Thanksgiving: A Genre in Psalms

Accessed via Sefaria. Translation follows Mishneh Torah, trans. Eliyahu Touger (Jerusalem, Moznaim, 1986–2007).

Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit, 2d. ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007), 2–3, 8–15, as well as “Psalms and the Life of Faith: A Suggested Typology of Function,” in his collection, The Psalms and the Life of Faith, ed. P.D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 3–32, esp. 6–8. Brueggemann identifies not only thanksgiving psalms but also hymns of praise as songs of reorientation. He also describes wisdom psalms as literature of orientation. It seems to me, however, that hymns represent orientation rather than reorientation; unlike thanksgiving psalms, hymns of praise do not refer back to a specific crisis or experience of disorientation. The contemporary American novelist Anne Lamott changes the order used by both Maimonides and Brueggemann. She speaks first of request, then thanksgiving, and finally praise in the title her book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. This sequence puts humanity’s needs rather than God’s nature first, but the categories remain the same. See Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012). This book is accessible but deeply problematic. It is of interest primarily as an example of how secular Westerners misunderstand prayer—indeed, misunderstand the cultural category we call “religion” altogether—and condescend to communities committed to traditional piety.

The German term Gunkel used, Gattung, has become so well known in biblical scholarship that many English-speaking scholars refer to Gattung rather than using the English-language terms “genre” and “form.”

Again, Gunkel’s term, Sitz im Leben, literally “setting in life,” is frequently used by English-speaking biblical scholars.

Editor’s note: See Marc Zvi Brettler, “Reciting Ready-Made Prayers in Biblical Times and Today,” TheTorah (2019).

During the crisis an individual might have vowed to bring an offering if he or she survived. In that case, the individual would bring a נֶדֶר or “vow offering” to the temple. (Rules for that type of offering appear in Lev 7:16–18.) A person might also have chosen to offer the נְדָבָה or “voluntary offering” (also described in Lev 7:16–18), or to bring some other class of offering, such as the עוֹלָה, “whole sacrifice,” or the מִנְחָה, “grain sacrifice.” The latter two were given over to YHWH and the temple entirely. The thanksgiving, vow, and voluntary offerings, on the other hand, were shared by YHWH and the person who brought it—that is, for these three, which belong to the broader category known as the זֶבַח הַשְּׁלָמִים, the individual who brought the offering ate most of the meat along with family and other guests, while choice cuts were burned on the altar as a gift to YHWH.

See Zev Herzog, “Sha‘ar,” in Encyclopaedia Miqra’it (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1955–1988), 232–234 [in Hebrew]. For an example of such business, see Ruth 4:1–12. On the city gate as public congregating space and hence a predecessor to the postbiblical synagogue, see Lee Israel Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years, 2^nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 21–44.

Gunkel lays out the elements of the individual song of thanksgiving in Hermann Gunkel and Joachim Begrich, Introduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel, trans. James D. Nogalski, Mercer Library of Biblical Studies (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), 201–207. A similar treatment with minor differences is found in Claus Westermann, “Praise and Lament in the Psalms,” in Praise and Lament, trans. Keith R. Crim and Richard N. Soulen (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), 102–108. Westermann refers to this genre as “narrative praise” or “declarative praise” rather than “thanksgiving.”

Note the example of Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2. The priests and Levites who helped Israelites offer sacrifice and prayer in ancient Israelite temples were male, but these ritual officiants served both males and females. On the role of women in the ritual use of psalms in ancient Israel, see Marc Zvi Brettler, “Women and Psalms: Toward an Understanding of the Role of Women’s Prayer in the Israelite Cult,” in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, ed. Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson, and Tikva Frymer-Kensky (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), esp. 41–56; see also Erhard Gerstenberger, “Weibliche Spiritualität in Psalmen und Hauskult,” in Ein Gott allein? JHWH-Verehrung und biblischer Monotheismus im Kontext der israelitischen und altorientalischen Religionsgeschichte, ed. Martin Klopfenste and Walter Dietrich (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Schweiz, 1994), 349–363. Gerstenberger’s observations are useful, in spite of his tendency (inherited, בעל כרחו, from earlier scholars) to blame misogyny in scripture on what earlier scholars regarded as the incipient Judaization of biblical religion. On women as worshipers in biblical texts more generally, see Patrick D. Miller, They Cried to the Lord: The Form and Theology of Biblical Prayer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 233–243.

