Ps. 45.17 (conclusion: praise and remembering)

“I will / make your name / to be remembered / through every generation; - therefore/ peoples will praise you / for ever and ever.” It is tempting to see in these last lines God’s blessing; that, however, is likely not the case and what we have is the “I” of the psalmist. The only other “I” in the psalm has been the psalmist and what we are probably hearing is the fact that his ‘song’ is one that will be past down, bard-like, through the generations and the king will be remembered in that manner. It is interesting in this regard that the memory of the king would, to some extent, rely on the skill of the psalmist and his perception of the wedding ceremony. The force of the king’s person is not simply ‘there’ but must be transmitted by and through this “noble theme” and song; through the tongue of this singer (vs. 1).  Along these same lines, an English reader would be forgiven if it seemed as if the psalmist was speaking to the queen as she was the immediately preceding person addressed. Hence, it would seem as if it were her name, not the king’s, that would be remembered through the generations. It would be through force of the honor bestowed on her, through her prince-children, that her name would be perpetuated. One would not be able to resist thinking of Mary when she said that “all generations will call me blessed”. Conversely, were this to be God’s voice (there is nothing, I believe, in the syntax which necessarily disallows it), a different reading would emerge. Just as God was to be the one responsible for making Abraham’s name great, so too would the king’s name be placed within God’s sphere of fruitfulness and thereby raised into “for ever and ever” (again, the sphere of God is the sphere of “everlasting”). For God to “make his name remembered” could be read as his guaranteeing of human fruitfulness down through the Davidic line. This would, indeed, be a ‘blessing’ in that it would make permanent that which man cannot guarantee: that the women through whom the covenant is to pass will never themselves become barren, thereby putting an end to the covenant itself. According to this reading, when God turns to the king, immediately on the heels of the previous verse, he is, in effect, speaking about the queen and those women who will follow her in their perpetuation. They will be the ones who will be brought into God’s realm; they will be the ones made fruitful; they will be the ones through whom “the name will pass.” In a sense, each of them will give birth to David. It is in that light that he will be praised for ever and ever and not just his children. The promise will be mediated directly, in a sense, from and through him, by and through her.