The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  But if King David did not write most (or any) of them, who did? As the literature of Israel’s neighboring states came to be deciphered and translated over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars began to compare Israel’s psalms to those of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. They soon came to an obvious conclusion: just as these nations’ hymnic compositions apparently had a role in public worship, so too did many of the Hebrew psalms. They seem to have been intended for recitation at one or another of Israel’s ancient sanctuaries, either by a choir or an individual, and in either case presumably as a complement or accompaniment to the offering of sacrifices.6 As we have seen, ancient Near Eastern sanctuaries were deemed to be the earthly residence of the deity. Scholars were therefore quick to notice that many of the biblical psalms refer explicitly to temples or other holy sites where sacrifices were offered to God:7

  But I, through Your abundant love, enter Your house; I bow down in awe at Your holy temple. (Ps 5:8*)

  Sing to the LORD, all those on earth; worship the LORD in joy; enter into His presence [i.e., at the sanctuary] with rejoicing. (100:1–2)

  With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to You; I will greatly praise Your name, O LORD. (54:8; some Bibles 54:6)

  Let me offer You a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and call on the name of the LORD.

  Let me pay off my vows to the LORD in the presence of all His people, in the courts of the LORD’s house, in your very midst, O Jerusalem. (116:17–18)

  Bless the LORD, O you servants of the LORD, who stand in the LORD’s temple by night. (134:1)

  I bow down to Your holy temple and give thanks to Your name. (138:2)

  In short, the psalms appear to be, for the most part, liturgical compositions, written to be sung or recited in any one of various Israelite temples or holy places. They weren’t David’s “occasional, personal lyrics” at all; they were somebody’s (or several somebodies’) accompaniment to the offering of sacrifices.

  As to the authors of these compositions, scholars have little to go on. Jerusalem court figures or officials, learned Levites (who otherwise served in sanctuaries), members of a guild of northern psalmists,8 perhaps even some prophets9—whoever they were, these authors clearly do not share a single profile. Many of them in all probability had been commissioned to write what they wrote—to put together words of praise or thanksgiving to be uttered by or on behalf of the king, or to create some sort of national hymnal for festivals and other occasions. But the precise circumstances of their activity remain altogether unknown.

  Another unknown is when the psalms were written. It used to be thought that psalms must have entered temple worship at a relatively late date, since there is no mention of psalms or hymns being part of the temple service as it was described (in painstaking detail) in the book of Leviticus. By contrast, temple singers are mentioned prominently in the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles, which most scholars date to sometime toward the middle of the Persian period (539–332 BCE). This suggested to scholars that the psalms were written sometime in the fifth century BCE or so, presumably too late to have been mentioned in Leviticus. But this whole approach to the question has now been abandoned. To begin with, the discovery of the cache of ancient Canaanite writings at Ugarit (the city was destroyed around 1180 BCE, so its writings must go back to before that date) has turned up parallels to elements in a number of biblical psalms.10 Thus, dating the psalms as a whole to the Persian period seems most unlikely. If—to cite another argument—the language and syntax of various psalms suggest that they were originally written in northern Israel, this would imply that they were composed before the Assyrian conquest of the North in 722–721 BCE—again, a relatively early date.11 On the other hand, Psalm 137 is clearly a look back at the Babylonian exile; it likely was written sometime in the late sixth or early fifth century BCE. Scholars suggest that the alphabetical acrostic Psalm 119, along with other acrostics as well as Psalm 1, which functions as an introduction to the Psalter, have been dated even later, perhaps as late as the fourth or third century BCE.12 But this still leaves most of the Psalms undatable; commentators generally are content to label a psalm as “probably post-exilic” or “arguably pre-exilic” and leave it at that.

  One thing that has struck scholars in this connection is the “one size fits all” character of a great many of the psalms.13 For example, numerous compositions ask for God’s help in fighting “the wicked,” “my enemies,” “my foes,” and “those who rise against me,” but they never get around to saying who those enemies are. Wouldn’t specificity be desirable if one truly wanted God’s help, or revenge? But the enemies are usually described in vague metaphors: they are “lions,” “jackals,” and “serpents,” bloodthirsty hunters who have “set a trap for me” or “dug a pit.” This seems to suggest that such psalms were intended to be used again and again by a variety of different speakers whose circumstances in some general way fit the words. On the other hand, the very fact that there are 150 psalms in our canonical book of Psalms—rather than just a single, formulaic sentence or two to fit any circumstance—has led scholars to suppose that in biblical times, officials at different temples and sacred sites must at least have been trying to give worshipers the impression of some specificity. “Let’s see, you’re making good on a vow?” a priest might say. “All right, repeat after me . . .” “Recovery from illness? Let the choir sing this hymn of thanksgiving on your behalf . . .”

