The Aspen Grove

Psalms-The Language of Our Heart

Note Planted: 2024-06-27
Last Tended: 2024-09-17
11 min read

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Importance: 10%

“The Bible is more than prosaic rituals; it is a love letter, a story of adventure & victory, a multigenre conglomeration that God called “good,” full of mystery, romance, comedy, prophecy, even poetry.”

  • Alabaster Co., A Reflection on Poetry in Scripture

Our Heart Language

The Psalms can be thought of as the Christian’s handbook for navigating life1.  In it God’s people of old have expressed their joys and woes, struggles and convictions.  They speak the language of a godly life in all its rich beauty and pain.  A language we as God’s people should learn to speak ourselves.  However, “we are often guilty of speaking the strange words of a lament or enthronement Psalm without serious attempts to help worshipers understand what they are saying.”2

As teachers of God’s word, we should therefore take seriously the task of opening all Scripture to those under our care.  For example, the clear logical argumentation and exposition of the epistles (while admittedly more concrete) should not supplant, but work in unison, with the deep variety and complexity of Biblical poetry.   The Psalms should be an integral part of Scriptural teaching, devotional life and weekly worship.  Their language and timber should shape our lives from week to week.  In the Psalms, we should find a means of expressing the full range of emotion, struggle, but ultimately hope and assurance taught by our ancestors of faith and experienced in our lives as well.   

This kind of biblical knowledge and understanding should reach far beyond didactic theorems or doctrinal positions, but should go down to the core of our being to shape the way we engage every moment of every day.  It is in the Psalms we listen to the prayers of the faithful calling out in pain and loneliness as well as joy and triumph.  We see God’s people engaging the messy realities of life in raw - yet beautiful ways.  The Poetry of the Psalms peels back the layers of our normal perception of the world to look deeper. It challenges us to see God in the midst of everything; the ups and the downs, the heartache and the peaceful rest. In the words of St. Ambrose: “History teaches, the Law instructs, prophecy proclaims, reproach chastens and moralizing persuades; in the Book of Psalms there is the successful accomplishment of all this along with a kind of balm of human salvation.”3

Some Basic Hermeneutical Principles for Read and Teaching the Psalms 

Poetry can be subjective and unclear. Therefore, in order to approach this fount of living water faithfully, we must begin with appropriate guiding principles.  These principles can help us avoid descending into fruitless speculations or self-serving  interpretations. The following principles are drawn primarily from Dr. Timothy Salaska’s forward in the Concordia Commentary Series on Psalm 1-50.

Speaking Style

Hebrew poetry makes primary use of a particular type of sentence structure called parataxis. This can be defined as: 

Paratactic -Independent sentences that continue one after another. Each sentence is complete and makes sense on its own.  A famous example of this kind of sentence structure is Julius Caesar’s declaration: “I came. I saw. I conquered.”

However, much of the written text we are used to reading in Scripture and our daily life makes uses of hypotaxis: 

Hypotactic - Interwoven dependent clauses and sentences. In The Raven Edgar Allen Poe used this sentence structure like this: “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.”

Dr. Timothy Saleska suggests using this observation to read each sentence of a Psalm in the following manner:  “Since the lines in a paratactic construction are arranged somewhat independently of one another, parataxis invites us to read each line somewhat independently of the others. A helpful metaphor is to consider the lines of a psalm as a succession of verbal ornaments hung on a frame. Each lime invites us to slow down the forward progress of our reading and take time to contemplate the ornament that is before us, to ‘linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication.’ I think that it is in these discrete moments provided by each line of a psalm- these moments of lingering, parsing, and teasing out, moments where our minds are actively working to understand- that the power of a psalm begins its work on us.”4 

Compressed Structures of Language

“The lingering, parsing, and teasing out of the poetic line suggests that all the parts that make up the verbal ornament (the line) of a psalm ask for your interpretive attention. That includes everything from the individual words themselves, to the order in which the words have been placed, to the collocations of words that have been intentionally put together. After all, nothing interprets itself. It’s obvious, for example, that you have to figure out what each word of a line means and what the poet’s intentions were when he put them together in the line and then in the entire psalm. What is the best gloss and best translation? How are you going to decide? Translators testify that it is not always easy to decide, and not everyone agrees on the decisions because deciding means emphasizing some things and overlooking others.

