Royal Psalms – Video, Transcript

Yale Divinity Bible Study: Psalms, Royal Psalms - Yale Divinity School

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvaru5kovMo

Transcript

(00:00) Now there's a major cluster of Psalms that talk about the king. The first question, I suppose, would be why is the king so important in these Psalms? We have to remember something that we often miss as we think about how the monarchy worked in ancient Israel. We tend to separate the monarchy from what's going on in the temple, which the Bible sort of suggests that we should. In many places, it really wants to keep them separate. If you read Leviticus, there's no mention of the king, but it's clear from the rest of the ancient world that, in fact, you didn't have a cult without royal promotion, involvement, and support. We have to remember that there's a reason the temple was built directly next to the palace in Jerusalem, right? Solomon's Palace was directly next to Solomon's Temple. This was the royal cult, and the king was not only the patron but, as far as we can tell from other Near Eastern cultures, was probably actively involved in the cult. I'm thinking of numerous Ugaritic texts, Canaanite texts, that prescribed the offerings that the king would make. So we don't want to separate at all the role of the king from the role of really probably the leader of the cult in some sense. This sort of explains why there are Psalms that look like they're written for the king, honoring their royal patron.

(00:45) Now, the reason why you have large segments of the Hebrew Bible where the king disappears from the picture is that after the Babylonian exile, they didn't have a king, right? So the high priests would eventually come to the fore, and even in the Book of Ezekiel, when they're painting a picture of the ideal Jerusalem in the future, the king is really reduced. He just becomes the prince whose job is to provide the sacrifices. One of the things that's so interesting about royal Psalms is they give us a glimpse of the old-time religion before the Exile. We can certainly say that Psalms that talk about and honor the king must come from a period when there was a king, which is nice because we can pretty much date these to the pre-exilic period. As you say, they also give us insight into the conceptual background of the king's place in the divine sphere.

(02:05) One of the interesting things about the Bible generally is that even though we see allusions to a sort of royal ideology, a theology of kingship, how the king relates to the deity, you see this in Samuel a little bit, it's never really explicitly stated. What we have in the Royal Psalms is, I think, as close as we come to a very open picture of how the king was understood to fit into the relationship of God to Israel, God to the king, and how the king functioned as something of an intermediary between God and the people, a representative. Let's look at a couple of them. The first one you meet in the Psalter is Psalm 2: "Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and His anointed." His anointed, of course, is his Messiah, the word that gives us Messiah, but the reference here is not to a future figure; it's to the actual king of the day. The nations say, "Let us burst their bands asunder and cast their cords from us." He who sits in heaven laughs; the Lord has them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath and terrify them in his fury, saying, "I have set my King on Zion, my holy mountain. I will tell you the decree of the Lord: He said to me, 'You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance.'" It goes on to warn the kings of the earth about the dire things that will happen to them if they question the authority of Yahweh's King in Jerusalem.

(04:04) There's so much wrapped up in there. The most striking image surely is the king as God's Son. This is an idea that I think often we would tend to associate with other Near Eastern traditions, like Egypt, for example, in which the king was understood as a deity or somehow deified. Mesopotamia also had similar sorts of traditions, but here we have exactly that notion in Israel. Not only as a child through adoption, which is a formula we regularly see—God adopts David, for example, that's a reasonably common trope—but "my begotten," which is really taking the role of king to a place that you almost never see anywhere else in the Bible. The king is brought up to that height. It's really just a few passages in the Psalter. How do you think they arrived at that kind of idea of being begotten by God? The prime example of it would be in Egypt, yes, and this was back in the centuries when Egypt was ruling over Jerusalem. So I think there is reasonable ground for suspicion that this idea actually came into the tradition way back then and that it was part of the kingship in Jerusalem and that this just evolved and was taken on in the royal cult. As you underlined, it is not adoption; it's begetting. Now, of course, when they say that the king is begotten by God, they're not suggesting that the king's mother was a virgin, although the term can get used very easily. It is very much so, and the fact that the king is here called the mashiac or the Messiah is really, I think, the root of the idea that the Messiah is the son of God, which would come to be a very important idea in Christianity. Of course, what we see here is simply the widespread understanding that the king gets anointed as part of the process of crowning him.

