Status Updates From Psalms for Normal People: A...

Chapter 16
Psalm 22 used in Gospel of Mark and Matt to emphasize Jesus’ suffering during the Stations of the Cross

Chapter 15
Psalm 51
Disagreements on interpretation of original sin psalm
Psalm 8
Ascribing Kingly status to humans under god / Christian pantheon
Psalm 139
Wonderfully made psalm used to limit reproductive rights

This historical reality has led some commentators to wonder if Psalm 72 functioned as "liturgical cover" for the king. The psalm offers the right words, it describes what the kings should have done, but it doesn't reflect the real intent of the king to actually care for the poor…The psalm reads more like a hope-filled prayer of the people that the king actually be equitable and good.

I'd say the images we have are due to the fact that the ancients believed God fought their battles. Many Christians today, for various reasons (Jesus being one of them), believe that God is not at the head of any battles. Both interpretive groups, the ancients putting the Hebrew Bible together and Christians

Psalm 137 about Israelites being humiliated by Babylonians, Temples being destroyed and Israelites wanting to bash Babylonian babies heads against rocks being used post 9/11.

Psalm tense is about evoking Gods wrath as God of Justice, taking agency out of the hands of the oppressed Israelites

1974 Liturgy of the Hours - removing three imprecatory psalms entirely (Pss 58, 83, and 109) and sections from twenty-two other psalms from the daily prayer resource. The removal of "troubling" lines from the imprecatory prayers might save participants in worship from the cognitive dissonance of comparing the psalmists' requests for divine violence and Jesus's teaching

Chapter 11
Invoking God during times of trouble, lament reinforces he can handle what we lay at Gods feet
Public practice of lament is not normalized in mainstream Christian spaces, often there is juxtaposition between praising gods goodness and cruelty in the world
Psalm 42+43: invoking gods actions from previous story’s and asking him to pursue justice on behalf of psalmist

Chapter 10
Psalm 136 & 107
Reminders of Gods Commitment to Israelites in form of Steadfast Love. Reinforces that God has helped Israelites in last, will redouble his efforts during the Babylonian Exile

Chapter 9
Psalm 104: God created Leviathan as pet, but also frames god as creating both positive and negative elements out of the chaos of the unformed earth in the form of the water constituting sea and sky
Psalm 74: Lamentation prayer saying if god killed sea creatures and leviathan before, he could kill them again for the destitute Israelites

Chapter 8
We can’t superimpose all of our religious baggage on psalms. They hold historical contexts like polytheism that doesn’t map onto our existing Christian thought. But we can find similar threads like Psalm 82s takedowns of lesser gods that stomp on the destitute and weak in their societies

Chapter 7
Psalm Book 1: Psalms of Lament and Praise contemporary to David’s Rule
Book 2: End of David’s Rule
Book 3: We not I Community Laments, Fall of Assyria and Israel
Book 4: calls back to Moses in Exile, Psalms for exiled Israelites
Book 5: reorienting around what future king from Davids house would look like with reconnection to God

Psalms of Orientation = reflection of Israel’s core tenants, in line with gods wants
Psalms of Disorientation = Psalms of Lament, feeling disconnected from gods love
Psalms of New Orientation = you’ve learned from lamentation and have new point of view, redoubled connections with god

Chapter 6
Parallelism = related, heightening verses in psalms
Antithetical = verses that are in direct contradiction in psalms
Synthetical = all other relations of verses in psalms

Chapter 5
Praise Psalm: Praising God
Lament: God has forsaken us
Thanksgiving: God tested me and answered my prayer
Royal: Related to Monarchy
Pilgrimage: Enroute to temple to praise god
Mixed Genre: has elements of above listed genres but doesn’t fall completely into Gunkel framework

Chapter 5

Gunkel identified five main genre categor-ies:
hymns (or praise psalms), royal psalms, communal laments, individual laments, and thanksgiving psalms. He also identified a bunch of minor genres, too, such as pilgrimage songs, victory songs, communal thanks-givings, legends, torah psalms, and sayings of blessing and curse.

Chapter 4 is very grad student brained or fundamentalist deprogramming coded because I don’t interact with anyone that’s literally trying to connect every psalm with a historic figure to make it a biblical story unto itself. The framing of Psalms as general prayers or hyms is helpful because the generalities of the translation helps to make them more accessible and I don’t think that’s a bad thing for them

While there is a historical tradition of David Wuthering 73 Psalms, that can be understood as invoking his place under God not literally him writing the psalms

Invoking David might have been more of a shorthand for referring to Old Testament stories or themes, not literally authorship

Jesus invokes David in Psalm 110 that is in line with historical understandings of that text not inherently a true statement

Psalm 23 Decoupling Shepard from singular protector to connection to community and solidarity

Shoel in opposition to duality of Heaven and Hell, just the end of existence

Unpacking the need to read psalms through modern lens vs how their themes would have been perceived in historic context

Childs identifies the "psalms of ascent" (Psalms 120-134), the Asaph psalms (Psalms 50, 73-83), and the Korah psalms (Psalms 42, 44-49, 84, 85, 87, 88) as examples. There is also a group of
"David psalms" in Psalms 138-145

break the book into scenes of a narrative, moving from the rise and fall of the Davidic kingdom (in Books 1-3) to the reclaimed kingship of Yahweh (in Books 4-5).