Latest / Reformed Thinking / The Psalms: History, Use, and Theology | F. L. Cross & E. A. Livingstone

Transcript

The Psalms: History, Use, and Theology | F. L. Cross & E. A. Livingstone · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Welcome to Reformed thinking, and welcome to the deep dive.
• 0:04
  Today we're taking on a book that is, for many, the very
• 0:07
  heart of the Bible's devotional life, the Book of Psalms.
• 0:11
  Our source for this is the overview from the Oxford
• 0:13
  Dictionary of the Christian Church, and it's a great
• 0:15
  starting point because it forces us to look at the Psalter not
• 0:19
  just as Scripture, which of course it is, but also as a
• 0:22
  compiled document, a piece of literature with a history and
• 0:26
  the structure. And that's really our mission
• 0:28
  here. We want to get into the
• 0:29
  mechanics of the Psalter. Most of us come to the Psalms
• 0:31
  for personal reasons, for prayer or for comfort.
• 0:34
  But to really get what this book is, you have to understand its
• 0:37
  architecture, how it was built, why the numbering is so
• 0:40
  confusing, and what scholarship says about its authors.
• 0:42
  And then how believers from the early church all the way to the
• 0:45
  reformers actually use this book?
• 0:48
  And we're kicking off with something that shows you just
• 0:50
  how much human editing went into this.
• 0:52
  You think of it as the book of 150 Psalms, but just trying to
• 0:56
  count them shows this huge split between major Christian
• 1:00
  traditions. It tells you right away that
• 1:03
  we're dealing with an assembled text.
• 1:05
  So let's start with the basics. The name in the Hebrew Bible,
• 1:09
  the Psalms, are the first book of the section called the
• 1:12
  Hagiographa or the Writings. So it's not law, it's not
• 1:16
  prophets, it's in that third category.
• 1:18
  Correct, but the name we use songs comes from the Greek title
• 1:22
  Somoy. And Somoy has a specific
• 1:24
  meaning, doesn't it? It does.
• 1:25
  It literally means songs accompanied by string music.
• 1:29
  So the title itself tells you this wasn't just poetry to be
• 1:32
  read silently, this was meant to be performed.
• 1:35
  It was a liturgical collection from the very beginning, a
• 1:37
  songbook for worship. OK, so let's get into the
• 1:40
  numbers. Everyone agrees there are 150
• 1:42
  songs in total, but how they're numbered?
• 1:45
  Yeah, that's where it gets complicated.
• 1:46
  It really does. And this is a practical issue.
• 1:49
  If you're reading, say, an old commentary, you're dealing with
• 1:51
  two main systems. There's the Hebrew Masoretic
• 1:54
  Text or Mt, which is what you'll find in the King James Version,
• 1:58
  the Book of Common Prayer, most Protestant Bibles.
• 2:00
  OK, that's our tradition. And then there's the Greek
• 2:03
  Septuagint, the LXX and the Latin Vulgate which followed it.
• 2:08
  That's the system used for centuries by the Roman Catholic
• 2:10
  Church and in Orthodox traditions.
• 2:13
  And they don't match up. They don't.
• 2:14
  The whole problem comes down to choices about combining or
• 2:17
  dividing certain Psalms. So let's walk through that
• 2:20
  slowly, because this really matters when you're trying to
• 2:22
  find a verse someone like Augustine is quoting.
• 2:25
  Absolutely. The first major split happens
• 2:28
  very early in the Hebrew tradition.
• 2:30
  Psalms 9 and 10 are two separate Psalms, right?
• 2:33
  But in the Greek and Latty versions, they're combined into
• 2:36
  a single Psalm 9. So right there, by the time a
• 2:39
  Protestant reader gets to Psalm 11, the Vulgate reader is only
• 2:43
  at Psalm 10. They're already one number
• 2:45
  behind. Exactly, and that gap stays
• 2:48
  consistent for a huge chunk of the book all the way up to Psalm
• 2:51
  114 in the Hebrew. The Greek and Latin versions are
• 2:55
  one number behind. That's a lot of potential
• 2:57
  confusion. It is.
