Lecture 21: Reading the Psalms: Spurgeon, Gunkel, and the Psalter as a Book

The lecture, section by section

1. The most reinterpreted book

   Childs observed that critical scholarship has ruptured the traditional interpretation of the Psalter more sharply than that of almost any other book, a strong claim given what criticism has done to the Pentateuch, to Isaiah, sliced into Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah, and, Essex jokes, a Quattro-Isaiah if they could find one, and to Daniel, redated to the Maccabees. Yet Childs is right: over the last two centuries the Psalms have been fundamentally reread, and the story falls into three positions that every student of the book should be able to name.

2. Position A: individual expressions of spirituality

   Until the nineteenth century the classic approach read each psalm as an individual unit, anchored where possible in the author's historical experience: Psalm 34's heading places it when David feigned madness before Abimelech (1 Samuel 21), and Psalm 3, from his flight before Absalom, reads naturally as a morning hymn, the fugitive waking to find God had brought him through the night. The approach could overreach: Essex displays Hibbard's 1856 chart assigning every one of the 150 psalms an author, occasion, and exact date BC, Psalm 1 by Ezra in 444 as a preface, Psalm 2 by David responding to Nathan's oracle, precision the text simply does not supply. The tradition's treasure is Spurgeon's Treasury of David, gathering the best of pre-critical interpretation from the Reformers, the Puritans, and the evangelical revivals, with homiletical hints closing every psalm; long in the public domain, it belongs on every preacher's shelf, Spurgeon, as Essex puts it, collecting his royalties from the Lord.

3. Position B: forms used in Israel's worship

   With Hermann Gunkel the twentieth century learned to ask how the psalms functioned in Israel's corporate worship, and the point stands on inductive grounds apart from Gunkel's system: the songs did not remain private compositions but passed to the Levites, the choir directors, for use at the sanctuary. Essex's own seminary professor called the Psalms Israel's hymn book, songs sung with smoke, the smoke of the offerings ascending while the Levites led the singing. The perspective shapes the modern commentaries: Craigie, Tate, and Allen in the Word Biblical Commentary; Kidner, blending it with the older approach; Broyles, unapologetically reading the psalms as tools for worship. And the church has always used them so: from the ancient church's psalmody through Calvin's Geneva to Isaac Watts's freer versifications, and Essex's own boyhood in an English church, non-liturgical yet singing a psalm every Sunday after the pastor read it, a practice he still misses.

4. Position C: the Psalter as an organized book

   The newest movement, roughly twenty-five years old, reads the Psalms as a book: an anthology, but an organized one, arranged by a final Spirit-directed collector as the Twelve was, its compiler perhaps as anonymous as the Twelve's, though tradition has guessed at Ezra. The analogy is the modern hymnal: someone takes the available hymns and orders them, worship of the Father first, then Christ's person and work, the Christmas section, Easter, Christian living; likewise someone placed these one hundred fifty songs. Everyone concedes the frame, Psalms 1 and 2 as introduction and Psalm 150 as conclusion; the canonical approach presses further, asking what themes and purpose the arrangement serves, and reading each psalm within it. Wilson and Grogan represent the approach among the recommended works, their structures differing, for the discussion is young.

5. Toews's outline of the five books

   As one worked example, Essex passes on Brian Toews's 1997 ETS paper, franker than his own first attempt at the same task. After the introduction, book one shows the king in exile: David on the run from Saul and Absalom, learning in his historical life to trust the Lord for deliverance, and thereby becoming the model for all who await Messiah among the enemies of God. Book two centers on Psalm 51, the covenant king's own sin judged, with the Korahite psalms singing the ideal king, and closes at Psalm 72, Solomon's anticipation of the kingdom, sealed with the prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended. Book three sounds Israel's unfaithfulness and exile, culminating in Psalm 89's anguished collision of the Davidic promise with present ruin: how long? Book four gives the prayers of exile and wilderness, opening with Moses and looking to the eternal King of heaven; book five sings the restoration from exile and looks to the kingdom's final establishment. Essex would not go to the stake for the details; the value is the demonstration that the Psalter can be wrestled with as a book.

6. Celebrate, thank, praise: 1 Chronicles 16

   Before Gunkel's categories, Essex grounds the psalm types in the text. When David brought the ark to Jerusalem he offered burnt and peace offerings, blessed the people, and spread the fellowship feast of bread, portion, and raisin cake for every man and woman gathered, representative of all Israel; then he appointed Levites, Asaph first, to minister before the ark, and 16:4 states their threefold purpose: to celebrate, to thank, and to praise the God of Israel. The thanksgiving song that follows (16:8 to 36) stitches together Psalm 105's opening, most of Psalm 96, and the frame of Psalm 106, ending with all the people saying Amen exactly as Psalm 106 requests, three psalms nowhere ascribed to David in the Psalter, yet tied by the Chronicler to David's founding of Levitical praise, while other Levites still served the altar at Gibeon until the temple rose.

