Songs of the Heart

032

The Hebrew Bible has three parts: the Law (Torah), the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Kethuvim). The Book of Psalms is part of the Writings. In the Law and the Prophets, God reaches out to man. The initiative is his. The message is his. He communicates, we receive. Our God-given free will allows us to be receptive, to be accepting, or to turn a deaf ear, to reject. In the Psalms, human beings reach out to God. The initiative is human. The language is human. We make an effort to communicate. He receives. He chooses to respond or not, according to his inscrutable wisdom. He gives his assent or withholds it.

In the Psalms, the human soul extends itself beyond its confining, sheltering, impermanent house of clay. It strives for contact with the ultimate source of all life. It gropes for an experience of the divine presence. The biblical psalms are essentially a record of the human quest for God; 033hence, the variety of forms in which the ancient psalmists expressed themselves, reflective of the diverse and changing moods that possessed them. In short, the psalms constitute a revealing portrayal of the human condition. No wonder they infuse and inform the basic patterns of both Jewish and Christian worship, give character and essence to their liturgies and govern the life of prayer and spiritual activity of the individual and the congregation.

“Said Rabbi Yudan in the name of Rabbi Judah, ‘Whatever David says in his book pertains to himself, to all Israel, and to all times.’ ”¹

What this astute observation conveys is that each psalm is multifaceted. With several possible levels of interpretation, it may be understood as a personal statement, as a manifestation of the soul-life of an individual or as an expression of the concerns and the life of faith of the entire community. Its composition, grounded in a radically different era, is a product of a social and cultural milieu wholly at variance with our own; nevertheless, the message and teachings it communicates are always meaningful and relevant. The genius of the Book of Psalms lies in this—that while it is time-bound in 034origin, it is ever fresh and timely, and hence timeless. It speaks to each reader in a great variety of moods.

Another aspect of the Psalms evoked a subtle rabbinic comment, even if, at first glance, it appears to have been somewhat artlessly formulated. Accepting the notion that a dream experience reflects the inner life of the dreamer, the rabbis of the talmudic period said, “He who sees the Book of Psalms in a dream may hope for piety.”² The implication is that the Psalms possess intrinsic value in that they fulfill a didactic function. They are meant to be internalized. Diligent recitation and study of them is preliminary to a higher level of spirituality and piety; and piety, in the biblical view, is not solely individualistic, certainly not egotistical, self-righteous or sanctimonious. Piety finds expression in the quality of interpersonal relationships.

Sadly, our 20th century secularized society—to its own impoverishment—no longer relates to these vast spiritual, moral and intellectual treasures of the Psalter that our ancestors so reverently and fondly cherished. We hardly know how to pray anymore.

A Yemen Jew once told me how he celebrated his bar mitzvah. The family was desperately poor; there were no parties, no gifts, no excitement, no speeches. The boy simply went to the synagogue on the designated Sabbath morning and read the appropriate portion of the Torah with the traditional blessings before and after. But what left an indelible impression on him—the experience that continues to move him deeply even 40 years later—was staying up all the previous night with his grandfather, and their reciting together the entire Book of Psalms.

Anatoly Sharansky spent nearly nine years of deprivation and suffering as a “prisoner of Zion” in Soviet prisons and labor camps. His crime consisted of wanting to leave the hell of the “workers’ paradise,” to immigrate to the land of Israel. By his own testimony, during all his years of enforced isolation, oppressive loneliness, appalling misery, agonized suffering and unutterable anguish, it was a copy of the Hebrew Psalter that he kept with him that sustained his spirit, gave him the strength to endure his bitter fate and imparted the courage to persevere.

While he was incarcerated, his wife, Avital, accepted on his behalf an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Yeshiva University in New York. On that occasion, she told the audience, “Anatoly has been educated to his Jewishness in a lonely cell in Chistopol prison where, locked alone with the Psalms of David, he found expression for his innermost feelings in the outpourings of the king of Israel thousands of years ago.” When he finally arrived in Jerusalem still clasping in his hands his beloved Book of Psalms, he was carried to the Western Wall on the shoulders of his friends and admirers?^3a

The following incident is a sorry contrast.⁴ Zalman Aranne, who twice served as Israel’s minister of education, was wounded during World War I by cannon fire and lay helpless and unattended on the battlefield. Drenched in blood, believing that his life was ebbing away, he felt a strong urge to pray or to recite a psalm. In his youth in the Ukraine he had received a traditional Jewish education and still remembered what he had learned in his formative years. Yet, he could not bring himself to utter the words because he had abandoned the practice of Judaism and thought that praying in such circumstances would be hypocritical. When he recounted this experience to Mordecai Bar-On, then chief education officer in Israel’s Defense Forces, the latter responded with an experience of his own. He had found himself in a similar wartime situation. He, too, had wanted to pray, but he needed no effort to suppress the urge because he had not the slightest idea what to say.