  Beyond compositions that were intended for individual worshipers, some of the psalms were clearly meant to mark communal festivals and other regularly occurring events. The three pilgrimage festivals, Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths, would especially have been marked by joyful singing. It may also have been the case that individual communities celebrated the (real or mythical) founding of their particular sanctuary with songs of praise. In addition, the book of Psalms also contains communal requests for help in imminent danger, as well as hymns of praise not connected with any particular occasion. And then there are other psalms that commentators find difficult to characterize, like the ever-popular Psalm 23 (“The LORD is my shepherd . . .”), which seems quite sui generis.14 In sum, the book of Psalms is a collection (or more precisely, a collection of collections) written by different people and assembled from different sources and periods.15 What can be learned from these disparate writings?

  Cry of the Victim

  The psalms that seem most relevant to the human encounter with God are the ones that request some form of divine help. These requests constitute a significant part of the biblical book of Psalms, and while they contain little concrete information about their authors or date of composition, they do offer one kind of testimony that is uniquely valuable. On the face of things, these psalms were all intended to be spoken by people in need. Whether composed by such people themselves or by temple personnel is immaterial: their words are a cry for help, and the terms in which that cry is phrased can tell us a lot about how their speakers conceived of their interaction with God.16 “Hear me,” the psalmist says to God. “Here is what I am asking You to do.”

  Of course, for much of the biblical period Israel’s God, YHWH, was one deity among many; “pure monotheism,” the belief that there exists only one true God and that all others are simply an illusion, cannot be demonstrated to have existed in Israel before about the seventh century BCE. Prior to that time, some Israelites may have limited their worship to a single God, but probably without denying the existence of other deities (this is the phenomenon sometimes called monolatry, “serving One”).17 Others went further, worshiping YHWH along with other gods; indeed, we have already seen evidence of Northerners whose religion combined the worship of YHWH with that of Ba‘al—the Be‘alim against whose worship Hosea and other prophets intoned.

  Thus, when the authors of the book of Psalms called out to God for help, they were addressing a specific God—for much of the biblical period, one among many. They turned to Him because He was their God (eve
n if there were others), a deity associated specifically with the land in which they dwelled and the people of whom they were a part. He was naturally assumed to have a physical body, indeed, one rather human-sized and humanlike. To modern readers brought up on an omnipresent deity, this way of conceiving of things may seem to detract from the reality of God, but I suspect that if ancient Israelites ever heard of a bodiless, omnipresent deity (but of course they didn’t), they would at first have been profoundly disturbed. How could one imagine a God without a body, a God who was everywhere at once? It would have been like praying to oxygen. Their God, by contrast, had a definite, identifiable presence: He was just over there, on the divine side of the divine-human divide, a powerful being who normally resided among those powerful ones who dwelt in heaven. (To be sure, God had an earthly presence as well; He could appear in His temple or temples. As was seen earlier, however, the presence of deities in multiple locations presented, for a very long time, no contradiction. They were here, but they also were elsewhere.)

  Of course, an ordinary Israelite never saw God, and as far as he or she was concerned, this was all to the good. God’s presence in Israel’s midst was a bit like that of the government in a modern Middle Eastern state. You’re glad that it exists and, to the extent possible, makes things run properly; but the last thing you want is to come individually to its attention, since this might have the most dire consequences in taxation or even personal life and liberty. So too with Israel’s God. It was comforting to know that His earthly home base was in your very midst, since that meant, or could mean, that He would fight to protect His lands (and you as well) from foreign invaders and other catastrophes. Moreover, as a God of justice and right, He would no doubt punish the wicked for their crimes and in general see to the orderly operation of at least those close to His home base. But you yourself normally had no interest in His taking notice of you as an individual.

  The exception, of course, was when you as an individual desperately needed divine help—when you or your loved ones were gravely ill or otherwise in danger. Then, in contrast to the way such things were contemplated elsewhere in Scripture, ancient Israelites pulled out all the stops, describing their suffering in painful detail:

  My life’s ebbing out like water, all my bones are coming apart;

  My heart is like wax, melting in my insides.

  My strength is as dried out as clay, and my tongue is stuck to my mouth;

  You’re setting me down to lie in the dirt and the dust of the grave. (Ps 22:15–16)

  My wounds stink and fester, because of my folly.

  I’m bowed down and crooked, in darkness all day.

  My muscles ache with the fever; nothing’s straight in my flesh.

  I’m numb and completely crushed down; I groan to my heart’s inner crying. (38:5–8)

  Ancient Israelites normally conceived of God as existing elsewhere, on the other side of the curtain that separated ordinary from extraordinary reality. (This was true even when He was held to inhabit this or that temple.)18 From the other side of that curtain, He could hear human beings asking for divine aid, but He was not exactly on call: you could cry out, but He wouldn’t always answer or do anything for you. Even bringing lavish offerings to His sanctuary wouldn’t necessarily attract His attention.* What did often work, however, was “the cry of the victim.”19 God was by definition fair,20 and nothing was conceived to spur Him to action more than the pitiful moan of someone who was suffering unjustly.

  Have mercy on me, LORD; I am in such pain! My eyes are wasting away with sorrow, my body and spirit too.