The thanksgiving psalm in Jonah 2:10 provides a good example of this. (See the appendix below.)

Psalm 30 is recited shortly before Pesuqei Dezimra in both the Ashkenazic and the Sephardic siddur. It does not appear in the Italian or Yemenite rites before Pesuqei Dezimra or in the Vilna Gaon’s version of the Ashkenazic rite. While this psalm already appears there in medieval Sephardic siddurim, it enters Ashkenazic versions of the liturgy only in the 17th century, due to the influence of Lurianic kabbalah. For a detailed discussion of the place of the psalm in Jewish liturgy, see Moshe Hallamish, Studies in Kabbalah and Prayer (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2012), 69–80 [in Hebrew].

For a longer discussion of the psalm and its form, with explanations of several translation choices I make here, see Benjamin D. Sommer, “Form and Flexibility: A Commentary on Psalm 30,” JANES (2022):150–180, David gavra tava: Essays in Honor of David Marcus, ed. Edward Greenstein.

My translation preserves the choppiness, the brevity, and the cadence of the Hebrew. To sense the cadences in the translation, it is important to pronounce “YHWH” with two syllables, the second of which is stressed, e.g.: “Hashem.”

Hymns that celebrate a particular national victory—e.g., Exodus 15 and Judges 5—straddle this boundary. But they are closer to hymns than to the individual thanksgiving psalm, not only because they are communal rather than individual, but also because they contain no reference to crying out to YHWH during the crisis or YHWH hearing or answering the cry.

Most English-speaking scholars use the term “lament” where I use “psalm of crisis.” But “lament” properly denotes an elegy, a song of mourning that emphasizes grief over something that has already occurred. Good examples of lament in this sense are found, appropriately enough, in the book of Lamentations. The psalms of crisis, on the other hand, deal with a crisis that is taking place now, and their tone is angry, aggrieved, desperate, hopeful, or some combination of these. Gunkel referred to these psalms as “complaint songs”; some German scholars (e.g., Erhard Gerstenberger) also refer to them as “petitions.” Similarly, in modern Hebrew scholarship this genre is known variously as תלונה (complaint) and בקשה (petition).

Just as thanksgiving psalms may quote crisis psalms, so crisis psalms may end by quoting parts of a psalm of thanksgiving the worshiper intends to recite if she is rescued. See, for example, Psalms 7:18, 13:6b, 54:8–9.

Alternatively, some crisis psalms address why the person in crisis is turning to YHWH for help.

For examples of such a vow, see Psalms 7:18, 26:12b. Sometimes this element includes a promise to bring an offering to the altar: see Psalm 54:8a, 56:13. Similarly, in all likelihood the word נְדָרַי in Psalm 61:9 refers to the נֶדֶר offering described in Leviticus 7:16–19. The explanation of why YHWH should respond favorably may also consist of an affirmation of how reliable, powerful, or merciful YHWH is, or a reminder of how loyal the worshiper has been in the past.

The Book of Psalms includes other genres beyond thanksgiving, crisis and praise psalms, including wisdom and torah psalms, royal psalms, a few prophetic psalms, and psalms of procession. Some lyrical poems, such as Psalms 8 and 23, do not seem to belong to any liturgical genre.

In pointing out how thanksgiving psalms can be used as psalms of crisis, I do not intend to dismiss the attempts of scholars like Gunkel to identify the situations in which particular genres functioned. Rather, I am pointing out that in addition to what scholars have identified as the primary settings of a text, secondary settings existed as well. The fact that Psalm 100, a textbook example of a hymn of praise, is called a “thanksgiving” text (תּוֹדָה) in its superscription is a further example of this phenomenon. Tellingly, one rabbinic manual recommends Psalm 30 as a prayer to be recited upon recovery from an illness (after ברכת הגומל) while another suggests it as a prayer for healing. For the former, see the 1965 Rabbinical Assembly manual for Conservative rabbis; for the latter, see the 2015 Central Conference of American Rabbis manual for Reform rabbis.