• 2:59
  But then it gets even more complicated because they seem to
• 3:01
  try and fix it. How so?
• 3:03
  Well, the Hebrew Psalms 114 and 115 are then combined into one
• 3:08
  Psalm in the Greek and Latin, so the gap gets wider.
• 3:11
  But then right after Psalm 116 in the Hebrew is split into two
• 3:15
  separate psalms in the Greek and Latin.
• 3:17
  It sounds like scribes were trying to rebalance the numbers
• 3:20
  as they went along the sort of editorial back and forth.
• 3:22
  That's a good way to put it. We see it one more time near the
• 3:25
  end. Psalm 147 in the Hebrew is also
• 3:28
  split in two in the Greek and Latin versions.
• 3:31
  So when you step back and look at the whole book book, what's
• 3:33
  the result? The result is pretty startling.
• 3:36
  Only the first 8 psalms and the last three, one 48149 and 150
• 3:41
  have the same number in both traditions.
• 3:43
  The entire middle of the book is numbered differently.
• 3:46
  The entire middle It shows just how much active editorial
• 3:49
  shaping was going on in these different communities.
• 3:52
  But beyond the numbering of individual Psalms, there's a
• 3:54
  much larger structure that seems very deliberate.
• 3:57
  I'm talking about the five books.
• 3:59
  Yes, this is one of the most critical insights into how the
• 4:02
  final editorial thought about this collection.
• 4:04
  The entire Psalter is divided into 5 smaller books.
• 4:08
  What are the divisions? Book 1 is Psalms 1 to 41, Book 2
• 4:11
  is 42 to 72, book three runs 73 to 89, Book 4 is 90 to one O 6
• 4:18
  and the final book. Book 5 is 107 to 150.
• 4:21
  Now a 5 book structure in the Old Testament, that can't be an
• 4:25
  accident. No, it's almost certainly
• 4:27
  intentional. The thinking is that this
• 4:29
  structure was created to mirror the five books of the
• 4:32
  Pentateuch, the Torah. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
• 4:35
  Numbers, Deuteronomy. Right, by giving the Psalms the
• 4:39
  same five part shape as the Law of Moses, the editors were
• 4:42
  making a huge theological statement.
• 4:44
  They were elevating it, saying that this is the proper inspired
• 4:48
  response to the well. It's how you live out the
• 4:50
  covenant. It's positioned as a kind of
• 4:52
  second Torah, not to replace the first, but to provide of the,
• 4:55
  let's say, the prayer book for it, the emotional and spiritual
• 4:58
  guide for the people of God. Then we know where these
• 5:00
  divisions are because they're marked.
• 5:02
  Right they are. Each of the first four books
• 5:04
  ends with a doxology, a little burst of praise to God, usually
• 5:07
  ending with Amen and Amen. Like a chapter marker.
• 5:09
  Exactly. They function as literary
• 5:11
  signposts, closing one section before the next begins.
• 5:15
  It shows a very high level of intentional final stage editing.
• 5:19
  So that five book structure shows the final theological
• 5:22
  vision, but inside the text there are clues that this book
• 5:26
  was built from even older, smaller collections.
• 5:29
  That's right, the final Psalter is an anthology.
• 5:31
  It was assembled from materials that have been circulating
• 5:34
  independently for a long time. You can see the seams, so to
• 5:37
  speak. You can.
• 5:38
  The clearest piece of evidence is a little note that the final
• 5:42
  editors left in the text. It's at the end of Psalm 72,
• 5:45
  which is also the end of Book 2. What does it say?
• 5:47
  It says the prayers of David, the son of Jesse are ended.
• 5:50
  Wow. But there are many more psalms
• 5:53
  after that. 78 more to be exact, and some of them are even
• 5:57
  attributed to David later on. So that note must be a remnant
• 6:00
  of an earlier separate collection.
• 6:02
  It has to be. It's a fossil.
• 6:03
  In the text, it tells us that there was once a book called The
• 6:06
  Prayers of David that ended right there at Psalm 72.