For three months in 1989, I served as a scholar-in-residence in the greater Washington, D.C. area, at the local Foundation for Jewish Studies. Among the many courses I taught was one on the Book of Psalms. At the final session, a participant, one of the many federal government workers present, approached and said, “I have not stepped into a synagogue these past 30 years. I have always regarded this religious stuff as mumbo jumbo. Having attended your weekly classes on the Psalms, I have come to realize that the material does, indeed, contain profound Ideas of lasting worth. Thank you.”

According to the Book of Genesis, the urge to worship God is something innate in human beings, for the very first such act is ascribed to the 035first natural-born human beings on earth: Cain and Abel. Each brings an offering to the Lord (Genesis 4:3–4), but they do not pray. Theirs is a spontaneous, unprescribed, unlearned exercise that consists solely of a ritual act performed in total silence.

The vocal aspect of worship is attributed to another generation, that of Adam’s grandson Enosh: “It was then that men began to invoke the Lord by name” (Genesis 4:26). It may be coincidental that this development is said to have occurred in the days of Enosh, whose name carries with it intimations of human frailty (the Hebrew root of Enosh means “to be frail”). The uncertainty and insecurity of life, its fleeting nature, the sense of utter dependence upon a higher being—these all stir the human instinct to reach out to God, they kindle the desire to offer petition or to express gratitude.

The Genesis narratives completely separate sacrifice from prayer; that is, the ritual act is differentiated from the ritual word. This is consistent with later developments in Israelite religion, in which sacrifice and prayer continued as distinct and discrete domains. The elaborate rules and regulations for sacrificial rituals as laid down in the Torah are all but silent about accompanying prayer or music, while the headings to the psalms have nothing to 036say about any sacrificial association. The sacrificial ritual is the responsibility and prerogative of the priesthood; the recitative and musical components of the official worship are a Levitical franchise.⁵

In post-Exilic biblical literature (those Scriptures that derive from the period after the return of the exiled Jews from Babylon), sacrifice is traced back to the Mosaic period. The institution of psalmody is ascribed to David. This careful and consistent separation of the two components of worship, the assigning of diverse histories to the sacrifices and liturgical components,⁶ may be a conscious effort to distinguish Israel’s mode of worship from contemporary pagan patterns where the two institutions were inextricably linked because the combination of the ritual and verbal elements were held to have magical potency.

The Hebrew designation for the Book of Psalms is Sefer Tehillim, often shortened to Tehillim, which means “The Book of Songs of Praise.”⁷ True, many psalms cannot be so categorized. Yet the fact that the root HLL (to praise) appears predominantly in the Book of Psalms and that “hallelujah” (which means “praise God” [Yahweh]) occurs nowhere else in the Bible, must have been decisive in calling the book Tehillim.⁸ That title also recognizes that disinterested praise of God expresses the very essence of the act of worship and its highest expression.

The seminal importance that the Book of Psalms held in the religious consciousness of Israel is reflected in early references to the third section of the Bible as simply Psalms, even though in fact the third section (the Writings) contains a number of books of various genres. For example, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, who died about 50 C.E., mentioned “the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms …”⁹ The same distinctive prominence appears in the late first century C.E. Gospel of Luke (24:44), which speaks of “the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.”

All this provides eloquent and incontrovertible testimony to the extraordinary status and high prestige that the Psalter acquired during the Second Temple period, which ended with the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. Thereafter, when the sacrificial ritual could no longer be observed, prayer and the study of the Torah took its place as the highest forms of spiritual activity. Psalms came to enjoy a position of the foremost rank in both private prayer and public worship.

Another reflection of the centrality of psalms in early Israel is their very survival. I am not now referring to the Book of Psalms as a unit, but to the individual psalms ultimately collected into the 150 in the canonical Psalter. Given the fate of the bulk of the literary works of the ancient world, it is indeed remarkable how much of the writings of Israel during the biblical period managed to defeat the ravages of time. The Hebrew Bible preserves the names of some 20 compositions, once well known but now lost.¹⁰

The survival of the psalms is all the more remarkable when their fate is compared to that of much Greek literature. Of the great fifth century B.C.E. dramatists acclaimed during the floruit of Greek civilization, Aeschylus is said to have composed 90 plays, but only 7 have survived intact and only fragments of just over 70 others remain. Sophocles, the favorite dramatist of Athens, wrote more than 100 tragedies, but only 7 survived in complete form. Euripides, whose popularity on the stage was sustained for more than 600 years, is reputed to have written at least 75 plays yet only 18 are extant in full.

