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150 chapters, 2,461 verses. The book of Psalms is a collection of *lyric poems. Since these poems were originally also sung and recited liturgically, we can view the Psalter (the title given to the collection of 150 poems) as Israel’s hymnbook. Further, since the *psalms were particularly associated with worship in the temple in Jerusalem, we can view them as “largely a Temple collection” (C. S. Lewis). The thing that the psalms do best is express a full range of feelings and reflections of the believing soul. John Calvin was so impressed by this aspect of the psalms that he famously called the Psalter “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul,” adding that “there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror.” The psalms are self-contained compositions, meant to be read individually. Although there is no progressive structure to the Psalms as a whole, there are some groupings within it. The chart that follows should not be taken to imply that the poems that appear in the various groupings all match each other in tone or theme.
| Division in the Hebrew Psalter | General Content | Dominant Lyric Genres |
|---|---|---|
| Psalms 1–41 | Wide-ranging experiences: the voice of suffering dominates, but not by a wide margin, over praise and reflection regarding the blessings of God in the poets’ lives | Lament psalms; praise psalms; reflective lyrics; nature poems |
| Psalms 42–72 | As in the first book of the Psalms, the note of suffering and human sinfulness dominates, but praise of God for his greatness comes in a close second, and the experience of worship is definitely introduced | In order of decreasing frequency: lament, praise psalm, worship psalm, lyric of personal experience, assorted forms that appear only once |
| Psalms 73–89 | More emphasis on the communal life of the nation and believing community than in the two previous books | Laments and praise psalms dominate, but there are so many additional genres that the unit is actually a poetic miscellany |
| Psalms 90–106 | The primary focus is on God’s acts and attributes | The praise psalm dominates by a wide margin |
| Psalms 107–150 | Because this is such a large unit within the Psalter, its content ranges over all of life. Prominent topics include the praise of God; worship; the vicissitudes of life (in the lament psalms); God’s Word or law; all of life. Psalms 120–134 are songs of ascent, pilgrim songs sung or recited on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem | Praise psalms dominate; numerous lament psalms; a wide range of other lyric subtypes |
The one constant is that all 150 poems are *lyrics. Lyrics are either emotional or reflective, meaning that the dominant content is a series of feelings or a series of thoughts. A lyric poet ordinarily speaks in the personal, first-person mode (both singular and plural), and the result is a subjective expression of experience. This being the case, a good strategy for reading any lyric poem is to regard the poet as sharing more and more information about the chosen topic or experience. Because the content of these poems is expressed in a poetic idiom, we need to be ready to interpret such staples of *poetry as *image, *metaphor, *simile, *personification, *hyperbole, and *apostrophe. (For more information on items accompanied by an asterisk, see the glossary at the back of this Bible.)
All of the psalms are written in the verse form of *parallelism. The main types of parallelism are *synonymous parallelism (in which the second line repeats the content of the first in different images but similar grammatical form); *antithetic parallelism (in which the second line states a contrast to the first); *climactic parallelism (in which the second line repeats part of the preceding line and then adds to it); *synthetic (“growing” or “progressing”) parallelism (in which strictly speaking there is no parallelism but the second line completes the thought of the first, so that, as in the other forms of parallelism, the two lines form a unit).
Here are six useful things to know about lyric poems such as we find in the Psalter: (1) Lyric poems are unified around a central idea, feeling, or *motif. (2) The unity of a poem can be formulated as a series of variations on the central theme/motif. (3) Lyric poems do not ordinarily tell a story, although often a life experience provides the occasion for a lyric. (4) Lyric poems usually fall into two categories based on the predominant subject matter: the poet presents either feelings or reflections. (5) Lyrics have an overall three-part structure, consisting of introduction–development–conclusion or closure. (6) In the middle part, the poet develops the theme using as many as four techniques: repetition, listing or catalog, contrast, and association (in which the poet branches out from an initial idea to a related idea).