• 6:10
  The final editors included it even though it doesn't quite fit
• 6:13
  the final form. And you also see other
• 6:15
  groupings, right? Based on who they're attributed.
• 6:17
  To you do you can see these little sub collections.
• 6:20
  There's the big Davidic group in the book. 1 Psalms 3 through 41.
• 6:24
  Though I think there are a couple of exceptions in there.
• 6:26
  A couple, yes. Psalm 10 is really Part 2 of
• 6:29
  Psalm 9 and 33 doesn't have the Davidic title, but it's clearly
• 6:34
  a David centric section. And what about the others?
• 6:36
  They're not all David. No, you get a whole section from
• 6:39
  the Sons of Korah, who were a Guild of temple singers.
• 6:42
  That's Psalms 42 to 49. Another musical connection.
• 6:46
  And then there's the of Asaph collection.
• 6:48
  Asaph was another one of the chief musicians.
• 6:51
  His Psalms are mostly in the 73 to 83 range, plus Psalm 50.
• 6:56
  These titles show us the building blocks.
• 6:58
  So when you put it all together, the different selections, the
• 7:01
  musical titles, the five book structure, the picture becomes
• 7:04
  pretty clear. It does.
• 7:06
  The overwhelming conclusion is that the Psalter, as we have it,
• 7:10
  is a liturgical book. It was designed for use in
• 7:13
  organized public worship. Which is why that phrase, the
• 7:15
  hymn book of the Second Temple, is so fitting.
• 7:18
  It is. The scholar Jay Wellhausen
• 7:20
  coined it, and it's stuck because it's perfect.
• 7:23
  This was the songbook for the restored community worshipping
• 7:26
  in Jerusalem after the exile. And as a book of poems, it has
• 7:29
  its own literary rules, the main one being parallelism.
• 7:32
  Heap for poetry isn't about rhyme the way ours often is.
• 7:36
  It's about rhyming ideas. The second line will echo or
• 7:40
  contrast or build on the idea of the first line.
• 7:43
  That's parallelism. Scholars have tried to find a
• 7:46
  consistent meter right, but with not much success.
• 7:49
  Very little success. It doesn't seem to work that
• 7:51
  way, but they did use other poetic devices like refrains and
• 7:55
  some very complex acrostics. The alphabetical Psalms.
• 7:58
  Let's talk about Psalm 119, because it's just on another
• 8:01
  level. It's an incredible piece of
• 8:03
  literary construction. It's built around the 22 letters
• 8:05
  of the Hebrew alphabet. So there are 22 sections.
• 8:08
  Right one for each letter, and each of those sections has 8
• 8:11
  verses. And the really amazing part is
• 8:13
  that every single one of those 8 verses in a given section starts
• 8:17
  with that section's letter. Correct.
• 8:19
  So in the first section for the letter Alef, all 8 lines begin
• 8:22
  with a word that starts with Alef.
• 8:25
  It's an extraordinary display of discipline.
• 8:28
  What does that kind of structure tell you?
• 8:29
  Why go to all that trouble? Well, for one, it's a memory
• 8:32
  aid. It makes it much easier to
• 8:34
  memorize for recitation, but it also suggests a deep reverence
• 8:38
  for the content. It's a way of saying this
• 8:40
  teaching is complete, perfect from A-Z or a left to tav.
• 8:45
  You're enshrining the words in this perfect.
• 8:47
  Structure. You are.
• 8:48
  And before we move on to authorship, there's one last
• 8:51
  piece of evidence about the book's formation that's really
• 8:53
  important. The Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 8:54
  The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Psalm scrolls found at Qumran, show us
• 8:57
  that even in the century or two before Christ, the final order
• 9:01
  of the Psalms wasn't completely set in stone.
• 9:03
  So they had the same psalms, but maybe in a different sequence.
• 9:07
  In some cases, yes. It demonstrates that the process
• 9:10
  of standardizing the collection was a long one.
• 9:12
  The final fixed order we have today probably wasn't
• 9:15
  universally settled until sometime in the early Christian
• 9:18
  era. Which leads us right into the
• 9:20
  question of who wrote them. For a very long time, the answer
• 9:23
  was just. For centuries, yes.
