The Book of Psalms

Posts

  • Psalm 132

    (a song of steps) * * * Readers of ancient texts have to be especially alert to the time axis, that horizontal arrow that traces the production and reproduction of cultural memory. In hymns about foundational figures, for example, there is the t=0 of the moment of writing, a point that stretches to a line Read more

  • Psalm 131

    (song of steps, of David) * * * It matters very much whose voice we hear, reading Psalm 131. Overall its gestures of obeisance seem deferential and docile to the point of wincing and cringing. However literally we take the heart (1a), eyes (1b), throat (2a, 2c), and legs (“have not walked around,” 1c) in Read more

  • Psalm 130

    (a song of steps) * * * The least penitent of the traditional “penitential psalms,” Psalm 130 twice follows a stanza of poignant experience with a stanza of theological reflection. The first stanza (verses 1-2) deepens the typical opening of a psalm of lament, while the second (3-4) describes the Lord as forgiving, not fault-finding. Read more

  • Psalm 129

    (a song of steps) * * * The two halves of Psalm 129— four verses of oppression, four of enemies undone—cohere by their defiance and imagination. They hold together, too, by perfective verbs in the third-person plural: “they,” and what they have and will not have done. An us-against-them psalm, it begins by borrowing pathos Read more

  • Psalm 128

    (a song of steps) * * * In contrast with Psalm 127, to which it seems a linguistic and thematic retort, Psalm 128 does not imagine deploying children from private home to public gate, the domestic against the civic, as in combat. The prior psalm began by doubting divine support for communal projects before claiming, Read more

  • Psalm 127

    (a song of steps, of Solomon) * * * Psalm 127 is known more as parts than as a whole. Some know the foundational counterfactuals of its long first verse; some love the little lullaby at the end of verse 2, “thus he gives his dearest | sleep”; and others cite those final three verses, Read more