Psalm 79 (78 LXX): O God, the nations have come into your heritage

This is obviously not a metrical Psalm, but a Greek Orthodox rendering of Psalm 79, or 78 by Septuagint numbering. In the Orthodox world the singing of this Psalm is associated with lament over the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks on tuesday, 29 May 1453. This particular video includes an English translation of the text.

Let God Arise: Christ is Risen!

In the Orthodox Agape Vespers for Pascha (Easter), the people sing this joyous hymn, whose text can be found here. It borrows from Psalms 68 (LXX 67) and 118 (LXX 117) and ends with the traditional paschal hymn, Christ is Risen. The recording is from St. Symeon Orthodox Church, Birmingham, Alabama, USA, in 2018.

David's Psalter: Psalm 23

Once again, metrical psalmody meets the Polish Renaissance in this wonderful performance of Mikołaj Gomółka and Jan Kochanowski's rendition of Psalm 23. Katarzyna Wiwer sings soprano, accompanied on the lute by Henryk Kasperczak.

Darkness is my only friend: Psalm 88

No question that Psalm 88 is the darkest of all the Psalms, so many of which are already psalms of lament. But while most such psalms end on a note of hope in God, Psalm 88 ends with this bleak complaint: "Darkness is my only friend." Here is Josh Rodriguez's chilling musical rendition of this Psalm:

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

Allegri's Miserere: not what he wrote

On this Good Friday, as we meditate on Christ's sacrifice for our sins, it is worth looking at this familiar choral setting of Psalm 51 (50 by LXX and Vulgate numbering): Gregorio Allegri's Miserere. It seems that what we are accustomed to hearing in this piece is not what Allegri actually wrote in the early 17th century. My daughter alerted me to this fascinating account, by Rory McCleery and Ben Byram-Wigfield, of the piece's development and elaboration over the centuries. Among other things, the story of Pope Urban VIII threatening to excommunicate anyone who performed it outside the Sistine Chapel lacks any basis in available evidence. Moreover, the high notes sung by the soprano are due to an error in transcription made as recently as the 1880s. They were not in the composer's original.

As I watched this, I thought of the game of telephone that we played as children. It's amazing that an iconic piece of music could become so in a version foreign to its composer's intentions.

Meeter Center lecture

The H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies has now posted an announcement of my forthcoming lecture: Meeter Center 40th Anniversary - Lecture: The Genevan Psalms And Their Significance. It will take place at 15:30 UTC-4, wednesday, 18 May 2022, at the Meeter Center Lecture Hall at Calvin University, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. From the website: "Join us for this special lecture featuring Dr. David Koyzis (Global Scholars Canada), who has recently completed a new versification of all 150 Genevan Psalms." I hope to see many of you at this event.

Praying All of the Psalms Over Russia

Like so many of us in recent weeks, John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett, writing for Breakpoint, return to the imprecatory Psalms and find that they are still relevant today: Praying All of the Psalms Over Russia. An excerpt:

It is right at these times to want justice, and to want it now! It is right to weep at the horrors of human existence, as Billie Holiday did with her mournful song about lynchings in the Jim Crow South, “Strange Fruit.” Passages like Psalm 88 describe the struggle to find hope in God, and to lament the injustice in the world. Sometimes, the only possible moral response is to appeal for God’s judgment on evildoers. Anger is a proper response to real evil in this world, a world that was created good . . . .

Imprecatory psalms affirm our sense that there’s real wrong with the world, that we are right to be angry about it. They speak of the psalmist’s pain in their realness and rawness. They remind us that God is not afraid of our anger. In fact, He, too, is grieved and angry at evil borne of the sin we have committed against one another.

Read the entire commentary here. 

Psalm 119: Thy Word Have I Hid in my Heart

This is not exactly a metrical psalm, but it does draw on selected verses from Psalm 119. We sang this hymn as children in our church and sunday school. Words and music were written in 1908 by Ernest Orlando Sellers (1869-1952): Thy Word Have I Hid in my Heart.

Angry Psalms

In the month since the Russo-Ukrainian War began, many of us are learning again what it means to pray the imprecatory Psalms, namely, those psalms that call down God's wrath against his enemies. I recently had a conversation with Trevor Laurence, for whose Cateclesia Forum I sometimes write, and he told me of his interest in these particular Psalms, which puzzle many Christians. Laurence offers us this reflection in the online journal, The Biblical Mind: How the ‘Angry Psalms’ Fit within the Story of God and His People. An excerpt:

Psalm 2: Why do the nations madly rage?

This was just posted yesterday by Ref-Grass Moments: Psalm 2: Why do the restless nations madly rage? The tune is the proper Genevan meloday for Psalm 2. The text is from the Canadian Reformed collection. The footage is from Port Dalhousie in St. Catharines, Ontario.

