Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 91 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session crosses from the Prophets into the Writings, the final third of the Hebrew canon. Dr. Essex first maps the collection, three poetic books, five festival scrolls, three closing prose works, and names its burden: what the righteous do between the promise given and the promise fulfilled. Then comes a working introduction to Hebrew poetry, delivered with self-deprecating humor from a confessed prose man, and the opening of the Psalms. Listen for why the Hebrew title Praises fits the book better than Psalms, and for what the arrangement of authors quietly insists: you can never get away from David.
The Jewish canon's third division is easy to hold: it opens with the three great poetic works, Psalms, Job, and Proverbs, and closes with three prose works, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah counted as one book, and Chronicles. Jesus could name the whole division by its first book, the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms (Luke 24:44). Between the bookends sit five shorter works, the Megilloth or five scrolls, read at Israel's assemblies by the second-temple era: Song of Songs at Passover, Ruth at the Feast of Weeks amid the grain harvest, Lamentations at the late-summer remembrance of Jerusalem's destruction in 586 BC, Ecclesiastes at Tabernacles, the feast of greatest rejoicing, with its call to rejoice in all one's labor, and Esther at Purim, the feast born from the book itself. This course takes up Psalms, Job, Proverbs, the three middle scrolls, and Daniel, the rest having been covered in the previous course.
The Prophets ended with a command: wait, trust, until the Lord's restoration comes. The Writings answer the question that command raises: what does waiting and trusting look like? The saint learns to praise and give thanks while depending on God in the circumstances of life; learns that God knows what he is doing whatever hardships come; and learns that the Creator who will one day make new heavens and a new earth gives wisdom now for living in a fallen world by his moral order. The Writings are continuing revelation for those living between the promise given and the promise fulfilled, which is why, Essex notes, they speak so directly to believers today, who occupy the same position.
The Torah and the Prophets deal overwhelmingly with corporate Israel: the nation promised to Abraham, formed at Sinai, judged by covenant curse, awaiting corporate restoration; the righteous individual in a wicked generation shares the judgment, and the wicked individual in a righteous generation enjoys the blessing, so the individual, as it were, gets lost. The Writings turn the lens: their theme is human life in relation to God with emphasis on the individual godly man. Hence the pattern of prayer and praise (Psalms, but also Job's end, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles), insight into God's work in the world, lessons drawn from the created order, and models of devotion: the excellent woman of Proverbs 31 finds her one narrative embodiment in Ruth, the only other place the word is so used; Haman plays the fool of Proverbs; Daniel is the wise man beside foolish kings; and Chronicles presents David and Solomon in their goodness as examples, warts recorded elsewhere, a caution for the Sunday-school teacher whose pupils will one day read Samuel.
Israel sang long before the Psalter: Exodus 15 celebrates in song what Exodus 14 narrates, and Judges 5 sings what Judges 4 reports. Essex sets the Jael accounts side by side: chapter 4 gives the facts, the peg, the hammer, the temple, while chapter 5 lingers over the scene from angle after angle, blessed among women is Jael, between her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay. That difference, reporting versus lingering, is the difference between prose and poetry, and the prophets' oracular poetry has been echoing it all course long. Essex confesses his own prose-man's resistance, no singing in hospital rooms, please, before granting cheerfully: praise the Lord, I did not write the Bible.
Hebrew has no word for poetry; prose and poetry are Greek and Western categories, and in recent decades Kugel of Yale has led a challenge: since the devices appear in Hebrew prose too, perhaps there is only a continuum of style. Essex declines the nihilism: the text itself names songs and lamentations, as Amos 8:10 pairs the two terms, I will turn your songs into lamentations; the lament is the funeral dirge, and the song the rejoicing that follows deliverance, with a whole vocabulary of singing, rejoicing, and thanksgiving around them. Some portions of the Old Testament are simply more poetic than others; and the lyrics of Israel's songs survive while the music is gone, so that any modern musician who sets a psalm must, like Isaac Watts, rearrange to sing it.
Modern study begins with Robert Lowth in the eighteenth century, who worked from Psalms and Proverbs, poetry from beginning to end, and named the basic structure parallelism: a second line echoing, opposing, or completing the first. Synonymous parallelism: the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands, each element matched; the first line is the sketch, said Essex, and the second adds the color, two lines together giving a fuller picture than either alone. Antithetical parallelism, Proverbs' native mode: a wise son makes a father glad, but a foolish son is a grief to his mother, the contrast of wise and foolish carried by contrasted parents who together are the parental authority. Synthetic parallelism, once Lowth's catch-all: the second line adds or completes, as in, I cry aloud to the Lord, and he answers me from his holy mountain, the answer and its place added to the cry.