(07:06) Some people have suggested that this actually would be part of a coronation ceremony. Again, thinking about what the setting of such a psalm would be, that's one possibility. There's also, I would assume, semi-regular royal involvement in the cult, if not on a daily basis, then I'm sure annually. We certainly have from other Near Eastern cultures the annual celebration of the king becoming king. So once a year, on coronation day, as it were, you would see another celebration. You get this idea also in the Egyptian texts that the king presumably is actually the son of the god, but this is only recognized when he actually ascends to the throne because if he doesn't ascend to the throne, you don't need to believe that he's the son of God, I suppose. So there is a connection with that. There's only one other Psalm, I think, that uses this begetting language, and even then the text is corrupt. It's an interesting one, Psalm 110, where the Lord said to my lord, "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool." A little bit further into it, though, the reading here from the NRSV translation: "On the day you lead your forces on the holy mountain, from the womb of the morning, like dew, your youth will come to you," which doesn't make a lot of sense in Hebrew. The word that's translated "your youth" could be pointed differently in the Hebrew, and the Greek actually translates that as "I have begotten you." So the suspicion is that what you actually had in this Psalm was a statement of how God had begotten the king, and you had something to do with it at least. Now, there is an Egyptian inscription where the goddess says to the god, "Your dew is at all my limbs." It doesn't have to be exactly the same usage of it here, but dew was thought to be life-giving.

(09:53) With all of these, what you see, what I think is so striking, is, as I said, the elevation of the king in the eyes of God. Most of what we see when we deal with kings, as we read through, for example, the book of Kings, is mostly to do with God judging the kings as to whether or not they obey the Torah or whether or not they followed the law. That's a very critical understanding of kingship. What we have in these Psalms is sort of from the royal perspective in a way that we don't get elsewhere. What you see is the kings really thinking of themselves, or at least the king's priests, the royal servants, viewing the king in this almost non-biblical way. It is an elevation of the king that I think most of the prophets would not really have approved of. Certainly, Deuteronomy wouldn't approve. It pushes the king down. This is what makes these so valuable for a historical understanding of the Bible. They are these small windows into what may really have been going on, as opposed to the way that more critical authors tried to constrain the kingship.

(11:18) Now, there is, I think, a rather nice Psalm in Psalm 45, which actually seems to be a poem composed for a royal wedding. You may think, what's that doing in the middle of the Psalter? But it goes like this: "My heart overflows with a goodly theme; I address my verses to the king." So this is the court poet, if you like, composing a poem for his majesty on his wedding day. How do you begin? "You are the most handsome of men, and grace is poured out on your lips; therefore God has blessed you forever. In your majesty, ride on triumphantly. Your throne, O God, endures forever; your royal scepter is a scepter of equity. You loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you." How many gods are we talking about here, right? What you can see again is this sort of notion of a personal relationship between the king and the deity. Whether it is father-son, whether it is God being your God specifically, the notion of the king always having been personally chosen one way or the other is one that permeates. You see it also even in Deuteronomy, right? "If in time to come you choose a king," Deuteronomy says, "it must be somebody who I approve of, somebody who I choose." You see that here. You also see in that Psalm, I think, what we would have talked about already, which is the parallel between the king as sort of justice-giver and the king manifesting God's justice on earth. The king is the human manifestation of the God. But the controversial verse here is the one that says, "Your throne, O God, endures forever." There have always been, and still are, scholars who will argue that that should be "your divine throne," meaning the throne that God has given you. But the fact that it comes back a verse later and says, "Therefore God, your God," shows you the possibility of confusion. Here, the king is not on a par with the Most High, but he is an Elohim. He doesn't appear to be a human being either, right? This is a kind of veneration of the kingship that you just would not get in the later parts of the Hebrew Bible.

(14:01) In fact, one of the shifts that I think we see even within the Psalms is from this sort of absolute veneration—enduring forever, or the throne endures—to the later notion that, in light of the loss of kingship, there's a conditionality to this relationship. Whereas in the early period, the king is God's son, the king's throne will endure forever, but later on, there's a growing recognition that, in fact, perhaps that wasn't as absolute a promise as it seemed.