• 9:26
  The popular view was that King David wrote the entire book, and
• 9:30
  that view was held by many of the Latin Church fathers like
• 9:33
  Ambrose and Augustine. It became the default assumption
• 9:36
  through the Middle Ages, and for many of the reformers too.
• 9:40
  It provides a very powerful, unified way to read the whole
• 9:43
  book through the life of one person.
• 9:45
  It does. You read it as David's spiritual
• 9:47
  autobiography. His sins, his repentance, his
• 9:50
  victories. But even within that tradition,
• 9:52
  there were some early voices who questioned it.
• 9:54
  Oh yes, Saint Jerome, who translated the Vulgate, He
• 9:58
  pushed back against it. He could see the evidence for
• 10:00
  multiple authors in the text itself.
• 10:02
  And crucially for us, so did John Calvin.
• 10:05
  Yes, Calvin's position on this is really telling.
• 10:08
  He, of all the major reformers, was quite clear that David did
• 10:11
  not write the entire Psalter. Why is that significant from a
• 10:14
  reformed perspective? Because it shows the principle
• 10:17
  of adfontez back to the sources in action.
• 10:20
  Calvin looked at the text. He saw the superscriptions of
• 10:23
  Asaph or of the sons of Korra, and he took the text at its word
• 10:27
  over a long standing tradition. He saw it as a collection of
• 10:30
  prayers from many hands. So what's the modern view?
• 10:33
  What does scholarships say now about who wrote them and when?
• 10:37
  The modern consensus is that Calvin and Jerome were right.
• 10:40
  The Psalms come from many different authors over a very
• 10:43
  long period of time, perhaps as long as 7 or 800 years.
• 10:47
  And the dating has been a subject of a lot of debate a.
• 10:49
  Huge debate for a while in the 19th century the trend was to
• 10:54
  date almost everything very late after the Babylonian exile.
• 10:58
  The idea being that early Israel wasn't sophisticated enough to
• 11:01
  produce this kind of literature. Basically, yes, but 20th century
• 11:05
  scholarship reacted strongly against that.
• 11:08
  Now the thinking has shifted back.
• 11:10
  In what way? There's a growing acceptance
• 11:13
  that many of the Psalms, or at least their core ideas and
• 11:15
  forms, could be very old. They could easily originate in
• 11:19
  the early days of the monarchy, in the time of David and
• 11:21
  Solomon. So some of these could have been
• 11:23
  sung in the First Temple before the exile.
• 11:25
  It's very likely while we reject the idea of a single author,
• 11:28
  we're recovering a sense of the real antiquity of some of the
• 11:31
  material. And what about the most extreme
• 11:34
  late dating theories? They're pretty much dismissed.
• 11:36
  There was a thesis by a scholar named B Dumb that most of the
• 11:40
  Psalms were from the Maccabean period, so the second century
• 11:43
  BC. Very late.
• 11:44
  Way too late. No serious scholar holds that
• 11:47
  view today. The evidence just doesn't
• 11:48
  support it. So we have old material and
• 11:51
  newer material from different sources all brought together.
• 11:55
  What can we say about when the final book, our five book
• 11:58
  Psalter, was actually compiled? The general agreement is that
• 12:02
  the final compilation and arrangement, the five Book
• 12:05
  structure that mirrors the Torah, is a post exilic project.
• 12:09
  The material is ancient, but the book as we hold it is a product
• 12:13
  of the Second Temple period. OK, so let's shift from the how
• 12:16
  and when to the what The actual content.
• 12:18
  The Psalms cover just about every aspect of the relationship
• 12:21
  between God and humanity. The theological range is just
• 12:24
  immense. They lay out God's attributes so
• 12:27
  clearly. He's the Creator, He governs
• 12:29
  everything by his Providence. He's eternal, all powerful and
• 12:32
  perfectly holy. And in response, what does this
• 12:36
  God demand from his people? Holiness and repentance.
• 12:40
  The songs are full of this tension between God's absolute
• 12:43
  justice and His overwhelming, steadfast mercy.
