Quick notes on the Psalms and Torah

Recently, I have been study­ing the first and sec­ond Psalms.  In what again seems to be like a long process (as I have one again accu­mu­lated a lot of mate­r­ial in which to browse through) I have found one book that I rec­om­mend for those who have inter­ests lean­ing towards mildly deeper the­o­log­i­cal dis­cus­sions (inter­pre­ta­tions) of the Bib­li­cal text.  It is called "A The­o­log­i­cal Intro­duc­tion to the Book of Psalms" by J. Clin­ton McCann Jr. (Abing­ton Press). In a very down to earth and easy to read approach, McCann relates at length on var­i­ous ele­ments regard­ing the nature of the Psalms in easy to fol­low, exeget­i­cal fash­ion.  Although some crit­ics have seem­ingly taken issue with some unex­pected devi­a­tions from the text, to begin (as some have stated) to "preach," this I believe in no way takes away from the rich­ness and con­tent of his per­sonal stud­ies.  (McCann, is a pro­fes­sor at Eden The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary and is also an ordained pas­tor, I think.)

Any­way, here is some of the notes that I have taken from his chap­ter that deals specif­i­cally with the Psalms and Torah. Enjoy.

• The psalms are to be heard as God’s instruc­tions to the faithful.
• A proper trans­la­tion of the Hebrew word Torah should lean more towards Eng­lish words such as instruc­tion, teach­ing or guide rather than the harsh tone of the word law, which evi­dently was the result of trans­la­tors heav­ily influ­enced (or else solely rely­ing upon) the Greek nomos (law) rather than try­ing to under­stand this word from a proper Hebraic perspective.
• Psalms 1–2 is an intro­duc­tion to the psalms as a whole, admon­ish­ing us “to be open to God’s instruc­tion and the real­ity of [his] reign on the earth.”
• "To be ‘per­fect’, ‘blame­less’ or ‘whole’ is not to never sin, but rather to be open to the torah (the instruc­tion or teach­ing) of the Lord on which "human life con­stantly depends."
• Con­cern­ing Psalms 119: (also a Torah Psalm)…  "For the Psalmist, the impor­tance of the torah is over­whelm­ing.  Apart from God’s instruc­tion (torah), there is noth­ing wor­thy to be called life!”  [Obvi­ously other choices of words would per­haps make McCann's point a lit­tle more clear.  Per­haps: "Apart from God’s instruc­tion, there is noth­ing worth liv­ing for or writ­ing about!")
• Hap­pi­ness… " has every­thing to do with ori­en­tat­ing one’s life to being instructed by God."
• Some schol­ars believe that Psalms 1–119 may have been in fact the orig­i­nal Psalter. “If so, this would mean that at one stage of it’s exis­tence, the Psalter itself was encom­passed by what Psalms 1 and 119 affirm is all encom­pass­ing — the instruc­tion [or Torah] of the Lord!"  Thus… "torah applies to every­thing!”
• "The ful­fill­ment of the Torah is not so much a spe­cific reward on earth but rather a result of being con­nected with the source of life."
• "The wicked are those who con­sider them­selves autonomous, which being inter­preted means “a law unto one’s self”.  Thus the wicked are “self instructed, self directed, and self ruled.”
• “The ful­fill­ment of the wicked is not so much a pun­ish­ment as [it is] the result of cut­ting [off] of one­self from the source of life.”
• “In short, wicked­ness con­tains the seeds of it’s own self destruction.”
• “Wicked­ness is essen­tially the con­vic­tion that we are doing all right by ourselves.”

There's a lot more… per­haps I'll post more of my notes later on.  Hope­fully this will whet your appetite to find, bor­row or pur­chase (and then read) this book — there was so much to choose from!

Bless­ings,

John

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