If Greek literature, in the most favorable of circumstances, had to bow to the harsh imperatives of human history, what fate might have been expected for the literary compositions of ancient Israel?¹¹ This people in its day was demographically insignificant and relatively unimportant compared to the great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The trials and tribulations that commonly visited most ancient literatures were aggravated and augmented in the case of Israel by additional afflictions peculiar to itself.

If the chances of survival for ancient literature were so slim, how did it come about that these 150 psalms managed to resist the destructive agencies fashioned by nature and history? Several powerful factors saved them from oblivion. One was the proliferation of musical guilds. Each had its own repertoire, recited, collected and transmitted from generation to generation. The guilds were highly mobile, and their members moved easily either as a group or individually from one cult center to another when their home base was destroyed, bringing their repertoire with them.

Another determining factor was the liturgical tradition itself. That is to say, individual psalms belonged to or constituted standardized liturgies available for recitation or singing on different occasions. They were used when an Israelite felt the need to commune with God, whether to express adoration and praise; to offer thanksgiving; to confess sin and ask for forgiveness; to resort to petition and supplication in circumstances of peril, in a state of dire illness or as the victim of false accusation or injustice. Israelites might repair to the Temple or local shrine and there be given appropriate psalms to recite or sing, or to have recited or 037sung for them. Frequent repetition of these liturgies over the ages reinforced them in the minds of the worshipers. This practice was no doubt a powerful factor in the preservation of the psalms.

Although the Hebrew Bible numbers 150 psalms, the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, made by the Jews of Alexandria, Egypt (perhaps as early as the third century B.C.E.) has 151. In the major Greek Bible codices, or manuscript books, this extra psalm bears a special caption noting that it is “outside the number.”¹² The internal divisions are also slightly different in the Greek translation and in the Hebrew Bible.

Our printed Hebrew Bibles and their English translations divide the Psalter into five “books” of unequal length, each sequentially labeled. These division closings are marked by a doxology, or formula expressing praise of God. Thus, Psalm 41:14 reads:

“Blessed is the Lord, God of Israel from eternity to eternity; Amen and Amen.”

Psalm 72:18–20 reads:

“Blessed is the Lord God, God of Israel, who alone does wonderful things. Blessed is His glorious name forever; His glory fills the whole earth. Amen and Amen. End of the prayers of David son of Jesse.”

Psalm 89:53 reads:

“Blessed is the Lord forever. Amen and Amen.”

Psalm 106:48 reads:

“Blessed is the Lord, God of Israel, from eternity to eternity. Let all the people say, ‘Amen.’ Hallelujah.”

Psalm 150, which closes the fifth division, most likely is meant to serve as the doxology for the entire Book of Psalms.

If we examine these formulas in relation to the psalms to which they are attached, it is obvious at once that they are not an integral part of the compositions; they give every appearance of being additions.¹³ Moreover, the term “Amen” is a congregational response in a liturgical context. Certainly the doxologies are ancient, for they were already present in the Hebrew text used by the Alexandrian Jewish translators sometime before the second half of the second century B.C.E:¹⁴

The pentateuchal division of the Psalter is strange, considering that, unlike the Torah, it is not so large as to require transcription onto several scrolls for ease of handling and convenience of study.¹⁵ The rabbis of talmudic times interpreted the arrangement as corresponding to that of the Torah. As they phrased it, “Moses gave Israel five books of the Torah, and David gave Israel five books of the Psalms.”¹⁶

Clearly, the Psalter as we know it is composed of what were once several smaller collections of psalms. Someone must have made a “Davidic” collection that was thought to be complete at the time, because Psalm 72, which closes the second “book,” plainly states (verse 20): “The prayers of David son of Jesse are ended.”

Then there must have been an “Asaphite” collection, because a number of contributions are attributed to that choirmaster.¹⁷ Another collection, now incorporated into books two and three, is credited to the sons of Korah, the descendants of the Levite who rebelled against Moses and Aaron in the course of the wilderness wanderings, and whom “the earth swallowed up” (Numbers 16:32). Korah’s sons, however, survived and one of their line was appointed by David to be among those in charge of song in the Temple.¹⁸

Apart from these there is also a block of psalms, numbers 120–134, each headed by the title, “A Song of Ascents”—or at least, that is how the English translations usually render the cryptic Hebrew title shir ha-ma‘alot.¹⁹ This too must have been a separate collection at one time.