A prayer for Russia and Ukraine

Almighty God and Father, you have created us in your image to live in peace with our fellow human beings. But we confess that we have so often failed to live in obedience to your will, to the detriment of our neighbours, both near and far. And now the world is seeing a brutal war of aggression launched by one state against another, with attacks made on civilians who are suffering greatly as a result. Thousands of refugees are fleeing their cities and pouring over the borders of neighbouring countries. We feel helpless to relieve their plight, but we are angry and thirst for justice.

We acknowledge, O Lord, that the people of Russia and Ukraine do not want this war, which has been foisted on them by a corrupt and tyrannical leader in Moscow. Many of your servants are making their voices heard at great risk to their lives and livelihoods. We pray, Lord, that you would encircle them with your protection: that you would cover them with your pinions, that under your wings they would find refuge (Psalm 91).

Chanting Psalms in the Dark

The Plough posted today an inspiring article, Chanting Psalms in the Dark, that you should take time to read in the midst of the turmoil of the past days. Susannah Black interviews Brittany Petruzzi about her project to chant through the Psalter and post it on her YouTube channel. An excerpt:

At the beginning of Covid, I just started thinking that I should do daily psalm-chanting.

Then in December 2020, I found out that I had a brain tumor; less than a week later I was in the hospital getting it removed. It was a seven-centimeter tumor right behind my forehead, squishing my brain back. Enormous amounts of pain. But it was on the meninges, on the outside of my brain. As my neurosurgeon described it, this is the kind of brain tumor you want, if you’re going to have a brain tumor.

A Psalm for Putin

In light of the horrific events of recent days, I am revisiting something I wrote last year: God as Judge: Praying the Imprecatory Psalms. If we can still pray these today, then I have the perfect prayer for Russian President Vladimir Putin taken from Psalm 109:8:

May his days be few; may another take his office!

Let all the people say: Amen! (Psalm 106:48)

And while we're at it, let's remember to pray for the people of Ukraine who are valiantly fighting for their freedom and for ordinary Russians who mostly oppose this war.

May the Lord give strength to his people! May the Lord bless his people with peace! (Psalm 29:11)

Psalm 8 "bachified"

Here is Johann Sebastian Bach's arrangement of Genevan Psalm 8. Note that it is a typical Bach arrangement in that it flattens the rhythm of the original, relies heavily on a raised seventh note, and ends on a picardy third. As such, it alters the dorian modal flavour of the melody.

The Psalms in wartime

This evening after dinner we read Psalm 27, which I thought appropriate in light of the events of the past hours. Here is something I wrote for the Center for Public Justice eight years ago, which I thought relevant to the current crisis: One Hundred Years Later: The Psalms and the First World War. An excerpt:

Nearly four decades ago, I visited Prague, the capital of what was still communist-ruled Czechoslovakia and, before the First World War, part of Austria-Hungary. During my time there, I purchased in an antiquarian bookshop a Czech-language New Testament and Psalms published in 1845 for “Evangelical Christians of the Augsburg and Helvetic Confessions,” that is, for Lutheran and Reformed Christians. The print was in the old German black letter font, and even some of the spelling was obsolete.

Meeter Center lecture coming up

In May I will be lecturing on the Genevan Psalter at Calvin University, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, as guest of the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies. This year marks the 460th anniversary of the Genevan Psalter's completion. More information forthcoming.

Psalm 82: the consensus of the metrical psalters?

As a follow-up to my previous posts on the identity of the "gods" in Psalm 82, I have consulted a few more metrical psalters. Here are stanzas 1, 7, and 8 of the version in the Sternhold & Hopkins Psalter of 1562:

Among the princes, men of might,
the Lord himself doth stand,
To plead the cause of truth and right
with judges of the land.

But notwithstanding ye shall die
as men, and so decay;
O tyrants, you destroy will I,
and pluck you quite away.

Up, Lord, and let thy strength be known,
and judge the world with might:
For why? all nations are thy own,
to take them as thy right.

Where Alter's Psalter falters

Christian Courier has just posted my January column, titled, Where Alter's Psalter falters, with the following subtitle: "What's really going on in Psalm 82?" Here is an excerpt:

Although I generally appreciate Alter’s work, I question one element of his interpretive framework. This is relevant especially to Psalm 82 but to others as well. Throughout the Psalms he sees vestiges of Canaanite polytheistic religion, with many of the traditional attributes ascribed to Baal being reassigned to YHWH, including the often-used metaphors of riding on the clouds and defeating the waters of chaos.

Of course, there is little doubt that the early Hebrews were influenced by the surrounding peoples’ religions, as the Bible itself testifies. But I think it’s possible to exaggerate these mythological remnants in such a way as to miss something more concrete and obvious, which Alter is otherwise at pains to emphasize.

Read the entire article here. And read my full review of the Alter Psalter here.

Article in The Outlook

Not long ago I received a copy of the January/February issue of The Outlook carrying an article of mine, "The Genevan Psalter: Introduction." It is not posted online, so you will need to obtain a paper copy of the periodical to read it. A follow-up article on my own Genevan Psalter project will appear in a future issue.