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[00:00]
A
Hey everybody. We're thrilled to announce that Restore tickets are on sale now and we're so excited to tell you about the new format for this year. We're calling it Restore Connect. It's designed to make your experience more interactive, more embodied and more communal than ever before. This year it's September 24th through 26th at the Nordisk center at UVU. We'll have an opening social on Thursday evening with two days of smaller, more intimate sessions so that you can choose the topics that are most important to you and have lots of time to connect with other attendees. And the presenters space is limited, so you're going to want to get your tickets fast. You can go to faithmatters.org restore today. We can't wait to see you in September. Hey everybody, this is Aubrey Chavez from Faith Matters. Most of us can probably recall a verse or two from the Book of Psalms, something comforting or words inside a hymn that we know. But Psalms is the longest book in the Bible, and tucked inside this same book of Scripture are psalms of rage, cursing, and despair, and they're a lot harder to make sense of. Today, Dr. Ellen Davis joins us to talk about this ancient, essential book and describes the Psalms as a kind of script for the full range of human experience, experience before God. The Psalms, she says, expose all parts of our soul for healing. In this conversation, Ellen, who has spent years translating the Psalms, shows us just how expansive this ancient prayer book really is. She calls the Psalms a kind of First Amendment for the life of faith, permission to bring everything before God. Even the shape of the book reflects that, with lament gradually giving way to praise by the book's end. Ellen also takes us beneath some familiar translations with words like nefesh, which is usually translated soul. Ellen says this actually probably means something closer to our whole embodied self, challenging the idea that our spiritual lives are somehow separate or at odds with our physical ones. It's another way that the Psalms widen our sense of prayer. It's a vision spacious enough to hold our grief, our anger, our bodies, our silence, and our joy, trusting that all of it belongs in our relationship with God. Dr. Ellen Davis is the Amos Reagan Kearns Distinguished professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School and the author of several books exploring Scripture and the life of faith, including extensive work on the Psalms. We hope that you enjoy this conversation. All right, Ellen, thank you so much for joining us. We've been so looking forward to this conversation about Psalms, and we're excited to get to talk with you. So welcome.
[02:20]
B
Thank you. It's my great pleasure to be with you.
[02:23]
A
I would love to start with. I'm imagining some kind of orientation, actually. I think it was. It's been really helpful, as I've read your work, to just have a better understanding about what the psalms even are. You know, what. Where they come from, who wrote them, what's the point? Like, what is the book of Psalms generally?
[02:42]
B
Well, the first thing to say is we don't know exactly where they came from and who wrote them and when, because the Psalms are. They're oral literature, they're prayers, they're songs. They've been passed from mouth to mouth from generation to generation. And so to some extent, deliberately, I think, and inevitably the historical particularities have kind of been worn off because they keep being used like our hymns used. This is, one might say, the hymn book, the prayer book of ancient Israel. I think there's no question that David the King wrote what we would call psalms, but I would not want to try to identify which ones David wrote. When the Psalter says in Hebrew of David, that's a general term, associating the Psalms with the royal house of David, which stood cheek by jowl with the temple in Jerusalem. So we really have common prayer, common worship, to use some of the terms I'm familiar with, of Israel represented here. And the other thing I would say is that while this prayer was ancient already, by Jesus's time, Christians have never prayed without the Psalms. It's the book of the Bible, of the Bible being what we call the Old Testament. It's the book of the Hebrew Bible most quoted in the New Testament. And when Paul speaks to the early Christians about what they do when they gather for worship, he says, bring a psalm, bring a hymn. So historically, there's never been a body of Christians nor Jews who have not read recited sung psalms when they gathered for worship.
[05:18]
A
Wow.
[05:18]
C
And, Ellen, I wonder if you could sort of compare maybe the book of Psalms to the rest of the Bible, Although obviously the rest of the Bible is many. Is many things. But it is a little bit tricky because obviously these. The psalms seem to be written not so much in the voice of God. And, you know, traditionally, many Christians sort of like, need to see the Bible as somewhat infallible. So how do you. How do you think about the book of Psalms in those terms?
