A prayer is not a doctrine, and what it means to read words that were meant to be said back to God
Reading a Psalm
The psalms say that God sleeps, that he has forgotten, that he has hidden his face, that the singer’s enemies should have their children orphaned. They also say the things Christians have sung for two thousand years. All of it is scripture, and none of it is a lesson in theology. It is prayer, and prayer is read differently.
Lesson 5 of 12 · Reading a psalm
A psalm is words addressed to God, kept so that other people could address him in them. It tells the truth about the person praying, at that hour, and it does not always tell the truth about God: when a psalmist says the Lord is asleep, the Bible is not teaching that he sleeps. The truth of a psalm is found by praying it through to its end, which is usually somewhere different from its beginning. Read as a set of doctrines, the psalter contradicts itself on every page. Read as prayers, it is the most honest book in the Bible.
Written to be said back
Most of scripture is God addressing people, or people telling what God did. The psalms run the other way: they are people addressing God, and they were collected so that a congregation could keep addressing him in the same words. That is why the Bible’s most famous cry of abandonment is not a lapse of faith but a text.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? — Psalm 22:1 · WEB
Read the comment on My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?
Jesus prayed that sentence from the cross, in the words of a psalm a thousand years old. He did not compose his despair; he borrowed it, from a book that had kept it for exactly that use. The psalms are full of such lines, and they ask to be used rather than studied.
How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? — Psalm 13:1 · WEB
Read the comment on How Long Will You Forget Me?
How long? Four times in two verses. That is not a question the Bible answers. It is a question the Bible gives you the words to ask.
Sign in to keep a note here. It is listed with your Saved notes, under this lesson.
A psalm tells the truth about the one praying
Because a psalm is a prayer, its sentences are true the way a prayer is true: they say faithfully what the person praying felt and believed at that hour. They are not, one by one, statements of what is so.
Wake up! Why do you sleep, Lord? Arise! Don’t reject us forever. — Psalm 44:23 · WEB
Read the comment on Awake! Why Do You Sleep?
Wake up. Why do you sleep, Lord? The same book says elsewhere that the keeper of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps (Psalm 121:4), and a reader who treats both as doctrine has a contradiction. A reader who treats both as prayer has two people in two hours, one of them at the end of his strength. The Bible kept his sentence. It did not keep it as information about God. It kept it as permission.
The hardest case is the psalms that curse. Psalm 109 asks that the singer’s enemy die young, that his children beg, that no one show them kindness. Readers have handled those lines in three ways: as the Old Testament’s morality, since surpassed; as prayers about God’s enemies rather than the singer’s; and as exactly what they appear to be, the words of a wronged man handing his rage to God instead of acting on it. The third reading has the most to be said for it and does not make the lines comfortable, and the question is genuinely open. What is not open is that they are prayers. Nobody is instructed to orphan anyone. Somebody is heard.
Sign in to keep a note here. It is listed with your Saved notes, under this lesson.
The shapes a psalm takes
The psalms are not all one kind of prayer, and their first verses usually say which kind you are holding.
“Yahweh, how my adversaries have increased! Many are those who rise up against me.” Psalm 3:1 · WEB
A lament: trouble named to God, which is most of the book.
“I will extol you, Yahweh, for you have raised me up, and have not made my foes to rejoice over me.” Psalm 30:1 · WEB
A thanksgiving: a rescue remembered and told back to the rescuer.
“Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions.” Psalm 51:1 · WEB
A confession: a wrong owned, with no excuse attached.
“Praise Yahweh, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!” Psalm 117:1 · WEB
A praise: the shortest chapter in the Bible, and all of it is invitation.
“Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand on the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers;” Psalm 1:1 · WEB
A wisdom psalm: not addressed to God at all, but to whoever will listen.
The lament is the commonest shape, and it has a shape of its own: a cry, a complaint, a request, and then, in almost every case, a turn toward trust before the end. Psalm 13 begins with how long and ends with I will sing. Psalm 22 begins with why have you forsaken me and ends with a feast for the poor. The turn is where the psalm has been going all along, and a reader who stops at the complaint has read half a prayer.
תְּהִלָּה tᵉhillâh H8416
from הָלַל; laudation; specifically (concretely) a hymn; praise.
The Hebrew title of the book of Psalms is the plural of this word: Tehillim, praises. That is a strange name for a collection in which more than a third of the songs are laments, and the strangeness is the lesson. The people who named the book did not think a complaint addressed to God was the opposite of praise. They thought it was one of its forms. A psalm that says how long is counted among the praises because it is said to the one who can answer.
Sign in to keep a note here. It is listed with your Saved notes, under this lesson.
How to read a psalm
Read it aloud if you can, since it was written to be. Find its shape from its first lines. Follow it to its turn, and if it has no turn, as Psalm 88 has none, notice that the Bible kept a prayer that ends in the dark. Ask what the singer knew about God that made the complaint possible, because nobody complains to a God they do not expect to hear. And then, if it fits, pray it, which is the only thing a psalm was ever for.
Choose a psalm that says something you would not say in your own words. Read it to its end and write down where it turned, or that it did not, and what you think the person praying it knew about God.
Sign in to keep a note here. It is listed with your Saved notes, under this lesson.