A Journey of Two Psalms: The Reception of Psalms 1 and 2 in Jewish and Christian Tradition
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0199652414
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For two-and-a-half millennia these two psalms have been commented on, translated, painted, set to music, employed in worship, and adapted in literature, often being used disputatiously by Jews and Christians alike. Psalm 1 is about the Law; at the heart of Psalm 2 is the Anointed One ("Messiah"), and together they serve as a Prologue to the rest of the Psalter. They have frequently been read as one composite poem, with the Temple as one of the motifs uniting them. So three themes--Jewish and Christian disputes, the interrelationship of these psalms, and the Temple--are interwoven throughout this reception history analysis. The journey starts in ancient Judaism, moves on to early Christianity, then to rabbinic and medieval Judaism, and so to Christian commentators from the early Middle Ages to the Reformation. The journey pauses to look at four important modes of reception--liturgical use, visual exegesis, musical interpretation, and imitation in English literature. Thirty-eight color plates and numerous musical and poetic examples bring the work to life. The journey continues by looking at the debates about these psalms which have occupied scholars since the Enlightenment, and ends with a chapter which surveys their reception history in the light of the three key themes.
‘. . . the image of the green tree as a mark of the person blessed by the deity is too common for literary dependence to be involved’.9 So although a general stock of images has been used––and the image of the fertile tree by the waters is well known in the ancient Near East as well as in the Hebrew Bible10 ––it is unlikely that Psalm 1 has explicitly used this text from Jeremiah 17. As Creach observes, ‘. . . the figure of speech in Psalm 1 is altered by the addition of fresh vocabulary and
historical retrospect, a less immediate appropriation of what could be seen as messianic terminology, taking away the direct divine authority of the promises which are more clear in the Hebrew. The rest of the psalm, from v. 6 onwards, now can be read as one lengthy speech by the king to the rebel nations, which, placed in the mouth of a synagogue elder at the time of translation, becomes a long didactic passage about God’s protection of his people. In this interpretation, the part played by the
Patrologia Latina 191, so we have to surmise how his systematic treatment of this psalm would follow Psalm 1. From his other works it is clear that the materia (subject matter) is quite simply, like Gilbert, ‘Christ in his two natures’, to be read (just as we saw with the early Fathers) in the same way as Psalms 45, 72, 89, and 110. But if his treatment of these other psalms is to yield any further clues on this missing commentary, it would have been not only about dogmatic theology––the
godly, who know true happiness by pursuing heavenly wisdom, and the ungodly, who think they possess happiness but who are to discover that what they possess is a mere shadow of the real thing. Occasionally Calvin refers to the psalmist as ‘David’, sometimes as ‘the prophet’: but other than brief observations about the meaning of the Hebrew for the three different stages of wickedness in v. 1 (the OYE$R, the OYAUX and the OYCL), the emphasis and focus is entirely on the meaning of the verses for
psalms, starting with Luther’s German and Calvin’s French and better-known English metrical versions, in Chapter 8 ‘Christian interpretations’: 207–20. The Liturgy 143 common practice, both publicly at Communion or morning and evening prayer, and privately as well. A well-known publication, intended to aid such recitation, was an edition of ‘psalm collects’ designed to be read after each psalm. Although mainly intended for continuous recitation of the psalms, they could also be used when the