  My life is ending in pain, my years in groaning; in my misery my strength has left me; my bones are wasting away. (Ps 31:10–11)

  Although these psalms of request are unique in their directness, the theme of the “cry of the victim” plays a role in a few biblical laws as well:

  If you should take your fellow’s garment in pledge [for a loan], you must give it back to him before the sun sets. After all, it is his only clothing, all that he has to cover his bare skin—what else can he sleep in? Consequently, if he cries out to Me, I will hear him, for I am compassionate. (Exod 22:26–27)

  Loans throughout most of the biblical period were basically a form of charity. A person was not to demand interest on a loan or to discount it (as the verse just preceding the above passage says): money had to be loaned to one’s countryman for free—mostly to poor farmers who needed something to tide them over until the harvest. But what if the farmer couldn’t pay even after his crop came in?

  The usual practice in loaning money was to secure the loan with a pledged item: the borrower would temporarily give the lender some valued possession that would be returned to him only after the loan was repaid. But in the above passage, it is clear that the borrower is extremely poor: he has nothing to give in pledge, no prized family heirloom or bit of jewelry, only the shirt off his back. So that is what he offers. In such a case (similar to someone who gives a millstone in pledge, Deut 24:6) the lender is not to accept the pledged item, or at least he must return it before sunset, since keeping it would be grossly unfair.

  What is striking, however, is the precise wording of this law. The text could have limited itself to pointing out the obvious: the borrower has offered the only thing he has to offer, his own garment. Clearly, he would not have done so if he were not desperately poor; as the passage says, he has nothing else to warm his body in the nighttime cold. This certainly ought to have been justification enough for requiring the lender to return the garment as soon as it was offered. “Give it back at once,” the law could have concluded. But the passage mentions one further element, the cry of the victim: “Consequently, if he cries out to Me, I will listen to him, for I am compassionate.” Other sorts of prayers and petitions were no doubt deemed to reach God, but it is the cry of those who suffer injustice or great pain that are said here to spur Him into action.

  Similarly, another law in the book of Exodus states:

  Do not abuse any widow or orphan. Because if you should abuse them, then they will certainly cry out to Me, and I will just as certainly hear them. Then I will become angry and kill you at sword-point, so that your wives will become widows and your children orphans. (Exod 22:21–23)

  Once again, it is not the simple facts of the case—the actual abusing of a widow or an orphan—that guarantee divine intervention.* God may or may not be aware of these abuses on His own, but it is the cry of these easily victimized members of society (widows and orphans were proverbially helpless) that will always trigger His intervention: “they will certainly cry out to Me, and I will just as certainly hear them.”

  Indeed, the cry of the victim is mentioned as the decisive element in various biblical narratives of the Israelites’ exodus in Egypt:

  [God tells Moses:] I have indeed seen the suffering of My people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry at the hands of their taskmasters; indeed, I know their plight full well . . . But now listen! The cry of the Israelites is coming to Me; indeed, I have seen the misfortune that the Egyptians are inflicting upon them. (Exod 3:7–9)

  We cried out to the LORD and He heard us, and He sent an envoy to take us out of Egypt. (Num 20:16)

  We cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and He listened to us and saw our suffering, our plight, and our misfortune. (Deut 26:7)

  So also with other piteous cries:

  When the poor are being robbed and the needy cry out, “Now I will act,” says the LORD. “I will come to the rescue and help.” (Ps 12:6)

  When they cried out, the LORD heard and saved them from all their troubles. (Ps 34:18)

  Here then is one important thing to be learned from these psalms of request: God is thought to react to the prayers and cries of human beings who are suffering (rather than reacting to the injustice itself, or to the oppressors’ bad behavior). This is as much as to say that prayer had an acknowledged role in the divine machinery by which God managed the world; in extremis people prayed to
God for help, and it was their cry that (sometimes) moved God to act.21

  A Cold and Impersonal Deity

  Would it be possible for someone to believe in a God who doesn’t hear people’s prayers? It certainly would. One has only to look back at the story of Joseph to see a deity who is not prayed to (the hero, Joseph, never asks God for help, not even in the direst of straits). Instead, the God of this narrative is, as we have seen, the great long-range planner who has everything plotted out in advance. In such an arrangement, prayer by definition can have no role, since nothing can change what has already been decided.

  Somewhat similarly, scholars have noticed that those sections of the Pentateuch found among the priestly instructions (“P”) present a strikingly different picture of God from that underlying the Psalms.22 In these P passages—which actually constitute a hefty part of the Pentateuch as a whole—God seems to be an altogether cold and impersonal deity. He never speaks to humans in the first person, “I will do this” or “I have ordered that,” not even to Moses. Apparently, to do so would imply a closeness, and a personhood, that these passages sought to avoid. So similarly, God here does not forgive; instead, these parts of the Pentateuch say about penitent sinners that “it will be forgiven to them.” Perhaps most strikingly, people never pray to God in these passages. Clearly, the priesthood was deeply implicated in whatever went on in the temple (or the tabernacle that preceded it during Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness)—what sorts of sacrifices were offered to God, the layout of the tabernacle/temple, the laws of ritual purity, and so forth. But there is not a word about the psalms of request that we have been examining, even though some of them seem explicitly connected to worship in the temple. In fact, the whole idea of humans praying in the temple or outside of it is basically absent. What counted, apparently, were the sacrificial offerings that people brought to the temple; words of any kind were just words.