The Book of Psalms

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  • Psalm 78

    (an Asaph didactic) * * * That Psalm 78 is a grand psalm concerned with history is clear. As always, we readers have to ask whose history, told how, told when and for whom, and to what ends? Every story does things as it chooses beginnings, middles, and ends. This story-psalm in particular chooses explicitly. Read more

  • Psalm 77

    (director: on Jeduthun, an Asaph lyric) * * * This is a sensational psalm. It is deft and layered, powerfully personal and embodied, and yet richly allusive. It transposes its first-person first half to a grand and mythic register. So much of the drama of the Asaph psalms that precede Psalm 77 is distilled here Read more

  • Psalm 76

    (director: strings, an Asaph lyric, a song) * * * Once we admit that the selah notations in Psalms do not necessarily mark section breaks, as here in verses 3 and 9 of Psalm 76 (cf. Pss 4, 20, 46, 52, 55), it’s possible to see different structures. The twenty-four lines of this psalm yield Read more

  • Psalm 75

    (director: don’t destroy, an Asaph lyric, a song) * * * Repetitive lines go nowhere fast but are easily explained. “We give thanks to you God | we give thanks” (1) and “don’t raise your horn / don’t raise high | your horn” (4-5), for example, pose only the question of why one should say Read more

  • Psalm 74

    (didactic, an Asaph) * * * The destruction of places dedicated to Israel’s God is at the heart of Psalm 74. It is impossible to tell whether these special places are all part of one place, “Mount Zion | here you lodged” (2), Solomon’s Temple, razed in the 6th c. BCE by the Neo-Babylonians, or Read more

  • Psalm 73

    (an Asaph lyric) * * * The central collection of psalms in the Psalter (Pss 73-89) begins with this meticulous, searching lyric that is wise beyond years and ahead of us all. Its narrative of transformation is held together by a cluster of cues. They shape its discoveries and underscore its contrasts. The basic story Read more