Two further categories: emblematic, where a figure carries the thought, as the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for you, O God, the hot, thirsty deer at the stream picturing the soul's desire; and formal parallelism, as in, But as for me, I have installed my King upon Zion, my holy hill, where no neat scheme of matched elements applies, which, Essex notes wryly, is the scholars' way of saying we cannot figure it out. The category exposes the system's limits: Lowth is worth following at the start, but his formula cannot explain every bicolon and tricolon, and Watson's handbook is the place to see the field's current synthesis, commended, with a word to the wise, to anyone choosing a poetic passage for an exegesis paper.
Following Landy's response to Kugel: prose assumes sequential time, poetry an air of timelessness; prose keeps narrator, subject, and reader distinct, poetry expresses feeling so the reader enters the experience, which is precisely why the Psalms were given to be sung by people whose experiences matched them; prose handles everyday life, poetry the liminal moments above it; prose relates things by nearness in time and space, poetry by likeness and difference; and poetry is terse where prose expands, an economy of language, three words where a preacher would use thirty. Hence the practical warning: translating narrative is half the exegesis; translating poetry, with fewer words but far more packed into them, leaves the exegesis barely begun.
Alongside the rhythm of thought runs a rhythm of sound, visible only in Hebrew: the acrostic, lines or stanzas beginning with successive letters of the alphabet, as in Psalm 119 and Proverbs 31, from which we largely learn how Israel ordered its letters; alliteration, as in Psalm 122:6, sha'alu shelom Yerushalaim, pray for the peace of Jerusalem, audible even in English; assonance, matching vowel sounds at line ends, as in Psalm 119:29, though never as regular as English rhyme; paronomasia, wordplay, as in Isaiah 5's vineyard song, he looked for justice, mishpat, but behold bloodshed, mispach; onomatopoeia, words sounding their sense, thunder as ra'am, and the hoofbeats of Judges 5:22; and inclusio, the repeated frame, as Psalm 118 opens and closes with give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his lovingkindness is everlasting. A third area, meter, remains debated: some, including Dr. Barrick in modified form, hold that a metrical stress pattern underlies Hebrew poetry, though it resists full definition.
The Psalter is the longest book of Scripture, and unlike Jeremiah, the longest from one author in one generation, it is an anthology: many authors across the whole Old Testament era. The Hebrew title is Praises; our title comes from the Septuagint's word for songs accompanied by plucked strings. The Greek names the form; the Hebrew names the content and the destination, for the book ends in a crescendo of praise, the last five psalms, and Psalm 150's final doxology, let everything that has breath praise the Lord, and even the laments characteristically end in a vow or declaration of praise. Essex's cheerful preference: had he directed the hand of history, the chapel announcement would be, turn to Praise 100.
About ninety of the 150 psalms carry ascriptions: seventy-three of David, roughly half the book; one of Moses (Psalm 90, from the wilderness era around 1410 BC); two of Solomon; twelve of Asaph; ten of the sons of Korah; one each of Heman and Ethan. The Hebrew lamed prefix could in theory mean of, to, or for, and scholars debate whether it claims authorship; Essex tests the alternatives against Psalm 3's heading, a psalm of David when he fled from Absalom his son, and its opening, O Lord, how my adversaries have increased: a psalm written for David before he fled strains belief, and the natural sense is from David in that situation. The superscriptions, third-person and probably added as the collection formed, reflect author, occasion, or directions for the musicians.
The anthology's dating runs from Moses to the post-exilic era: Psalm 90 at the beginning of Scripture's composition, Psalm 137 by the rivers of Babylon in the exile, Psalm 126 when the Lord brought back the captive ones of Zion. So the Psalter spans the entire Old Testament period in song, just as Chronicles spans it in narrative from Adam to Cyrus's decree: the Writings open and close with an Old Testament in miniature, one sung, one told.
