Structure in Psalm 134

One of the shortest Psalms, this piece for choir and soloist nonetheless presents several structural features. Leaving “a song of ascents” aside as a title rather than part of the work proper, most commentators scan it as six lines or three couplets. This assessment can be left standing with the proviso that the middle couplet’s two lines interact with each other in a more involved way than either the first or third couplet.

The vocabulary is dominated by the word “Lord” which appears five times, more than any other word. This word is conspicuous not only in its frequency, but in its location. Consider its placement in the lines:

Come, bless the Lord, all you servants of the Lord,
who stand by night in the house of the Lord!

Lift up your hands to the holy place
and bless the Lord!

May the Lord bless you from Zion,
he who made heaven and earth!

If one tampers with the scansion a bit, one might also read:

Come, bless the Lord,
all you servants of the Lord,
who stand in the house of the Lord
by night.

Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord!

May the Lord bless you from Zion,
he who made heaven and earth!

When asking whether such adjustments are at all reasonable, one notes that the positioning of “by night” after “Lord” is found in the Hebrew Vorlage, and that Hebrew meter in general is less strictly confined to syllables and rhymes, and includes a sort of “meter of ideas” which arranges, e.g., two concepts in each of the two lines of a couplet in order to “balance” the ideas in a way analogous to the way one might balance syllables.

The revised scansion makes more obvious how the word “Lord” might function as a way to end most of the lines. In terms of the music — this Psalm, like most or all Psalms, was probably composed as a performance piece — the word “Lord” might have had a whole note, coming after a series of quarter notes, or be metrically distinguished in some other way. Likewise, the word may have landed on the tonic in terms of pitch, giving a sense of finality, or it may have had a relatively high or relatively low note, or been in some other way distinctive.

The word “holy” has no preposition such as “in” or “toward” in the Hebrew Vorlage, and is a noun which can mean holiness or sanctuary. This poses a challenge for any translator.

The first two couplets are clearly in the second person plural, and the final couplet is in the second person singular. One can easily envision the first two couplets being sung by a soloist, and the final couplet by a choir.

Given the pilgrimage title of the Psalm, the soloist would be the traveler approaching the Temple, exhorting and encouraging the Temple staff, who ensured that worship never ceased, but continued all day and all night. The choir would be the Temple staff, bestowing a blessing on the pilgrim after his long journey.

Some commentators have hypothesized that the final couplet referred to a group, and that the second person singular was used to indicate that the pilgrims had such a unity among themselves that they might well be addressed in this way. This could allow for the possibility that two choirs were used, one singing the first part of the Psalm, and other singing the second part.

The first two couplets contain four verbs, all in the imperative: bless, stand, lift, bless. The final couplet contains a verb with the force, if not strictly the form, of a jussive (bless) and simple indicative verb (made).

Structure in Psalm 107

While the first line of this Psalm contains a second person imperative verb, the remainder of the work is free of any second person forms, whether verbs or pronouns. This work is at its core, then, neither a prayer, addressed to God, nor an exhortation, addressed to the Psalmist’s fellow Hebrews. It is a teaching Psalm, and a reasonable argument could be made to include it into the category of wisdom literature.

Psalm 107 has a clear structure. Verses 1 through 3 form an introduction, and verses 33 through 42 form the first part of a conclusion, and verse 43 is the second part of the conclusion.

The introduction explains that God has “redeemed from trouble” and “gathered” his people, and a third-person jussive tells the reader that the people should thank God for his salvation.

Between the introduction and the conclusion, the body of the Psalm is cyclic and goes through four iterations. Each iteration, and the subparts within the iteration, is clearly marked by identical stock phrases. New cycles begin at 107:4, 107:10, 107:17, and 107:23 with the word “some” in the ESV, but in Hebrew, the initiation of a new cycle is more subtle. Each of the four cycles begins with a plural: three times it is a plural verb and once it is a plural adjective. While understated, it is nonetheless a reliable marker, and this becomes clear after multiple readings.

The first part of each cycle describes a difficult situation in which a group of people finds themselves. The second part of the cycle begins with “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress.” This sentence is identical in each of the four cycles, and leaves no doubt that it is marking the beginning of the second part of the cycle. After this is a narrative of deliverance, narrating how God saved the people from the situation.

The third and final part of each of the four cycles begins with “Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!” After this is another third-person jussive, more particular to the first two parts of the cycle, indicating the specific nature of the rescue for which the people should be thankful.

The first part of the conclusion lists different ways in which God saves; the second part of the conclusion is again a jussive, this time singular, ascribing wisdom to whomever meditates and reflects on God’s salvation.

Psalm 107 displays a deliberate and highly structured organization, almost all of it in couplets, and many of those couplets manifesting the typical parallelism which one associates with Hebrew poetry.

