Ps. 1 & 2 (an interpretation)

One question we did not directly address in our reflections on Ps. 1 & 2 was why did the Psalter open up this way? Why were these two Psalms understood to be the ‘gateway’ to entire collection? I want to offer here one interpretation, and it is one that was implicit in our previous reflections but something that has just emerged in a different light for me. A few general observations about these two psalms:

1) Yhwh’s speech and presence—Yhwh never makes a direct appearance in Ps. 1 and says nothing either; the ‘torah’seems to be the object of attention; in Ps. 2 Yhwh directly says very little; the vast majority of Yhwh’s ‘words’ are placed on the lips of David, not Yhwh.

2) Yhwh’s ‘action’—in Psalm 1 Yhwh ‘does’ very little; the psalm works more along the lines of an ‘identification’ psalm (meaning, this is what a blessed man is like, not ‘do this’ and you will be blessed); the ‘separation’ of the wheat and chaff is not something directly attributed to Yhwh but rather could be pointing more to the fact that the slightest breeze carries off the wicked, while the blessed man is as stable as a tree; in Psalm 2, an initial reading may give the impression that Yhwh ‘does’ a great deal, but all he ‘does’ is speak (which, granted, is a lot properly understood); he laughs and then proclaims to the nations what has already occurred (the begetting, the anointing, etc…). The ‘action’of the psalm is placed more directly in the hands of David (the rod of iron, the smashing of the clay vessels, etc…).

Without rehashing everything we already observed, what we do not see here is a type of ‘scripture’ alone. Psalm 1 does emphasize the ‘torah’.It is both a source of ‘living water’ and is the blessed man’s ‘delight. However, with Psalm 2, the source of blessedness is in the anointed. Significantly, and as a couter-balance to Psalm 1, the very words of Yhwh are placed within the mouth of this anointed (who is David). Whereas one is only indirectly given the ‘words’ of Yhwh’s instruction/torah in Psalm 1, in Psalm 2 we hear an intimate dialogue between David and Yhwh. In this way David becomes something like a new ‘Moses’, and, in his anointing, engages in a dialogue with Yhwh as intimate as any Moses engaged in in a ‘tent of meeting’. One final observation—the psalms are unlike many other writings in the OT because they are not ‘words of Yhwh’ (as in prophets who say “Thus says the Lord…”, or the Decalogue (ten commandments) understood as the very voice of the Lord emanating from the flaming mountain of Sinai). Rather, they are prayers to the Lord. In this way, it would seem like they were more of a revelation about ‘man’ than a revelation about the Lord; they seem to be going ‘up’rather than ‘down’ (and ‘down’ is always ‘better’, isn’t it?).

What is the point? The vast majority of the following psalms are ‘attributed to David’ (although they were clearly not all written by him). Psalm 2 has keyed us into the fact that David’s speech is often not merely the mediated words of Yhwh but the expression of his discussion with Yhwh; what I mean is that Psalm 2 shows us that Yhwh’s ‘speech’ is embodied in a dialoguewith his anointed (it is, in this way, botha ‘down’ and an ‘up’). Here we are given something that we can miss in the prophets (although it is clearly there, especially in Hosea, Jeremiah and Ezekiel), that Yhwh reveals himself by and through his dialogue with man and not simply in a monological disclosure. And, as we also saw in Psalm 2, the vast majority of Yhwh’s words are placed in this context. It is a shocking realization: Yhwh’s theophany (revealing) of himself is just as much from these“ground up” psalms as the words spoken “down” in the Torah (from Sinai). It would not be hard to imagine these prayers as properly ‘devotional’ but the fact that they were included as Scripture should give us pause (and require us to re-evaluate what it means for Yhwh to “speak”).

We might say it this way: in David Yhwh has found a conversation partner that draws out of Yhwh more than would have been revealed without him and that, in some truly mysterious manner, this ‘more’ points to an ability for Yhwh to reveal himself not merely ‘through himself’ but through those who are not himself; one could almost compare this to David as a type of ‘bride’ of Yhwh, a woman who is not merely reduced to her husband but (like creation) causes an unforeseen ‘delight’ to emerge (and “God saw that it was good…”).

This, I think, is one reason why Psalms 1 and 2 were placed at the very beginning of the Psalter. It was to ‘introduce’ us into this realm of Davidic/Yhwh dialogue, and to show us how this “son of Yhwh”, in his prayers to “his Father”, was as equal to a revelation of that Father as any words ‘sent from above’. This, I would wager, is one reason why so many of these psalms were given attributed to David (and why it is important to, theologically, identify this). And, for Christians, nothing could be more essential: we see how the ‘unity’ of Christ must be captured from this ‘bottom-up’perspective as much as the ‘top-down’ perspective. Essentially, in Psalm 1 and 2 we see, in Christ’s light, a revelation of his dual nature (his ‘hypostatic’union: son of David and the spoken (Word) son of God).