PSALM 67: PROSAIC POETRY

Matthew Mullins has just written a book entitled Enjoying the Bible, which is really more specifically about how to read Hebrew poetry. A few of his chapter titles are: General Sense, Central Emotion, Reading with our Guts, Formal Means, and Delight and Instruction. His point is that there are various ways in which to approach the Bible.

In meditating on the Psalms, there are similarly a number of ways to do it. And by “meditating,” I am referring not to techniques of Eastern mysticism which involve an emptying of one's mind, but in the biblical sense of being fully engaged with the Word. One technique in approaching the Psalms is to first understand that generally in each individual verse there will be two or three lines of poetry which each express the same basic idea. So to comprehend what the Psalmist's meaning is, one should be able to capsulize each verse in one line of prose instead.

I chose for an example the short Psalm 67. I will demonstrate how each verse of poetry (quoted in the RSV) could be transformed into prose without losing the gist of the meaning:

Psalm 67:1 “May God be gracious to us and bless us

                             and make his face to shine upon us.”

This can become something like: “May God always have his eye on us to bless us in every way.”

Psalm 67:2 “that thy way may be known upon the earth,

                           thy saving power           among all nations.”

In prose, this end of the sentence begun in v. 1 could read “in order that everyone on earth could know who you truly are.”

Psalm 67:3 “Let      the peoples praise thee, O God;

                    Let all the peoples praise thee.”

Psalm 67:4a Let the nations     be glad and and sing for joy.”

In going through this sort of analysis, you will see that at this point whoever came up with the verse divisions hundreds of years ago should probably have added the first part of v. 4 to the end of v. 3 instead since all three lines express the same sentiment. The combined meaning of the three lines is something like “Let all the people of the earth praise thee in song, O God.”

Psalm 67:4b and 4c “for thou dost judge the peoples                      with equity

                                                and guide the nations upon the earth.”

A prose rendering of these lines is, “for you guide and judge all the people on earth equally.”

Psalm 67:5 This chorus is identical to 67:3 above.

Psalm 67:6 “The earth         has yielded its increase;

                    God, our God, has blessed us.”

This verse expresses a close relationship between our earthly blessing of food and their source as God. Thus, “Praise God for the ways in which he has provided for us here on earth.”

Psalm 67:7 “God has blessed us;

                                                   let all the ends of the earth fear him.”

This is practically prose as it stands. Thus, “Because God has blessed us, let all the ends of the earth fear him.”

If you attempt this sort of exercise on your own with other poetic passages in the Bible, you will find that it is not always so easy to identify the parallel thoughts.

For example, in the Proverbs, one can come across what is called antithetic parallelism in which the idea in the first verse is expressed in terms of its negative in the second verse.

Proverbs 24:16 “for a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again;

                           but the wicked        are overthrown by calamity.”

As prose, this becomes: “Unlike the righteous, the wicked are not kept free from disaster” or “God only preserves the righteous from harm.”

A final form of Hebrew poetry to consider is that of inverted, or chiastic, parallelism in which there is a different order to the similar elements found in the individual lines. As an example,

Job 15:15  “Behold, God      puts no trust in          his holy ones,

                                                     X

         and the heavens         are not clean             in his sight.”

In this verse, “put no trust in” is parallel to “are not clean.” However, “holy ones” in line 1 is parallel to “heavens” in line 2, and “God” and “his sight” are parallel. The combined thought is that “Even the angels in heaven are not free from sin in God's eyes.”

By playing with these poems in this manner, you can get a much better idea of their meaning even if the resulting sentences are not nearly as emotionally charged as the original.