Be that as it may, the process of interpretation- the lingering, parsing, teasing out -is fun even though absolute certainty about the meaning of any given line can be elusive. Sometimes the poet wants you to want for more. Sometimes he just wants you to wonder.”5

How We Read Metaphor

“You can also think of a metaphor as a compressed structure of language. When you recognize a metaphor in the line of a psalm, linger over it for a while. Get to know it better. Tease out its implications. When the poet says to God,

‘Certainly you are my rock and my fortress’ (Ps 71:3), stop and ask yourself how you are making sense of what he says. What are the connections that the poet wants you to see? Be (self-)aware of the fact that it is on the basis of your own knowledge of the Scriptures and your experiences of God and rocks and fortresses that you build an interpretation. Lakoff and Johnson urge us to recognize that the helping word ‘is’ in a metaphor such as this one should be viewed as shorthand for some set of experiences on which the metaphor is based and in terms of which we understand it. 

Not only do we use our own experience to interpret metaphors, but we also use metaphors to help interpret our own experience. Metaphors and metonymies structure our language and also our thoughts, attitudes, and actions. Creative metaphors can give us new ways of thinking about something and even change the way we live and act.”6

Connecting the Ornaments

“At the same time that parataxis encourages me to contemplate each line independently, I also want to understand the relationships that link phrase to phrase, clause to clause, stanza to stanza.St As I pass through the discrete moments each line gives me, I want to see how the entire psalm takes shape. I want to know where the poet is taking me. What he is doing.

So lask: How am I making sense of the relationship between these clauses? these lines? these verses? these stanzas? What is the poet doing in any particular case? Does the poet move from a general statement to a more specific one? Or vice versa? Is the proposition in a clause or line subordinate to that in another? If so, how? If not, why? Is there any kind of progression in thought, or does the poet keep circling around an issue? Is the relationship cause and effect? Does the speaker move me through time? If so, in what direction does he take me? Does he move from his present circumstances to his past? Or does he jump back and forth between past, present, and future? Does he stay in one place, or does he move me to different perspectives? Does he give me a closeup view of something or keep me at a bird’s-eye view? Does he give me a peek at his insides, or do I see only the outside? Are there emotional shifts or emotional sequences? Can I describe them? What shift in formal characteristics led me to this conclusion? My goal is to describe how the parts fit into a whole, however messy that whole may look.”7

These few principles can serve to give us a basic framework to approach Psalms as pieces of art and beauty. These prayers and songs are worth slowing down and discovering the truth God desires for us to learn and experience through them. 

Applying These Principles in Meditation 

Read the psalm, and as you read the psalm, read yourself. Practice your self-awareness. These are conversation enabling questions.

  • According to the speaker, where is God? 

  • How does the speaker describe God?

  • How does the psalm hook up to the larger story of the Scriptures?

  • How are the words of the voices in the Psalms true for me? (Or do they not ring true? Why or why not?)

  • Is it easy for you to identify with the speaker or difficult? 

  • What are some things you notice in the psalms?

  • What are some things that you value about what the speaker is saying?

  • When confronted with the words of the speaker, what should I do? Should I do anything?

  • What are you doing as you read?

  • Am I agreeing, questioning, empathizing, pushing back, getting bored, praising God, making certain connections, confused, filled with joy and so on?

  • What does this psalm assume about the way the world is? 

  • What are the key features of the world that this psalm tries to deal with, respond to, make sense of? 

  • What vision of the future animates the speaker? What new sense does the psalm seek to add to a world that often seems chaotic and senseless?

  • What assumptions does the speaker make about God? Are his beliefs surprising to you or old hat? 

  • How does this psalm challenge your imagination or fire it up? 

  • What can people do or imagine, thanks to this psalm, that they could not before?

  • Conversely, what does this psalm make impossible, or at least very difficult?

  • What activities and experiences that were previously part of the human experience become all but impossible in the wake of this new thing?8

Psalm 8 

1 To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith. A Psalm of David.

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.

2 Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

4 what is man that you are mindful of him,  and the son of man that you care for him?

5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings   and crowned him with glory and honor.

6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet,

7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,

8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

9 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Footnotes

  1. Athanasius Patriarch of Alexandria, Life of Antony and Letter to Marcellinus (New York, Paulist Press, 1980), 101-14, ESP. 112. ↩

  2. John Witvliet, The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship: A Brief Introduction & Guide to Resources (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007), 11. ↩

  3. John Witvliet, The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship: A Brief Introduction & Guide to Resources (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007), 4. ↩

  4. Timothy Saleska, Psalm 1-50 Concordia Commentary (Saint Louis, Concordia Publishing, 2020), 7 ↩

  5. Timothy Saleska, Psalm 1-50 Concordia Commentary (Saint Louis, Concordia Publishing, 2020), 7-8 ↩

  6. Timothy Saleska, Psalm 1-50 Concordia Commentary (Saint Louis, Concordia Publishing, 2020), 11 ↩

  7. Timothy Saleska, Psalm 1-50 Concordia Commentary (Saint Louis, Concordia Publishing, 2020), 15 ↩

  8. Questions Provided by Dr. Timothy Saleska ↩

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