[05:44]
B
Okay. It's a really important question. In a sense, the Bible is, rhetorically speaking, one might say it's almost the opposite of the prophets. The prophets say repeatedly, thus says the Lord. As you have observed, Tim, the psalmists or the psalms are words formulated for our mouths to speak to God or about God. So they really are the unique in the Bible. Interesting because they're the longest book in the Bible. And Martin Luther called the Psalter the Bible in miniatures. So it represents the Bible in a sense. And yet the dynamic of speech is not God taking the lead, but us taking the lead speaking to and of God. And yet, by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, these psalms have been canonized. So they've been accepted into our scripture and give us scripts, so to speak, in the common sense of a script script that delineates kind of the range of possibilities of prayer. And what we discover is that the range is much, much wider than most of us had thought it was.
[07:39]
A
I love you. Write that the, the Psalms are sort of first Amendment to, for a life of faith, this, this explicit permission to speak freely to God. And, and so I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit because I think that the, the psalms you're, you're referencing specifically are so unfamiliar to me. I like, I, I'm. I've been surprised over and over as we've been preparing for this interview, how many of these psalms, especially of lament and, and cursing. I just feel like I've, I feel like I've never even read them before. I think I just pass over them and that we don't talk about them really in church because they're kind of weird, I want to say, like they're uncomfortable. So what types of prayer are you talking about specifically? That the Psalms are sort of giving us permission to, to speak to God.
[08:25]
B
Okay, so you've already identified the two kinds of psalms that are least likely to be known to us. Laments and imprecatory psalms, as they're called. Psalms of cursing, psalms directed at our enemies. There are relatively few of the psalms that actually say to God in so many words, damn them, let their children beg bread, take everything from them, frustrate their plans. Frustrate their plans. That's a pretty common appeal in the Psalms. There are not too many that actually actively seek the. Actively seek the destruction of the enemies. But there are some. And yes, I would say that you've not heard them or seen them, even if you've read sort of over them, because we are trained not to hear them, if not the way Christians speak about their enemies. But the psalmists don't feel about their enemies the way Jesus felt about Jesus's enemies. You know, that's a shock, but it's given to Us as scripture, in one might say, a tacit acknowledgment that we are not Jesus and we have a way to go to get to a place where we can pray sincerely and part for our enemies, for their well being. And part of the way that we have to travel to get there in sincerity is to acknowledge our anger, our bewilderment, our, yes, hatred of our enemies so that we can ask God in all honesty to keep transforming us. So I think that's part of what they do for us. John Calvin, the great 16th century theologian, Swiss theologian, called the Psalter an anatomy of all parts of the soul. I think it's a really beautiful phrase, an anatomy of all parts of the soul. And so what the Psalms are doing is exposing all parts of our soul for healing. And another thing that may be telling in this respect is the shape of the book of Psalms. The book of Psalms, Psalmos is a Greek word meaning hymns, songs of prayer. But the Hebrew name of the Psalter is te lim praisings. But it's an interesting thing that the first half of the Psalter is much heavier on lament than it is on straight out unalloyed praise. This praise and lament, which would be the two main categories, two main ways of addressing God here praise and lament are mixed all the way through, but it's heavier on lament at the beginning, heavier on praise in the second half. And I think that says something about the process of prayer that we have to become expert in the language of pain and suffering for ourselves and for others if we're going to pray honestly in the world in which we live rather than, as so many people outside the church think that Christians all about, and prayers all about pie in the sky till you die and. But the Psalter keeps our feet planted on the ground.
[13:16]
C
I would love to talk a little bit more about that and maybe, you know, removing ourselves from, for a moment from the Psalms themselves and more into the sort of the general questions of the life of faith. Like if I think about my upbringing, I was taught, and of course you children are taught in, in simple and even simplistic ways. And I think that's fine, you know, but I, you know, I was taught the primary that prayer is primarily made up of gratitude and petition. Those were sort of like the, you know, it's like I'm going to thank God for a variety of things, then I'm going to ask God for, for what I need. And there wasn't, I mean even I would say well into Adulthood. It didn't really occur to me that maybe I could open up a little bit more to God and bring in not just strong feelings of desire or gratitude, but feelings of lament or anger or frustration even not. And not just toward other people or circumstances, but even toward God. So I'm curious, Ellen, if you wouldn't mind talking about maybe why you think, to the extent you agree that that's sort of a broader experience that I'm describing, why you think that might be. And even. And this is. This is maybe a little bit tough to ask you to do, but if God maybe wants more from our prayer life than that.
