Trusting YHWH. Lorne E. Weaver

It would be another two centuries until the time of Samuel, Saul, and David and the flowering of Israel’s psalmic musical poetry. Other traditional hymns of praise likely were sung but no additional compositions are extant to our knowledge. One of the scrolls from the Dead Sea (11QPs a) attributes the composition of over four thousand psalms to David.

      And he [David] wrote psalms: three thousand six hundred; and songs to be sung before the altar over the perpetual offering of every day, for all the days of the year: three hundred and sixty-four; and for the sabbath offerings: fifty-two songs; and for the offering for the beginning of the month, and for all the days of the festivals, and for the day of atonement: thirty songs. And all the songs which he composed were four hundred and forty-six. And songs to be sung over the possessed: four. The total was four thousand and fifty. He composed them all through the spirit of prophecy which had been given to him from before the Most High. 73

      David was a prodigious figure and revered well into the second-century CE down to today. The tradition of Davidic authorial compositions was established fairly early on. The objective was to fuse singularly the person of David with the Psalter. This fixed and early tradition suggests the Davidization of the book of Psalms thereby conferring a particular special authority to the writings. Even so, the Five Books of the Psalms, which provide a certain arrangement and structure to the Psalter is reminiscent of the Five Books of Moses. Scribal intentions were most likely intended to attest to a privileged authority and the mantle of certainty of authorship of these two giants in ancient Israel’s saga. The legitimization of a Davidic tradition is the subject of some of the oldest historical writings in the Hebrew Bible and consists of the account of David’s rise to power (I Sam 16:14; II Sam 5:12) and the throne succession narrative in II Sam 6:28–20:26 and I Kings 1–2. The divine legitimization of the Davidic kingship originated in Jerusalem following the fall of the north (Israel) in 721 BCE, and played a crucial role in ancient Israel’s evolving story and lived experience of a learned, experiential trust in יהוה.

      The psalmist testifies to his intimate trust in Yahweh and expresses confidence (a kind of indirect prayer) that the offenders will be destroyed by Yahweh, from whom they have gone astray. The language is especially appropriate for the king: he is perpetually beside God, who has taken hold of his right hand. God conducts him by the agency of his ‘counsel’, which is here rather like the personified word and the covenant-graces which assist in guidance. ‘Counsel’ itself is commonly associated with kings and their political affairs. 74

      While the exact dates at which time the hymns and prayers now preserved in the Psalter were originally composed cannot be determined with anything like precision, it appears that the great majority of them first surfaced orally. Some of these songs may have come from the poet king himself. Many of these were songs of thanksgiving and were then chanted or sung to instrumental accompaniment before the fall of Jerusalem and during the exile, when in a clearly exilic poem, they are chided and taunted by their captors to sing us one of the songs of Zion (cf. Psalm 137).

      A thanksgiving hymn to be sung in a foreign land following the loss of Jerusalem and the temple was beyond the ken of a suffering people who never imagined they would ever sing songs of thanks and praise again. Although the Hebrew language does not have a word for thank, these psalms, sometimes designated as thanksgiving, or todah psalms, capture the essence of Israel’s praises offered to יהוה. Claus Westermann contends that since there is no word for thank in Hebrew this fact has never been properly evaluated.

      The ignoring of this fact can be explained only in that we live so unquestioningly in the rhythm between the poles of thanks and request, of please and thank you; the thought does not occur to anyone that these concepts are not common to all, have not always been present as a matter of course, do not belong to the presuppositions of social intercourse, nor to those of the contrast between God and humanity. According to the book of Exodus, these very earliest songs of thanksgiving and unbridled joy, gratitude and unitive praise, very soon give way to murmurings, complaints and, ultimately, an outright rebellion against Moses’ leadership by the community at Meribah. Harvey Guthrie was the first to observe that

      when we find passages in the Psalter, as well as the prophetic books, in which Yahweh accuses [his] people of misunderstanding and rebellion, passages which seem to conform in general to a fairly fixed pattern, we find ourselves squarely in the ethos of the faith and institutions of the pre-monarchical tribal confederation.75