This adaptability of psalms genres has often been noted. See, e.g., William Bellinger, “Psalms and the Question of Genre,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms, ed. William P. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 322; Erhard Gerstenberger, “Non-Temple Psalms: The Cultic Setting Revisited,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms, ed. William P. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 339–341; Anna Elise Zernecke, “Vom »Sich-Unterbringen« in den Psalmen: Überlegungen zur Individualität des Ich in Den Klagepsalmen,” in Individualität und Selbstreflexion in den Literaturen des Alten Testaments, ed. Andreas Wagner and Jürgen van Oorschot (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017), 305. Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, trans. and abridged by Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 310–311, notes the incongruity between the content of the psalms recited by Hannah and Jonah (on the latter, see the appendix below) as well as the psalm in Joel 1:16–20. Such incongruities, Kaufmann notes, are a normal (indeed, we may add, a vital) feature when existing prayers are applied in new situations: “Once a given psalm become public property, its application to various situations is obviously considered justified if even a non-essential element can be conceived as relevant.”

In modern Hebrew, they are usually referred to as “future tense” verbs or עתיד. Many biblical scholars refer to them in biblical Hebrew as “imperfect verbs.” The term “prefix verbs” is a straightforward, neutral way to describe them, regardless of how they are used in different periods of Hebrew. On the use of the prefix form to describe repeated or ongoing action in the past, see E. Kautzsch, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, 2d ed., trans. A.E. Cowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), section 107 b-e; P. Joüon and T. Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1991), section 113e-f; Steven Fassberg, An Introduction to the Syntax of Biblical Hebrew (Jerusalem: Bialik, 2019), pp. 73-74, section 163  [in Hebrew].

A worshiper’s decision to use Psalm 30 as a crisis psalm would be abetted by the psalm’s frequently terse language and the ambiguity of its verbs. I translated verse 2a, “I exalt You, YHWH, for You took me out of danger.” But the word כִּי there could mean “when” rather than “for,” and the prefix verb there (אֲרוֹמִמְךָ) could be understood to refer to the future rather than the present. In that case, these words could be a promise of future praise: “I will exalt You, YHWH, when You have taken me out of danger.”

I am not the first person to notice Psalm 30’s malleability. Amos Hakham, The Book of Psalms, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1979), 165 [in Hebrew], similarly emphasizes that the psalm’s language is flexible and allows three settings: during a crisis (so that the suffix and waw-consecutive verbs in verse 3 are intended for the future, and the imperatives in verse 5 are spoken in part to the speaker who utters them), after a crisis (and thus the petition referred to in verse 9 took place in the past), or after a crisis but with the intention of asking for help in verses 9–11 from future crises as well).

For an argument that formulaic prayer “does not exclude spontaneous prayer or the revitalization of traditional wording through new intentions or understanding,” so that a life of prayer involves not only “the communal and historical voice of traditional prayers, but also...the new intentions one may give these old words,” see Michael Fishbane, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 130–132. For the thesis that religious expression involves a “combination of the very personal and the stereotyped,” see also T. M. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 44. See also Zvi Adar, The Book of Psalms (Tel Aviv: Guma/Tcherikover, 1976), 25 [in Hebrew].

After all, worshipers’ minds sometime wander, often strategically. This reality enhances the elasticity of a psalm. See the useful discussion of this issue in Brettler, “Women and Psalms,” 47.

The psalms originated in antiquity, but they become new again and again. I think this is why several psalms (Pss 33:3, 40:4, 96:1, 98:1, 144:9, and 149:1) describe themselves as “a new song”: No matter how old these poems are, as long as worshipers continue to pray through them, their words live in the present.

Note further that a vow offering (נֶדֶר) and a thanksgiving offering (תּוֹדָה) are two subtypes of the זֶבַח הַשְּׁלָמִים class of offerings described in Leviticus 3. By placing the word תּוֹדָה after “sound” and by using the verbal formנָדַרְתִּי rather than the noun (נֶדֶר), Jonah alludes to both types of offering while allowing worshipers who sing the song to bring either one.

On the types of offerings, see footnote 6, above.