• 12:45
  This is where the tradition of the seven penitential Psalms
• 12:48
  comes from. Right.
• 12:49
  It is a group of Psalm 6323851102, 130 and 143 were set
• 12:55
  apart early on as a guide for confession.
• 12:58
  They became a core part of Christian piety for centuries,
• 13:01
  especially Psalm 51, David's great prayer of repentance.
• 13:05
  But there are parts of the Psalter that are much harder for
• 13:08
  modern readers. The calls for vengeance, for
• 13:10
  one. The imprecatory psalms.
• 13:12
  Yes, they can be shocking. You have the psalmist calling on
• 13:14
  curses, asking God to destroy his enemies, to smash their
• 13:17
  children against the rocks. It's hard to square with love
• 13:20
  your enemies. It is if you don't understand
• 13:22
  the context. For the psalmist, justice was
• 13:25
  something that had to happen now on Earth.
• 13:27
  There wasn't a clear developed doctrine of final judgement and
• 13:31
  reward in the afterlife. So if God was just, he had to
• 13:34
  act now to vindicate the righteous and punish the wicked.
• 13:38
  So these aren't just angry rants, they're passionate pleas
• 13:41
  for God's justice to be made visible in the world.
• 13:44
  They are cries for theodicy, for God to prove himself against the
• 13:48
  chaos and evil that seems to be winning.
• 13:50
  And that ties into their view of the afterlife, which was pretty
• 13:54
  vague. It was, for the most part, the
• 13:56
  destination for everyone, good and bad, was she'll a shadowy,
• 14:00
  silent place. Not a hell of punishment, but
• 14:03
  just an end to meaningful life and praise of God.
• 14:06
  But not always there are these little glimmers of something
• 14:08
  more. And these are so important.
• 14:10
  In a few places you see this brighter hope begin to
• 14:13
  breakthrough. Which Psalms are we talking
• 14:15
  about? You see it in Psalm 16 where he
• 14:17
  says You will not abandon my soul to she'll.
• 14:20
  You see it in Psalm 49 and Psalm 73, this trust that God will
• 14:23
  take him, receive him into glory, that their fellowship
• 14:26
  won't be broken by death. So the seeds of a resurrection
• 14:29
  hope are there, even if they're not fully developed.
• 14:32
  They're there, and that hope for the nation gets focused on one
• 14:36
  particular figure, the Messiah. The Messiah, the future of
• 14:40
  Israel, is tied to a coming king from the line of David.
• 14:43
  And the Psalms give us some of the most detailed pictures of
• 14:46
  who this figure will be. Psalm 110, for example.
• 14:48
  Psalm 110 is key. It describes him as a priest
• 14:52
  king, a king, but also a priest forever.
• 14:55
  In the order of Melchizedek. This combines the royal and
• 14:59
  priestly offices in one person. And Psalm 2 calls him godson.
• 15:03
  You are my son. Today I have begotten you.
• 15:05
  It's an incredibly high statement about his status, and
• 15:08
  his reign is described as global.
• 15:10
  He will crush his enemies, and as Psalm 22 says, all the ends
• 15:14
  of the earth will turn and worship before him.
• 15:16
  This traditional way of reading the Psalms as individual prayers
• 15:20
  and Messianic prophecy was the standard for centuries, but in
• 15:24
  the 20th century that was challenge.
• 15:25
  It was quite significantly the new approach was less about the
• 15:28
  individual and more about the community.
• 15:30
  And it started by asking a really basic question.
• 15:33
  Who is the I in the Psalms? Exactly.
• 15:37
  A scholar named Arsmand argued that when the psalmist says I,
• 15:41
  it's not always a private individual speaking.
• 15:44
  Often it's the voice of the nation of Israel as a whole, a
• 15:47
  corporate identity. So a sum of lament isn't just
• 15:50
  one person, said diary entry. It could be the nation lamenting
• 15:53
  its of exile or oppression. It could be the king might be
• 15:56
  speaking on behalf of the entire people.