From the earliest manuscripts the Psalter divides into five books, plausibly echoing the five books of the Torah. Each ends in doxology: Psalm 41:13, blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting; Psalm 72:18 and 19, with the intriguing note of verse 20, the prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended, though Davidic psalms appear in every later book; Psalm 89:52; Psalm 106:48, with all the people saying Amen; and Psalm 150 crowning the whole. Either the collector arranged existing doxology-ending psalms as seams, or added the doxologies in arranging; either way the fivefold shape is deliberate, and its trajectory runs from Israel's praise to the praise of everything that has breath.
Reading the ascriptions across the five books yields a pattern. Book one: after the two anonymous opening psalms, thirty-seven of the remaining thirty-nine are Davidic, with Psalm 10 possibly the continuation of Psalm 9 and Psalm 33 anonymous. Book two begins with Levitical psalms of Korah and Asaph and ends with Solomon, enveloping a Davidic core (Psalms 51 to 71, all but three): Levites and king around David. Book three, dominated by Levitical psalms at both ends, still carries one Davidic psalm at its heart, Psalm 86. Book four opens with Moses (Psalm 90), then anonymous psalms bracketing two of David with one between. Book five runs anonymous, three Davidic after Psalm 107, the songs of ascent with Davidic psalms inside them, eight more of David, and the closing hallelujahs. The observation, prior to any interpretation: in the way the Psalter has been structured, you can never get away from David.
The first two psalms come to us anonymous, though Acts 4:25 attributes Psalm 2 to David, information not drawn from the psalm's own text. They are almost universally received today as the introduction to the whole book, framed by blessing: Psalm 1 opens, blessed is the man, and Psalm 2 closes, how blessed are all who take refuge in him. What that doorway means for reading the Psalter as a book, an emphasis of the last generation of scholarship, is the next session's business.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twenty-two are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What is the three-five-three shape of the Writings?
2. Which scroll was read at Tabernacles, and why does it fit?
3. What question do the Writings answer, following the Prophets?
4. How do the Writings shift emphasis from the Torah and Prophets?
5. Where does the excellent woman of Proverbs 31 find her narrative embodiment?
6. What caution does Essex give about Chronicles' portraits of David and Solomon?
7. What contrast do Judges 4 and 5 illustrate?
8. How does Essex answer Kugel's claim that there is no Hebrew poetry?
9. In synonymous parallelism, what does the second line do, in Essex's image?
10. Which book is the native home of antithetical parallelism, and why?
11. What does the category of formal parallelism reveal, per Essex?
12. Why does translating poetry leave the exegesis barely begun?
13. From what do we largely learn the order of the Hebrew alphabet?
14. What wordplay marks Isaiah's vineyard song?
15. What is the Hebrew title of the Psalter, and what does it name?
16. How many psalms are ascribed to David, and what fraction of the book is that?
17. How does Essex argue the lamed of ascription claims authorship?
18. In what sense is the Psalter an Old Testament in miniature?
19. What marks the seam at the end of each of the Psalter's five books?
20. What is intriguing about Psalm 72:20, the prayers of David are ended?
21. What does the authorship pattern across the five books show?
22. How are Psalms 1 and 2 received today, and what frames them?
All twenty-two correct. Lecture 20 is complete.
The Writings answer what waiting and trusting look like between promise and fulfillment, the position believers still occupy. Which of the Writings has actually shaped your waiting, and which have you never really entered?
Essex jokes that he is a prose man who would rather not be sung to in a hospital bed, yet God gave a third of his word in poetry. Why might God choose poetry, with its lingering, likeness, and terseness, for so much of what he says to sufferers and worshipers?
The lament psalms characteristically end in a vow of praise. What would it mean for your own complaints to God to be shaped toward that ending without being rushed to it?
The Psalter never lets the reader get away from David, king, sinner, sufferer, singer. What does the persistence of David in Israel's praise book suggest about where the book means to fix our hope?
Chronicles gives David and Solomon as examples while Samuel and Kings record the warts, and Essex warns the Sunday-school teacher accordingly. How do you present biblical figures as models honestly, and what happens to faith when the warts surface unprepared?
Psalm 150:6
Read Psalm 19:1 to 6 and Proverbs 10:1 to 12 slowly, naming the parallelism in each line, then Judges 4:17 to 22 beside Judges 5:24 to 27 to feel prose become poetry. Read Psalms 1 and 2 as one doorway, and note the doxologies at Psalms 41, 72, 89, 106, and 150. Next session: reading the Psalter as a book, from the doorway of Psalms 1 and 2 through the story the five books tell.