*Lament psalms (also called complaints) and *praise psalms are the most numerous categories in the Psalter. The characteristics of the lament psalm are as follows: (1) There are five main ingredients, which may appear in any order and may appear more than once in a psalm: invocation or cry to God; the lament, or definition of the crisis; petition; statement of confidence in God; vow to praise God. (2) Laments are *occasional poems arising out of a specific event or situation in the poet’s or nation’s life. (3) The poet in a lament psalm typically does these things: he undertakes a quest to master a crisis and find peace in the midst of it; he paints a heightened and often figurative picture of the crisis; he protests about the situation to God and perhaps to himself and his readers; he attempts to persuade God to act; he finds a satisfactory solution to the problem. Praise psalms have the following traits: (1) They praise God (poems in praise of people go by other names). (2) They have three main parts: a call to praise (which may occur more than once in the poem), list of the praiseworthy acts and attributes of God, and a note of resolution (such as a concluding prayer or wish).
*Worship psalms (also called songs of Zion); *nature poems; *royal psalms (dealing with the king); meditative poems; thanksgiving psalms; *encomium (a poem praising either a general character type or an abstract quality); penitential psalms (dealing with confession and forgiveness of sin); poems of personal testimony; *epithalamion (wedding poem, with Psalm 45 as the sole example).
Things that we should not do with the Psalms include these: try to read psalms as stories; speculate unduly about the details of the life situation that may underlie a given psalm; regard the individual poems as chapters in an ongoing sequence; ignore the images and figures of speech and quickly translate them into a series of ideas; operate on the premise that a psalm is like an essay in being structured as a logical sequence of ideas with clear transitions between units; read a psalm as a collection of individual verses with little connection among them. The positive counterparts of those futile ways of reading include the following: anticipate a flow of feelings and/or reflections rather than narrative events; instead of viewing yourself as undertaking a journey through a series of events (as in narrative), begin with the premise that the poet will share more and more information about his feelings and/or his reflections; accept that poems are self-contained compositions, not chapters in an ongoing sequence; be ready for sudden movement from one topic or feeling to another (C. S. Lewis spoke of “the emotional rather than logical connections” in the psalms); begin with the premise that poets think in images rather than abstractions and that they prefer the figurative or nonliteral to the literal.
The book is designed to achieve the following literary purposes:
(1) The nature of God: no book of the Bible offers a more comprehensive survey of the acts and attributes of God. (2) The nature of people: because every psalm is at some level a personal statement by a poet, Psalms is also an index to what people are like, both good and bad. (3) Nature and the physical creation: the psalms say and imply many things about the external world that God made and sustains. (4) Worship: the psalms are used in worship, and many of them talk about worship. (5) Suffering: the many lament psalms yield a theology of suffering.
The master story of the Bible is a record of what God does and what people do in history. The psalms assert directly, and imply indirectly, what God does in the three arenas of nature or creation, history, and the personal lives of people. The primary actions of God that the psalms record are his acts of creation, providence, judgment, and redemption/rescue. Psalms also tells the story of what people do in history (including within that the individual poets’ testimonies to their own experiences). Additionally, many of the psalms express messianic expectations.
The blessed man: an encomium in praise of the godly person [ Psalm 1 ]. An *encomium is a poem or prose piece that praises either an abstract quality or a general character type by means of a set of established conventions and motifs. Psalm 1 praises the godly person in the standard terms of the genre, as follows: an introduction to the subject of praise (in the form of an opening *beatitude); catalog of the praiseworthy acts and qualities of the subject; the superiority motif (showing the superiority of the subject by contrasting it to its opposite); awakening of the desire to emulate the subject and thus share his destiny. Additionally Psalm 1 uses the technique of the character sketch or portrait and heightens the effect by means of a *foil (a contrast that sets off the subject).
1:1 Blessed is the man 1
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2 but his delight is in the law 2 of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
4 The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6 for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
Copyright ©2007 Crossway Bibles. The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Quotation information. Literary Study Bible notes copyright ©2007.