This too is the genius of the Psalter. Its poetry speaks the language of every person because it mirrors not only the general and the typical, but also the particular and the specific. The first word is very often the personal divine name of God, יהוה. In the Book of Common Prayer, and in most English Bible versions as well, the name יהוה is translated LORD (all upper case); אדני Adonai, or Lord (lowercase), is translated as the epithet meaning Sovereign. This feature again represents the psalmists’ concern to preserve the sanctity of the holy and sacred Name: יהוה. In the use of this one word so much is compressed, especially allusions to the personal relationship with יהוה and the confession that [he] alone can save. Claus Westermann explains the structure of Hebrew poetry and rhyme in this way:
It is a feature of the Hebrew language (as well as the neighboring Semitic languages) that sentences rather than words or syllables are rhymed. The rhyme occurs neither in sound nor in the number of words but in the meaning of the sentences. In this feature the ancient idea is kept alive that all human speech consists not of words, but sentences. Not the single word but the sentence as a whole is the basic unit.51
It is from this perspective that thought-rhymes or sentence-rhymes called parallelism are to be understood. In the Psalms, singing and praying are still united; psalms are sung prayers or prayed singing. As songs they are at the same time what we call poetry but in a different sense than our modern poetry. The Psalms unite in themselves three separate types of word formulations: prayers (words directed to God in petition or praise), poetry (poetically formulated language), and songs (that go beyond the speaking or recital of a poem and become music). Poetic language, then, becomes the voice of the Hebrew Bible. This voice calls out to us from the distant vistas of history and is the community’s witness to ancient and foreign encounters with the Holy. It is never easy to determine the exact meaning of the text amid its many layered forms.
The full hearing of the psalms will be greatly enhanced when the familiar tendency to abstract content from form or to empty form of its content is overcome. To know the psalms are poetic is not to forget that they are Scripture. To read and hear them as Scripture requires that one receive them also as poetry. From either direction, understanding is all. 52
Establishing the historical context of a given psalm is all but impossible. The titles, where provided, are considered to be later additions. They are not part of the early text, and are thought not to be reliable for establishing any historical frame of reference. So at best we are confronted with material that is book-ended by the Babylonian exile–pre-exilic and post-exilic.
A critical and essential component of the hermeneutical task then involves interpreting the Psalms through a continuous reinterpretation as a method of studying how each psalm may be understood. Interacting with the texts themselves and paying close attention to the details of the language is demanded. Discerning the shape and shaping of the Psalter can provide the serious exegete with an interpretative vantage point. This is no modest task, as Klaus Seybold remarks:
In the practical work of exegesis on the Psalms it proves useful to begin by seeing how a psalmist opens his psalm, and how he closes it. In all speech, the first word is of paramount importance, as it marks the speaker’s point of attack, where he himself stands or professes to stand, from where he makes himself heard, in which direction he speaks or calls, and where he knows or presumes the listener to be. 53
An added complexity to early biblical Hebrew was the absence of vowel markings, punctuation, and cases. Sentence divisions—as we know them—as well as a system of notation indicating grammar were only added to the Hebrew text in the Middle Ages. The present division of the biblical text was adopted by Stephen Langton (1150–1228 CE) and was incorporated into the Hebrew text in the fourteenth-century CE. These divisions do not reflect the text’s original arrangement. With precious few exceptions, the dates and relative setting at which the hymns and prayers as they are now preserved in the Psalter, were originally composed, cannot be determined with anything like precision. It clearly appears that the great majority of them, like the proverbs and hymnic poems later collected in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, surfaced orally and were chanted or sung in communal worship in the temple before the fall of Jerusalem in the early sixth-century (587 BCE).
It is likely that some of them may come from David himself; others, not so likely. For example, we know that the psalms of Korah (Psalms 42, 44–49; 84–85; 87–88) most likely originated in at least the early eighth-century BCE near the ancient sanctuary of Dan in the far northern frontier of Israel. The head-waters of the ravines and torrents in the foothills of Mount Hermon is the most probable geographic location for many of these psalms. These “northern songs” most likely made their way south in the latter part of that century under the pressure of Assyrian incursion and the subsequent invasion of the territory of the northern tribes of Israel resulting in the wholesale destruction of Samaria in 722–21 BCE.
Our interpretative challenge in understanding so many of the psalms is a multi-layered one. The psalmists’ close bonds with יהוה are spelled out in striking images; the affirmation that each of the psalmists live in the grace of יהוה; that the cup of salvation comes only from יהוה (Ps 116:13); that each psalmist perceives their own individual identity and destiny; that all that makes up life in God is in the hands of יהוה to give and to shape. The gift is the presence of יהוה who will never abandon to death and nothingness [his] covenant-partner. Bonded in a love of extraordinary fidelity, the emphasis is on total devotion to יהוה and trust in [his] abiding presence.
The Hebrew “gospel” can be summed up as follows: You will show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are unimagined glories forevermore (Ps 16:11, LW). The path of life (ארח חיים) is none other than יהוה who is the journey and the journey’s end. Life is a gift to be held in trust—like the land that was held in trust to God’s people. All statements about life are to be seen and understood in the liturgical context of Israel’s psalms without losing sight of the fact that Israel shared widely in the expressions and concepts of the ancient religious world and the neighboring peoples surrounding her.
The relative antiquity of psalms can be traced to their origins in Late Bronze Age II. We assess these relative dates by assigning to Israel’s origins some pertinent archaeological data. Important non-biblical sources for establishing Israelite origins in Palestine are the Merneptah Stele (ca. thirteenth-century BCE), which mentions an Egyptian defeat of “Israel” in Canaan, dated to ca. 1207 BCE, and the Amarna Letters, which disclose extensive political and social upheaval in the Canaanite city-states during the approximate period 1390–1362 BCE. The stele’s reference to Israel gives us a valuable chronological horizon for establishing the presence of Israel in Palestine by at least 1230 BCE, the beginning of Early Iron Age I. It is altogether probable that Israel—by the late thirteenth century BCE—was first a loosely confederated group of clans, and then, of tribes.
Merneptah’s inscription is hardly sober fact, but royal propaganda. There are many points of dispute in its interpretation. Nevertheless, it establishes that a group called Israel had a recognized presence in Palestine around 1200 and was important enough for an Egyptian monarch to brag about defeating them. It is significant that Israel is not simply given the standard label Shasu or sand dwellers, stock terms for despised Asiatic folk in Egyptian materials. Instead, Israel is referred to by name as a foe worthy of mention. Israel must have been prominent enough to serve the inscription’s propaganda purpose of honoring the king and to be recognized by its intended readership.54
Although the stele does not locate the geographical site of the battle or tell us anything about the strained and often duplicitous relations between the Egyptian court and its Canaanite vassals, it enlightens us about the internecine struggles that occurred among the vassal states. They attest to social unrest and rebellion within some of the city-states that seem to display early stages in the decline of the power centers in Canaan. In the absence of regional powers, this political vacuum would have allowed Israel to emerge in the same region more than a century later. We presume, based on this data then, that Israel emerged as an amphictionic tribal formation somewhere toward the end of Late Bronze Age II extending into Early Iron Age I. This then positions Israel’s origins and beginnings