Psalms

The elements of a thanksgiving prayer—praise, description of the crisis, calling on the audience, an acknowledgment of God’s answer, and a concluding thanks—are found in Psalm 30, recited daily in the morning service. The adaptability of this and other biblical psalms helps explain why these Iron-Age prayers are still recited around the world today.

The answer depends on the manuscript and tradition we read: Psalms are segmented differently from as early as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint and continuing through the medieval Hebrew manuscripts of the Masoretic Text.

In medieval Latin Christendom, the Psalms were highly beloved, with commentators interpreting them as prophecies about Christ and the Church. Aware of this prevailing interpretation, Rashi often deviates from the plain meaning of the text to read the Psalms as a reflection of the Jewish people’s experience and suffering in his own time.

In an existential crisis, the author of Psalm 77 is so incapacitated by his troubles that he struggles to speak. He attempts to bring to mind past memories of God’s kindness, but God has changed and is no longer manifest in his life. In an unexpected turn, the psalmist focuses on Israel’s memory of the Sea crossing at the Exodus. How does this meditation help him move from despair to hope?

From a shepherd’s guidance to a royal feast, the psalm’s two parallel scenes describe God’s providence and care.

The biblical authors knew that Moses did not lead the Israelites into the promised land, but the question of why preoccupied them.

In verses 2–31, YHWH is a mythic warrior, with smoke coming from his nostrils, riding a cherub and wielding weapons of lightning and thunder against the enemy. In contrast, in verses 32–51, YHWH strengthens and equips the psalmist to fight his own battles. The combined psalm celebrates YHWH’s complex involvement in human affairs.

Seeking a permanent connection with their god, ancient Mesopotamians would place votive statues of themselves in front of their god. Psalm 27 represents the Israelite alternative: the spoken request to see YHWH face-to-face uses words, not statues, to give the petitioner a refuge with God that endures even after departing the Temple.

In the ancient world, as now, indiscriminate violence and mass killing in war is explained as a struggle to defend “our” way of life against those who threaten to destroy it.

Themes from the Egyptian Great Hymn of the Aten, the divine sun disk, appear in Psalm 104: dangerous animals at night, human activity during the day, a focus on humans as opposed to Israelites, the great power of water, and many more.

Using the metaphor of Israel as YHWH’s vineyard, three biblical texts—Isaiah 5, Psalm 80 and Isaiah 27—grapple with Judah’s destruction and the hope for its future recovery.

What did the sea see to make it flee? Who caused the mountains to skip like rams?

Psalm 116:15 declares the death of the righteous to be yaqar, often translated as “precious,” to God. To avoid this message some scholars reinterpret the word yaqar to mean “difficult” or “grievous,” but a better solution is available.

YHWH declares to the Davidic king, “You are my son; today I have begotten you” (Psalm 2:7). For the New Testament, this verse is a prooftext for Jesus’s divinity, but what did it mean in its original context, and how did Jewish interpreters understand it?

Short does not mean simple: Psalm 117 is one of the more difficult psalms. It is only two verses long and exhorts non-Israelites to praise YHWH. Why would such a psalm be written? A look at the worldview of the exilic prophet Deutero-Isaiah provides one answer, while reading this psalm together with the beginning of Psalm 118 provides another.

Psalm 91 expresses confidence that God will protect the righteous from plagues, demons, and wild animals, while allowing the wicked to perish. How are we to understand this psalm when pandemics and other disasters often hit the weakest and most vulnerable the hardest?

Psalm 114, a late psalm, is exceptional in its structure and content.  These tightly structured eight verses, which reflect several non-Torah traditions, use Egypt symbolically, to encourage the exiles to return from Babylonia.

A midrash imagines Queen Esther reciting Psalm 22 the moment she was about to enter Ahasuerus' inner court. Are the rabbis responding to the Passion Narrative, in which Jesus, in his final moments, recites this lament on the cross?

The liturgical compilation Hallel (“praise”) opens with Psalm 113. Originally, this psalm was recited by women who gave birth after being barren, reminiscent of the song of Channah in 1 Samuel 2. A close look, however, suggests that its opening verses are a later supplement meant to introduce the larger Hallel collection.

The haftarah (prophetic reading) for the first day of Rosh Hashanah features Channah's two prayers. In the second prayer, she thanks God for the birth of Samuel by reciting a ready made royal hymn about defeating one's enemies, hardly relevant to her situation. Why does the Bible choose such a prayer and how might this help us better understand prayer in the context of the contemporary Rosh Hashanah?

And the Re-imagining of the Harvest Festival in the Wake of the Babylonian Exile

The division of the Torah into five books is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible, yet by the early first millennium C.E., the Torah became known by the Greek name Pentateuch, literally “five scrolls.” When and why was this division created?

Why Melchizedek, a minor biblical character, became so significant in Jewish and Christian interpretation.

מזמור שיר חנכת הבית לדוד, “A song of the dedication of the Temple of David”

The Song of the Well, as recorded in Numbers 21:16-18, is only a brief excerpt. While many commentators assume that the song was naturally short, R. Yehudah HeChasid presents a radical suggestion that the song was actually cut from the Torah and placed in the book of Psalms by none other than King David.

The psalm of the High Holiday season begins with the words “God is my light and my salvation,” moves to expressions of distress about God’s absence, and ends with a statement of hope. The psalm’s unexpected direction models the maturing of an authentic relationship with God.

A New Reading of Psalm 95

The verdant tree and the desert shrub: Jeremiah’s wisdom psalm (17:5-8) uses this arboreal simile in poetic parallelism to offer a poignant message: A person who trusts in God will still confront challenges.