7. Three verbs, three types

   The three appointed verbs map onto the three broad psalm types. Zakar, to cause to remember, to recount: the laments, roughly fifty psalms, a third of the book, in which the psalmist recounts his trouble to God, or the nation its trouble, and ends anticipating deliverance; Brueggemann's language, passed on in Cracking Old Testament Codes, calls them prayers of disorientation. Yadah, to acknowledge: the declarative praise or thanksgiving psalms, public acknowledgment that God has answered a petition, the circumstances stated more generally than in laments, and tied by Leviticus 7 to the peace offering, for in Israel one could not publicly thank the Lord without cost: no offering basket passed, bring an animal. Hallel, as in hallelujah: the descriptive praise psalms, Gunkel's hymns, which neither recount trouble nor report rescue but rave, Essex's word, about who God is.

8. Anatomy of a lament: Psalm 13

   The lament's usual parts: address, lament, confession of trust, petition, and a vow of praise or the praise itself, not every part always present nor always in order. Psalm 13 shows them in miniature: the address and fourfold lament, how long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face, how long shall I take counsel in my soul, how long will my enemy be exalted over me?; the petition, consider and answer me, enlighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death and my enemy say, I have overcome him; and the turn of verses 5 and 6, but I have trusted in your lovingkindness, my heart shall rejoice in your salvation, I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me, whether the deliverance has come or is confidently awaited. Laments divide into individual and national, and run through every book of the Psalter to Psalm 142.

9. Tool, not straitjacket

   A warning travels with the method: liberal form critics, having distilled the parts of a lament, treat any psalm missing a part or varying the order as damaged, emending the text because they know better than the psalmist what he should have said. Do not follow them there. The categories are genuinely in the text, as 1 Chronicles 16 shows, but the Psalter is not organized by them, no fifty laments followed by fifty thanksgivings followed by fifty hymns, and even careful evangelical commentaries like Craigie, Tate, and Allen can let the genre identification harden from a tool into a straitjacket. Westermann's The Praise of God is the standard contemporary treatment for those who want the discussion firsthand.

10. Thanksgiving and hymn

    The declarative praise psalms, Brueggemann's psalms of reorientation, typically move through a proclamation of intent to praise, a summary statement, the report of deliverance, and concluding praise. The descriptive praise psalms, his psalms of orientation, are the simplest to preach, running call to praise, cause for praise, renewed call: Psalm 136 opens with three verses summoning thanks for Yahweh's hesed, his loyal love, grounds it through verse 25 in creation and Israel's history, and closes with the final call of verse 26.

11. The types that will not fit

    One hundred fifty psalms refuse to squeeze into three boxes, so the subcategories multiply: enthronement psalms of the Lord's sovereign rule, anticipating his future reign; songs of Zion praising the place God set his name; royal psalms on the glory of the king; creation psalms; the songs of ascent (Psalms 120 to 134), self-labeled songs for the pilgrimage up to Jerusalem; and wisdom psalms, the catch-all for Psalms 1 and 119, which fit no type and speak the language of the wisdom literature ahead. The conclusion Essex draws: naming a psalm's genre has not yet interpreted it; form analysis yields insight, never the key. A student's question about the psalms that call down graphic judgment on enemies is deferred: the imprecatory psalms are an interpretive issue still to come.

12. The themes of the Psalter

    Read as a book, the Psalms yield recurring themes, and as in all Scripture, God is the hero. He is the sovereign God: of creation, which he made and continually upholds (Psalm 104 and a train of creation references); of Israel, whose history Psalms 105 and 106 recount under his direction; of the nations (Psalm 33); and the God who will establish his rule on earth (Psalm 2). Psalm 1 introduces the book's two categories of people: the righteous, the people of Torah who delight in it and meditate on it, refusing the counsel of the wicked, the path of sinners, and the seat of scoffers; and the wicked, chaff before the coming judgment, present within Israel as well as among the nations, the very enemies the righteous keep pointing out to God. Five attributes of God predominate: his loyalty, goodness, faithfulness, righteousness, and compassion; and psalms of David and of the Davidic covenant stand strategically throughout, the promise God is called upon to fulfill.

13. Purpose: praying toward the kingdom

    Essex's summary sentence: the righteous pray and praise Yahweh as they await the coming of God's kingdom. Toews's fuller formulation names seven themes, God, the wicked enemies, the righteous, communication to God and to the reader, deliverance and judgment, the king, and Israel, and states the purpose: the book of Psalms instructs the reader concerning faith in God's person, works, and word, that God will deliver the king and all blessed in him from their troubles and wicked enemies and bring them to Zion, to the praise and glory of God. Either way, the Psalter is the prayer book of the waiting righteous, which is exactly why the church, waiting still, has never been able to put it down.

1. Spurgeon read the psalms as personal spirituality; Gunkel asked how Israel sang them together; the canonical approach asks what the whole book teaches. Which lens do you naturally use, and what might the other two show you?

2. The laments spend most of their lines recounting trouble to God and still turn to praise. How specific and honest are your own prayers about trouble, and what would it take to end them the way Psalm 13 ends?

3. In Israel you could not say thank you publicly without bringing an offering. What would costly thanksgiving look like for you, and what does cost add that words alone lack?

4. The Psalter never organizes itself by genre, and psalms overflow their categories. Where have labels and systems helped your Bible reading, and where have they become a straitjacket?

5. The whole book is the prayer of the righteous awaiting the kingdom, and the church still waits. Which psalm has most taught you to wait well, and to whom could you pass it on this week?