• 15:58
  It changes the Psalm from a personal prayer to a piece of
• 16:01
  national public liturgy. And then ESMA Winkle took this
• 16:05
  in another direction, connecting the enemies in the Psalms to,
• 16:09
  well, to sorcery. Yes, Moe Winkle had a very
• 16:12
  specific theory. He suggested that when the
• 16:14
  psalmist complaints about his enemies in the Wicked, he's
• 16:17
  often talking about sorcerers who are trying to curse him or
• 16:20
  the community. And the Psalm itself acts as a
• 16:22
  counter curse. That was his argument, that the
• 16:24
  Psalm was a ritual tool used to ward off evil, a kind of counter
• 16:28
  charm. Again, it places the Psalms
• 16:30
  right in the middle of the cultic ritual life of the
• 16:32
  nation. And all of this new thinking was
• 16:34
  driven by a method called form criticism.
• 16:37
  Right form criticism was pioneered by Hermann Gunkel.
• 16:42
  His goal was to categorize each Psalm by its literary type.
• 16:46
  A hymn, A lament, a royal Psalm to figure out its original
• 16:50
  setting in life. It sits in Leban.
• 16:52
  Its original function. Its function, exactly.
• 16:55
  He wasn't as concerned with who wrote it as he was with how it
• 16:58
  was used in temple worship. And to do this, he and others
• 17:02
  looked for clues in the literature of Israel's
• 17:04
  neighbors, like Babylon. And this comparative approach is
• 17:07
  what led Moe Winkle to his most famous and most controversial
• 17:10
  idea. His theory of the accession
• 17:12
  Psalms. These are the psalms that
• 17:13
  declare the Lord reigns, right? Moe Winkle argued.
• 17:16
  These weren't just general statements of faith.
• 17:19
  He claimed they were the liturgical texts for a specific
• 17:22
  annual festival, a New Year's feast of the enthronement of
• 17:25
  Yahweh. Where God would be ritually re
• 17:28
  crowned as king for the coming year.
• 17:30
  That was the idea, and he based this entire theory on supposed
• 17:33
  parallels with a Babylonian festival where their God Marduk
• 17:37
  was enthroned each year. So he's proposing a major
• 17:40
  Israelite festival that isn't actually mentioned in the Bible
• 17:43
  based on a Babylonian model. Correct.
• 17:45
  And the criticism was, as you can imagine, pretty intense.
• 17:48
  What were the main objections? 1st, that the Babylonian
• 17:51
  parallels weren't as strong as he claimed, and 2nd, and more
• 17:55
  importantly, there's just no direct biblical evidence for
• 17:58
  this specific festival. Critics said he was reading a
• 18:01
  foreign practice back into Israel's history.
• 18:04
  And yet you hear about this theory all the time in Psalm
• 18:07
  scholarship. Why did it have such a lasting
• 18:10
  impact if it was so heavily criticized?
• 18:12
  Because even if the specifics were wrong, MO Winkle
• 18:15
  fundamentally changed the questions scholars were asking.
• 18:19
  He forced everyone to take the liturgical function of the Psalm
• 18:22
  seriously. So even if there wasn't his
• 18:24
  festival, his work opened the door to thinking about how the
• 18:28
  Psalms fit into any festival. Precisely.
• 18:30
  He made function, not just authorship, a central question.
• 18:34
  And that conversation continues to this day.
• 18:36
  So regardless of their original cultic setting, the life of the
• 18:39
  Psalms didn't end with the Second Temple.
• 18:41
  It was, you could say, just getting started.
• 18:44
  Oh, absolutely. The New Testament writers
• 18:46
  immediately pick up the Psalter and read it christologically.
• 18:49
  And Christ himself leads the way.
• 18:51
  He does think about it. He applies Psalm 118, the stone
• 18:55
  the builders rejected, directly to himself.
• 18:58
  He's claiming to be the fulfillment of the text and on
• 19:00
  the cross. On the cross, his words are the
• 19:02
  words of the Psalms, His cry of dereliction.
• 19:05
  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me is the first line of
• 19:09
  Psalm 22, and his final words of trust into your hand I commit my
• 19:13
  spirit are from Psalm 31. He literally breathes his last
• 19:17
  in the language of the Psalms. And the apostles just run with
• 19:20
  that Paul, the author of Hebrews.