In addition, Psalms 90 through 150, which constitute “books” four and five, were originally a single collection, later artificially split into two parts in a deliberate effort to create five “books” in imitation of the Torah.²⁰ We know this because Psalms 90 through 150 have certain features that differentiate them from books one through three. For instance, Psalms 90 through 150 are overwhelmingly psalms of praise and thanksgiving, which lack the variety of genres found in the other collections. The term “hallelujah” occurs only in these last two books. Here too there are three times as many psalms without headings as in the rest of the Psalter; those with headings contain none of the musical type; and the otherwise commonly used technical terms selah and “To the leader”²¹ are very rare.

The Davidic collection is the largest in the Psalter. The headings of almost half of all the psalms bear the name of the illustrious King David—73 out of 150, to be exact. (The Greek version omits four of these designations,²² but adds another thirteen.²³) Yet this still leaves 77 psalms not attributed to David in the Hebrew count. Apart from the 12 Asaphite and 11 Korahite compositions, two bear the name of Solomon, and one each is credited to Moses, Heman and Ethan.²⁴ The remaining 49 psalms are 040anonymous, or so-called orphan psalms.²⁵

Why then was the entire Psalter attributed to David? He was an intrepid warrior, a brilliant strategist, an empire builder, founder of Judah’s only royal dynasty and a messianic symbol. Yet he is best known as the author of the Psalms. A talmudic statement expresses it thus: “David wrote the Book of Psalms, including in it the work of the elders, namely, Adam, Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, Heman, Jeduthun, Asaph, and the three sons of Korah.”²⁶

The psalms provide a direct, personal approach to God. There are no intermediaries, human or celestial, no being or beings who facilitate the ascension of prayer to the divine realm. Nor is there any notion of angelic intercession or influence.

The psalms reflect the unqualified conviction that prayer is heard, that the deity is approachable and responsive to the pleas of humankind, although not necessarily immediately or always favorably.

The psalmists were also acutely aware of the dangers of hypocrisy and the perils it holds for true religiosity. They warn the would-be worshiper that God probes the mind and the conscience that he discerns the contrast between profession and deed, promise and performance.

The psalms take for granted that history has meaning because the processes of history are under the sovereign control of God. It is regarded as axiomatic that his governance of the world is based upon foundations of justice and righteousness, that there is a divinely ordained moral law of universal application operative in the concatenation of events and that there are positive ethical imperatives for the violation of which human beings are held accountable. Given such a system of beliefs, the psalmists inevitably possess unshakable faith that evildoing must in the end be punished and the wicked overthrown. They inveigh against the flagrant abuses rife in the land. Their special concern is the corruption of Judicial processes. They cry out against the exploitation of the disadvantaged and vulnerable of society: the stranger, the poor and the needy, the orphan and the widow.

Despite the frequent expression in the psalms of basic human concerns, there is a complete absence of personal pleas for power or wealth. If there ever were any, they have not survived. The vagaries and dilemmas of the human condition, on the other hand, find expression in abundance. The vexing problems of life, the fearful insecurities of existence, the troubles and travails that afflict every human being—all are reflected in the psalmist’s work. Always, the psalmist, and thus the worshiper, find solace and comfort in adversity, and are sustained and strengthened by faith, thereby mustering the courage to go on with life.

Moreover, the entire community shared the joys and sorrows of the individual, for in ancient times the psalms were recited in the Temple in the presence of a congregation. Sorrows were thereby ameliorated and joys enhanced. Man was recognized as an essentially social being even if, at times, an island unto himself.

For thousands of years, the biblical psalms have nourished, sustained and elevated the spiritual and moral lives of believers of many faiths. In this age of spiritual and moral chaos they still have something to teach us.

This article has been adapted from Songs of the Heart, An Introduction to the Book of Psalms by Nahum M. Sarna (New York: Schocken Books, 1993).

The Hebrew Bible has three parts: the Law (Torah), the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Kethuvim). The Book of Psalms is part of the Writings. In the Law and the Prophets, God reaches out to man. The initiative is his. The message is his. He communicates, we receive. Our God-given free will allows us to be receptive, to be accepting, or to turn a deaf ear, to reject. In the Psalms, human beings reach out to God. The initiative is human. The language is human. We make an effort to communicate. He receives. He chooses to respond or not, […]