[14:38]
B
You happen to be speaking to somebody who this morning was working on a sermon on the relationship between Moses and God. So I'm going to be speaking out of that to some extent because I think that we have all those details about the 40 years of intimacy between Moses and God because they are friends. And. And I think that what's happening at the burning bush is God saying to Moses, this is the situation. Are you going to be with me in this situation? And then over that period of time, over the 40 years in the wilderness, Moses finds that he's in for a whole lot more than he bargained for. But it's a friendship. And in a friendship you speak honestly. And so this brings me to the psalms. And of course, there are parts of the history of the relationship between God and Moses. There are parts of Torah that sound very much like the psalms. And there is. There is praise of God, and there is. Some of those petitions come out of a place of discontent, acute disappointment, a sense of having been betrayed by family and friends, a sense that God has turned away from us. I began with Moses because Moses is, you might say, the person we know best in certainly the Old Testament, maybe the Bible altogether. But all of those are parts of our experience. And so I think that the Psalter is giving us the material out of which to construct a genuine friendship with God. Not sure that we often speak in the church about what it takes genuinely to be friends with God. We have kind of a cozy notion of God as an uncle in tweeds, sort of. But again, that's just not the reality of the situation. And it's not, as you've already suggested, Tim. It's not what we really need from a friendship. We don't want someone to say, they're there, it'll be fine.
[18:00]
A
And so when I still. I'm stuck on the cursing psalms because some of them are just. They're like, so Intense. It's almost like a tantrum. It's just like the worst of ourselves just being fleshed out onto the table. And, And I feel like when I've experienced that, when I. I know that feeling, but when I, When I have that experience, I definitely also have this expectation that I shouldn't. I. I should be able to like, metabolize this quickly and, you know, have a more Christ like, perspective and love my enemy. Enemies quickly. You know, I want to, like, get over these feelings. And, and so I think if I'm. If I'm putting these psalms in my own life, what it feels like is indulgent. I feel like it's like too much. It's like I'm leaning into all the anger and the frustration. And in my real life, I always wonder if that's productive or if what I should be praying for is peace and, you know, help me forgive and like, help me move on and let this go. And so I'm wondering about those, like, those really acute experiences of just like, extreme frustration and anger. Like, is that really the answer the Psalms is providing? The Psalms are providing.
[19:16]
B
First of all, I would say that those Psalms and many other psalms, they're not psalms for all occasions. They're psalms for a moment.
[19:27]
A
Okay?
[19:27]
B
You should want to get over being in the place. You should want to get out of that place. And I remember, which is why I think the psalms should. Of cursing should be used with supervision if you're going to pray them, and I hope you have no need of them, but if you do have need of them, then I. Then I hope you will pray them. But someone should know, someone you trust in Christ should know you're praying them and you should report back. Because as someone once said to me, if you're still praying, someone who prescribed them to me, so to speak, said, I want you to pray these psalms, but if you're still praying them six weeks from now, we've got a problem. And I found that, you know, actually even setting a time frame, after a while, they came to feel just as you. Just as you've said, Aubrey, they came to feel self indulgent. I thought, okay, get over yourself. You know, it's. But I had to. But I also had to feel heard. Yeah. And so Psalm 65, God show me to fill up God cues prayer. I felt heard, and then I felt ready to move on. And. And I have, you know, I had someone, one of my former students who perhaps read the same book that you've read of mine, phoned me up one Day and said, one of my parishioners is being held at gunpoint by her estranged husband, and I'm here with the family. We're praying the cursing psalms. I wanted you to know that in the courses, in the course of the night, two lives we lost. And a week later, my friend, my former student, a priest, was saying, the funeral for both the person who held the gun and the person who was at the other end of it, that was a place for the cursing Psalms. Those were certainly not the psalms she used at the funeral services for those two people. She used a different set of psalms that are in the burial office. And there's psalms that call for mercy and comfort, including in the face of the incomprehensible. So the art of using the Psalms is to know what psalm needs to be used on what occasion. It's like medicine. It can do much damage if you don't use the right treatment at the right moment.
