Is the LORD a sun and shield? A follow up

After I posted last week on a solar metaphor for God, I looked back at my own metrical versification of Psalm 84 and discovered that I too had paraphrased this text, eliminating the reference to the sun, but following through on its meaning:

Better by far one day to be
within your courts than live to see
a thousand years while elsewhere dwelling.
The threshold of your house, O Lord,
is vastly thus to be preferred
to where the wicked make their dwelling.
For God the LORD, our source of life,
will be our shield amid the strife.

I am currently exploring publication options for my English-language Genevan Psalter collection.

Is the LORD a sun and shield? LXX: perhaps not

Not long ago I was reading a book that quoted Psalm 84:11: "For the LORD God is a sun and shield." I have observed in the past that the Greek Septuagint translation (LXX) of the Old Testament tends to avoid rock metaphors for God, substituting another word such as strength. For example, Psalm 95:1 runs as follows in the RSV: "let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation," while the New English Translation of the LXX (NETS) has it as such: "let us make a joyful noise to God our savior!" Might the LXX do something similar with a sun metaphor for God? After all, ancient peoples around the world, from Egyptians to Aztecs, worshipped the sun as a god. Might the LXX translators have exhibited a skittishness about inadvertently identifying the God who has created and redeemed us with the sun?

The church modes in Scotland and Geneva

In my previous post, I linked to a choral rendition of Psalm 43 from the Scottish Psalter, as sung to the haunting tune MARTYRS, one of only two tunes in that collection in the Dorian mode. I should immediately clarify that the edition of the Psalter to which I am referring is the 1929 edition published by the Church of Scotland. This includes tunes ranging from the 16th through the 19th centuries. The edition shown here is a split-leaf psalter, in which tunes and texts can be mixed and matched according to the preferences of ministers and congregations.

Psalm 43 to MARTYRS

Here is Psalm 43 from the 1650 Scottish Psalter sung to the tune MARTYRS. Note that it is in the Dorian mode, whose use is quite rare amongst the tunes to which this 17th-century collection has been set. This gives the text an unusually plaintive feel, although the Dorian mode covers an emotional range beyond the plaintive as well. The Genevan Psalter, by contrast, sets just over a third of the Psalm texts to tunes in the Dorian or Hypo-dorian modes. One explanation for this difference is that the tunes of the Genevan Psalter were influenced by gregorian chant and the traditional church modes, while the Scottish Psalter was less dependent on these historic elements, having originated at a time when western music was transitioning from its mediaeval form and assuming the tonal patterns more familiar to us today.