so consistent across the laments that most critical scholars treat it as one of the book's two or three native genres. A lament addresses God by name. It describes the trouble — usually with the speaker as victim of enemies, sickness, false accusation, or the silence of God himself — in vivid concrete detail that the modern reader sometimes finds disorienting in its specificity. It complains, often angrily, often bitterly, sometimes accusing God of having forgotten the speaker or of being asleep. It asks for deliverance, often with imprecation against the enemies. And then, almost always, it pivots — sometimes mid-psalm, sometimes only in the last verse — to an expression of confidence or vow of thanksgiving.

Psalm 22 is the most famous example: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me" opens it; "I will declare thy name unto my brethren" closes it. Christian readers have heard the opening from the cross, in Mark and Matthew. Jewish readers have prayed the whole psalm for two and a half millennia. The pivot is what gives the lament its peculiar shape: it is not a complaint that ends in despair, and it is not a complaint that resolves itself by withdrawing the complaint. It holds, simultaneously, the trouble and the trust. Psalm 88 is the great exception that proves the rule: it is the only psalm that ends in unrelieved darkness, with "lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness." That the book includes Psalm 88 at all is one of the most striking facts about it. The Psalter does not require even its laments to resolve.

Where to follow it: Psalm 6 (the penitential lament), Psalm 22 (the great lament), Psalm 42–43 (as a deer pants), Psalm 88 (no resolution).

There is a small group of psalms — Psalms 35, 58, 69, 109, 137 are the most discussed — that pray for violent things to happen to enemies. The most famous and the most uncomfortable is the closing of Psalm 137, the great exilic lament "by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion," which ends with the line: "O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."

Modern liturgical practice has often quietly suppressed these verses. C. S. Lewis, in Reflections on the Psalms, argued that the imprecations are evidence both of the Psalmists' moral seriousness — they cared enough about justice to pray fiercely against injustice — and of the gap between the ancient ethic and the New Testament's love of enemies. Many modern Jewish commentators have argued that the imprecations are exactly what makes the Psalter usable for people in real, ongoing oppression: they refuse to spiritualise the desire for justice and put the desire in the mouth of the speaker rather than the hand. To pray Psalm 137 is to refuse the option of carrying out the violence oneself; the violence is committed to God. What is undeniable is that these psalms are in the book, and any reading of the Psalter that pretends they are not is a reading the book itself does not authorise.

Where to follow it: Psalm 35, Psalm 58 (break their teeth), Psalm 109 (the great imprecation), Psalm 137 (by the rivers of Babylon).

About a dozen psalms are royal — Psalms 2, 18, 20, 21, 45, 72, 89, 101, 110, 132, 144 are the standard list. They concern the king of Israel: his coronation (Psalm 2), his marriage (Psalm 45), his battles, his prayer (Psalm 18), his enthronement, the dynastic promise that descends to him from David. Psalm 110 is the most disputed. "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool." The line is quoted more often in the New Testament than any other line from the Hebrew Bible, and the Christian tradition has read it from the beginning as a messianic statement about the relation between the Father and the Son.

What is interesting about the royal psalms is that they continued to be sung even after the monarchy ended. There was no king in Jerusalem after 586 BCE. But the psalms about the king were preserved, sung in the second temple, and read as if they were still about a king to come. This is the textual basis of the messianic expectation in late Second Temple Judaism, and the basis of the New Testament's reading of these psalms as fulfilled in Jesus. Whether one accepts that fulfilment or not, the historical fact is that the royal psalms outlived the institution they were composed for, and the book preserved them as future-oriented texts.

Where to follow it: Psalm 2 (the coronation), Psalm 45 (the royal marriage), Psalm 110 (sit at my right hand), Psalm 132 (the dynastic promise).

Whatever else the Psalms are, they are the prayer book of Second Temple Judaism, and they are the prayer book Jesus knew. Jesus would have grown up reciting psalms in synagogue and at home, would have heard them sung in the temple by Levitical choirs, would have used them as the texts of his daily prayer. The Hallel — Psalms 113–118 — was sung at Passover, which means that Jesus, on the night before his death, almost certainly sang Psalm 118 with his disciples in the upper room. From the cross, Mark and Matthew report him quoting the opening of Psalm 22. Luke reports him quoting Psalm 31.

The early monastic communities of the third and fourth centuries adopted the Psalter as the daily diet of prayer, and the practice has continued, in different forms, in the Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, and Reformed traditions ever since. The Benedictine office prays the entire Psalter every week. The Anglican office prays it every month. There is, in other words, an unbroken chain — Jewish before Jesus, Jewish and Christian since — of the same poems being prayed daily, by living people, in the same shape, for nearly three thousand years. The reader who picks up the Psalter today is not picking up an ancient text in the sense in which one picks up Aristotle or Cicero. One is joining a conversation that has been going on, continuously, since the Israelite court at Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE.

Where to follow it: Psalm 22 (quoted from the cross), Psalm 113 (the Hallel begins), Psalm 118 (sung at the Last Supper), Psalm 150 (the final doxology).