[22:41]
C
And do you see those psalms of cursing or psalms of lament as sort of just independent of, you know, psalms of praise, or do they in some way lay a foundation for an eventual. For an eventual prayer or song or psalm of praise?
[23:01]
B
What a good question. Absolutely. I think that they are quite literally in our Bibles, bound up with them. And it's. One of the interesting things about the arrangement of the Psalter is that they haven't separated it. If I were editing the Psalter, I put all the laments here, and then I have a little corner, you know, where I'd put the psalms of imprecation. They'd all be carefully delineated. It's not the way it's given to us. They're mixed up together, and sometimes they're mixed up in a single song. And I think that that reflects the movements of the human heart. And sometimes, and it's not as though sometimes you have to go back to something that you thought you were already through with, and then you discover it's popped up again. And that happens in the Psalter. If you, many religious communities especially, pray them seriatim, pray them in order, and you find yourself, you know, it's a lovely day in July, and you find yourself sang psalms of lament or cursing, and you're not feeling that at all. But it's a reminder, oh, you know, this is. This has popped up. It's popping up somewhere in my community in the world. And I think also it's when you're not feeling the vague yourself, it gives you the freedom to think, for whom should does this psalm speak today who might even feel this kind of anger toward me or toward the community that in some sense I represent? Whether I'm willingly, wittingly representing that community? I do. And so when you're free of some of your own baggage, so to speak, then use that freedom to think about someone else for whom. This is a very legitimate prayer today.
[25:40]
A
I know you've spent years translating the Psalms, and so I'm curious if there are words or phrases or song or specific psalms that you think we've maybe misunderstood or that you'd like people to understand better.
[25:57]
B
Oh, that's a big question. I think I'll just. I'll say one thing. And this came out of experience that I began almost 10 years ago now when a group of Christian contemporary ballet dancers asked me to work with them on the Psalms. And one of the things that they said to me was, what do we do with the word soul? S O U L. It occurs all the time in their English translation of the Psalter, probably almost any English translation of the salt. And not everyone but most is going to use the word soul on almost every page. She said, but we're dancers, you know, and so we use our bodies to interpret these texts. What do we do with that? And I said, the. The Hebrew word that is being translated, soul and all. But maybe a couple of places in the Psalms, it is the word nephesh. Nephesh. And it denotes this part of my body. It denotes the neck. So it's what you speak with, breathe through, eat and drink through. And so in Hebrew, it most often means my whole embodied self. There are a few places in my translation of the Psalms where I do use the word soul because it seemed phony not to. Bless the Lord, O my soul, Psalm 103, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. That one. I may even have used self. But there are a few words where. A few places where I know I use soul, but most of the time, the best English translation of it is me, myself, I. And so I said to the dancers, mentally, every time you run across the word soul, if you scratch that out and replace it with my whole embodied self, do those Psalms sound different to you? And she said, totally. Well, there you go, you know, that's. You know, that's what you need. Because for many of us, and this is especially true of white Western Christians, the realm of the soul and the realm of the body are different. And sometimes they are in conflict with each other. That's not true in black church language. That's why we talk about soul food. So it's not a problem for my African American students, but it is a problem for my Caucasian students.
[29:33]
A
That is so fascinating. I, I've never heard that before. Do you. How have you sort of reconciled that when you, you know, when you get into the New Testament and it does feel like maybe there, there's a case being made? You know, I'm thinking of Paul specifically against the body. Do you. Are you thinking about that differently? Like, I would just love to hear how you put that all together.
[29:56]
B
That's a pretty big question.
[29:59]
A
And I know we didn't plan to go here, but I'm so fascinated by this idea.
[30:04]
B
I would say that the Greco Roman world is a. It's a somewhat different thought world. Most of the Psalms are coming out of Iron Age Israel, which has not been touched by Greek philosophical thought and Neoplatonic thought and separation of soul and body. So. Ok, so, you know, I'll say that, I'll also say that when Paul is a rhetorician and he is not using words in a highly clinical sense and so there are times when he speaks about certainly the body needs to be disciplined, but that's not a damning thing in itself. When Paul uses words like world, cosmos sometimes, or sarks flesh sometimes, that has a negative cast to it. Not. I certainly don't think in the New Testament cosmos invariably has a negative cast. It definitely doesn't in the Gospel of John entirely. I mean, it's. So you have to kind of take it passage by passage. I think the very fact that the New Testament is citing the Psalms more than any other book of the Bible, they haven't repudiated it.