• 19:22
  They all see the aspirations of the psalmists, the suffering
• 19:25
  righteous, 1 the conquering king, as finding their complete
• 19:28
  fulfillment in Jesus. For them, the Psalms were a
• 19:31
  prophetic script for the life of Christ.
• 19:33
  And the Church Fathers cemented this reading.
• 19:35
  They did. Jerome and Ambrose urged
• 19:37
  believers to use the Psalms daily, and Augustine wrote a
• 19:41
  massive commentary where he found Christ and the Church
• 19:44
  prefigured in almost every line. This is why the Psalter became
• 19:47
  the bedrock of Christian liturgical prayer for centuries.
• 19:51
  It was the core of the Divine Office in the Western monastic
• 19:54
  tradition. The entire Psalter was recited
• 19:56
  every week. Every single.
• 19:57
  Every week the goal was to steep the soul in the full range of
• 20:01
  biblical prayer. The Church of England later
• 20:04
  adapted this to a monthly cycle. The Eastern Church still does it
• 20:07
  weekly and twice a week during Lent.
• 20:10
  And this wasn't just a practice for the big institutional
• 20:12
  churches. The Psalms were just as central
• 20:14
  for the reformers and the non conformists.
• 20:16
  Absolutely. The piety of both Lutherans on
• 20:19
  the continent and the English Puritans was deeply nourished by
• 20:22
  the Psalter. For many Reformed churches, it
• 20:24
  was their only hymn book. The practice of exclusive Psalm
• 20:27
  it. Right.
• 20:28
  They believed believed that the only words fit for singing to
• 20:31
  God in worship were the words God himself had provided in
• 20:34
  Scripture. So they sang metrical versions
• 20:37
  of the songs. Is that Sola scriptura principle
• 20:39
  applied directly to worship? It is.
• 20:41
  And what's so striking is that this one book could be so
• 20:44
  central to so many different groups.
• 20:46
  It's the prayer book for Benedictine monks and for
• 20:48
  Puritans, for Saint Francis Xavier and for Charles Wesley.
• 20:53
  Even for people like Calvin and Jerome who disagreed about its
• 20:55
  authorship, its spiritual utility was never in question.
• 20:59
  Never. The shared belief was that it
• 21:01
  spoke to the human condition and pointed to Christ.
• 21:04
  That conviction transcended all the scholarly debates.
• 21:07
  So after this whole deep dive, what should you walk away with?
• 21:11
  We've seen the Psalms aren't just one book, but 5A collection
• 21:15
  that was fluid for a long time but was also carefully
• 21:18
  structured. And it covers everything.
• 21:20
  The raw cries for vengeance, the the first whispers of
• 21:23
  resurrection hope, and this constant focus on a coming
• 21:27
  Messiah who is finally revealed in Christ.
• 21:30
  The Psalms really do capture the full range of human feeling
• 21:33
  before God. Fear, anger, repentance, joy,
• 21:37
  it's all there. It is, and that's why it has
• 21:39
  sustained believers for millennia.
• 21:41
  It gives us God's own words to speak back to Him no matter our
• 21:44
  circumstances. It united people who agreed on
• 21:46
  little else because it gave them a shared language of prayer.
• 21:49
  And that brings up a final thought.
• 21:50
  We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the text's own
• 21:52
  structure that the final order of the songs wasn't fixed until
• 21:55
  around the Christian era. The whole 5 book compilation was
• 21:58
  a deliberate post exilic choice. So knowing that it's a hymn book
• 22:02
  that was edited and arranged over time, what does that do to
• 22:06
  our view of its authority? It's a great question.
• 22:08
  Does the fact that the Church received it in this final form
• 22:11
  confirmed the editorial choices themselves were divinely guided?
• 22:16
  Or should we think more about the book's fluidity, its long
• 22:18
  history of being shaped and reshaped?
• 22:21
  It's something to reflect on this meeting of divine
• 22:23
  inspiration and human tradition in the pages of Scripture.