The author uses the jussive frequently; he is telling us about the way things ought to be. This is one piece of data to support the assertion that this Psalm might belong in the category of wisdom literature.

Psalm 107 was presumably, like most or all Psalms, a performance piece set to music. The structual features of the text here noted are suggestive of how the structural features of the music might have sounded.

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars: Allusions to False Gods

In the Tanakh there are nine occurrences in which the words ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ and ‘stars’ appear in the same sentence. Tangentially, there is one occurrence in which ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ and ‘constellations’ appear in the same sentence, with ‘constellations’ being a synonym for ‘stars’ (II Kings 23:5).

“The sun, the moon, and the stars” is used idiomatically to mean ‘everything’ or ‘anything’ in twentieth and twenty-first century English. This is not the case in Hebrew.

In the New Testament, there are five occurrences in which ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ and ‘stars’ appear in the same sentence.

While these words in English are simply nouns which refer to astronomical bodies, in Hebrew they were simultaneously names for the idols worshipped by the neighboring pagan nations which surrounded Israel. This placed the authors of the Tanakh into tricky situations: In Genesis, the author uses a circumlocution, referring to the “greater light” and the “lesser light” in order to avoid using the words ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ which are actually the names of heathen gods.

Moses uses these three astronomical terms as a circumlocution to indicate idolatry in general (Deuteronomy 4:19).

Although the authors needed to use care to avoid inadvertently seeming to acknowledge the pagan deities, the semantic fields of these Hebrew words also enabled the authors to construct linguistic slights which insult those idols.

The dynamic of these three words is similar but fainter in the New Testament, the Greek words being less directly connected to the mythological Gods. When Matthew quotes Jesus as saying that “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven,” the meaning is not eschatological, as is often supposed, but rather deals with the destruction of the Temple (Matthew 24:29). He explains that this astronomical collapse will occur “after” 70 A.D., when the Roman army plundered Jerusalem. Given that the sun, moon, and stars are not significantly different now than what they were two thousand years ago, a literal physical interpretation of this text is not plausible. What then might Jesus have meant?

It is arguable that Jesus is referring to the decline of the polytheistic mythological systems which were ubiquitous and which were, for the most part, the only alternative to the Judaism of the first three decades of the first century. For practical purposes, at the time, if one wasn’t a follower of the Hebrew God, then one embraced belief systems of the ancient world, all of which acknowledged some set of gods and goddesses. The Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, Celtic, and other ancient cultures each had their own distinctive mythologies, all of which had, however, at least these two features in common: they were polytheistic, and they lacked a fervent devotional relationship between the individual and a deity. Their rituals were widely observed, but did not reflect a personal piety.

Following the day of Pentecost, in the mid-30s A.D., faith in Jesus spread rapidly, and millions of people abandoned the polytheistic mythologies. The speed and ease with which individuals walked away from those religious systems is expressed in Christ’s statement that the sun was darkened, the moon gave no light, and the stars fell.

It is plausible to assert that in history, rarely or never have so many people discarded a religion or a belief system so quickly and with so little hesitation.

Jesus is reported as using this phraseology in Luke 21:25, where, like the Matthew instance, it occurs in a transition between Christ’s discussion of the destruction of the Temple and his discussion of the end of this world. Many commentators see this remark in Luke as eschatological, but it possibly, plausibly, and even persuasively can be read as applying to high rates of conversion to Christianity in the decades immediately after the Temple’s destruction.

From where did Jesus get this imagery? One source is probably a text (II Kings 23:5) in which King Josiah worked to free the nation from paganism:

He deposed the priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and the moon and the constellations and all the host of the heavens.

In this text, one sees clearly how “sun, moon, stars,” with ‘constellations’ substituting for ‘stars,’ can easily be read as referring to idols. Why the substitution was made is a question for a separate investigation, but the synonymy is clear enough.

Likewise, a couplet from a hymn (Psalm 148:3) alludes to heathenism’s false gods:

Praise him, sun and moon,
praise him, all you shining stars!

The Psalmist performs two tasks at once: first, the couplet is part of a longer listing of all aspects of creation praising God; second, the couplet demotes the idols, which, far from being gods, are creations made by God, and far from being praised, praise Him.

Likewise, Isaiah uses (13:10) these three astronomical words in his description of the judgment and downfall of Babylon. This can be read as not only the physical destruction of the city and empire, but also the discrediting of their idols, which are revealed to be null and void.

In like manner, Ezekiel (32:7) uses a similar structure in discussing the downfall of Egypt. Joel (3:15) does the same in describing the downfall of “the nations” (Tyre, Sidon, Philistia, et al.) which had behaved badly toward the kingdom of Judah, although there is a possible eschatological reading of this couplet. Not only do these nations fall, but their gods are revealed to be nothing.

Jeremiah (31:35) indicates that the sun, moon, and stars are subject and subservient to God, and implies, as Genesis (1:14-15) more explicitly states, that these astronomical bodies are to serve mankind by marking times and seasons, and that humans therefore do not serve them.

Analysis of the following is left as an exercise for the reader:

Elsewhere in the Old Testament, this vocabulary triad appears to be used not in reference to pagan deities (cf. Genesis 37:9, Ecclesiastes 12:2, Joel 2:10).

In the New Testament, too, not every time these three words appear together is a reference to false gods (cf. I Corinthians 15:41; Revelation 8:12, 12:1).

Semitic Semantic Syntactic Structures in Luke: Parallelisms in the Visitation

Although the disciples and evangelists composed the text of the New Testament in Greek, they were influenced by the idioms and structures of Hebrew and Aramaic. Certain structures can be identified as Hebraisms or Semiticisms, translated literally into Greek, creating phrases which would be non-idiomatic for native speakers of Greek in the first century.

One of the core features of Hebrew poetry is parallelisms structured as couplets. In its simplest form, this is two lines of poetry in which the second line echoes the meaning of the first. Consider Psalm 25:4

Make me to know your ways, O Lord;
Teach me your paths.

And Numbers 23:8

How can I curse whom God has not cursed?
How can I denounce whom the Lord has not denounced?

Generally, this repetition of meaning is not accompanied by any phonological similarities between the two lines. The second line needn’t sound like the first line in order for the couplet to qualify as an example of Hebraic parallelism. Indeed, in the majority of examples, the second line usually doesn’t sound like the first.

Readers who are familiar with, e.g., poetry in English or German will need to unlearn the habit of counting syllables and looking for metrical patterns, or listening for rhymes. Those features are rare in Hebrew poetry.

The authors of the New Testament carried this structure into Greek. Parallelisms can be found in many of the NT books, e.g., Matthew 6:24

For either he will hate the one and love the other,
Or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

Surprisingly, Luke, in his Gospel and in Acts, shows traces of this habit, even though many scholars hypothesize that he was a gentile.

If indeed Luke was a gentile, he may have unconsciously picked up the habit of parallelism through immersion in a Semitic linguistic environment; or perhaps he deliberately used the structure in his writing.

Other scholars suggest that Luke was not a gentile, but a Jew raised in a Greek-speaking community, perhaps in Syria. Many of these Hellenized Jews adopted lifestyles quite different from the Jews in Israel, and lifestyles quite similar to the Greeks and Romans. Yet they were exposed to the Tanakh, i.e., to the Old Testament, as they read the Septuagint. In this scenario, Luke would have picked up the habit of parallelism from the LXX.

Whether Luke was a Jew or a gentile, and whether his use of parallelism is intentional or unwitting, clear examples are found in his Gospel and in Acts. Different editions and translations are inconsistent in whether they mark these parallelisms as poetry by line breaks. Often, the parallelisms are printed as normal prose, hiding the fact that they are poetic.

These verses from chapter one (1:32-36) of Luke’s Gospel, in which the angel Gabriel speaks, are printed as prose in many editions, but they are clearly Greek clauses which follow the rules of Hebrew poetry:

He will be called the Son of the Highest;
And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.

And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever,
And of his kingdom there will be no end.

And

The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
And the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Now indeed, Elizabeth your relative has also conceived a son in her old age;
And this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren.

In the Magnificat (1:1:46-55), Mary replies to the angel, and her words are likewise often constructed in parallel couplets:

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

Mary also expresses herself in another type of parallelism, in which the second line in the couplet is not a direct repetition of the idea in the first line, but rather an extension or development of the first line, or a re-framing of the first line’s idea by showing this idea from another perspective:

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

God has “shown strength” in the first line; this “strength” is detailed and amplified when we learn that it was shown in the course of scattering.

The couplet which immediately follows shows parallelism by a sort of double negation:

He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estates.

To “bring down the mighty” is to “exalt the humble” — the two are mirror images of each other; they are complementary shapes, like a bronze casting and the mold in which it was cast. The next couplet has the same schema:

He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

Each couplet speaks of God’s action toward the powerful and the vulnerable. The two couplets themselves form a sort of meta-parallelism and a chiastic structure. The first couplet begins with God’s action toward the powerful and moves to His action toward the vulnerable; the second couplet treats the two in reverse order.

Chiasmus on the level of a two-line couplet, as well as larger chiastic structures which can include many lines, work well with Hebraistic parallelism, and are often found in Scripture generally, but not often in Luke.

Even if Luke was a gentile, and even if he composed his text in Greek, both of which seem likely, his composition is still shaped, consciously or unwittingly, by the semitic literary structures which he must have frequently encountered.