[32:01]
A
Yeah.
[32:02]
B
Wow. So thank you. And of course, part of the trick for me was not making it sound phony. You know, you don't, you can't use my whole embodied self in a poetic text. You have to find ways of expressing that. And there are places where it means neck. So in Psalm 69, Save me, O God, for the waters that are already ad nadesh up to my neck. That's literally what it means.
[32:32]
A
Yeah,
[32:35]
C
I. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm under the impression that the vast majority of the Psalms are sort of one way speech, you know, the, the psalmist to God. And in some of the Psalms, God, God responds. I'm curious maybe what to you that might teach us about, about prayer, but also, you know, feel free to draw from your own life and your own, you know, your own experience in, you know, in what ways does prayer, or should prayer be sort of a two way, A two way dialogue? And how, how might we learn from the Psalms or more generally to hear God's voice?
[33:13]
B
Excellent question. You're right though I wouldn't draw the inference that because they are mostly in a human voice speaking to God, that means I definitely would not draw the inference that prayer is a one way communication. It's. This is the way the scripts are written. There are, as you say, there are moments when we hear God's voice and, and people scholars debate, would a priest have, have uttered that in a worship setting? Is it kind of a, an oracular statement? You know, we don't know very much about how the Psalms were actually used in ancient Brazil. But I guess I'll say two things. I think it, I think the fact that God's voice is relatively muted here might teach us something about modesty in what we claim to have heard. Not a prohibition, but modesty. So you know, I'm thinking of Psalm 62. Once God has spoken twice of ihood, that power belongs to God and hesed, covenant love belongs to you, O Lord. That's a, that's a modest, It's a strong claim, but it is a limited claim. Power belongs to God and God is present to us in covenant love. We're told that God, as I said to you earlier, in Psalm 65, God is called Shomer Phila, the one who hears prayer. But Psalm 65 begins, and your translations may or may not have this. To you. Silence is praise, O God in Zion. So silence is a language out of which we speak to God. And then the very next line refers to God as the one who. Shomert Phila, who hears prayer, hears that silence as praise. Again, I think it is, I think that's despite the abundance of human speech in the solitude right here pretty much in the middle, it's reminding us sometimes you just have to shut up and listen to what's going on around you. And Psalm 65 is all about the praise of the non human creatures. And so it, the very last verse in there is speaking about the fields and it says that they are robed with flocks and the valleys draped with grain. They shout out, they even sing. Those are the valleys and the fields that are making those sounds of praise, not human beings.
[37:25]
A
You mentioned this word, this Hebrew word, hesed. And I think if I'm remembering that word appears over a hundred times or something in, in the Psalms. And that's, that's one word I, I think you just Translated it covenant love just now. Is that right? Is there. How would you describe that? What does that actually mean?
[37:45]
B
It's the, the word, it's the one. Neologism, you know, new word or phrase that I actually created for this translation because everything else I use just standard dictionary English, but that one, I felt I used a hyphen, covenant, hyphen, love, because I felt that both parts of that were essential. It's the word that is very frequently translated steadfast, love, loving kindness. I think that loving kindness might be the authorized version of sometimes it's translated mercy kindness. None of those is a wrong translation. But what they don't express and I decided was essential for this, my translation is it is going to appear in the new hymnal that Duke University Chapel is producing in honor of its hundredth anniversary. So, so it'll come out in January. And I wanted, what I wanted to express is the notion of covenant that hesed the accents on the first syllable. Chesed is, I often tell my students, it's covenant glue. It's the, it's the adherent that holds us in permanent relationship on both the vertical level between humanity and God, but also on the horizontal level amongst human beings. And that notion is that our lives are bound together with each other in the presence of God. That is basically the understanding of our situation that pervades Hebrew scripture and the New Testament. And so we are, of course, we live in general, we live in a highly individualistic society. This may be somewhat less true of your church and I wouldn't be able to judge that, but most North Americans live in a highly individualistic society. It's a dominant context. It's very hard to understand the theological claims of the Bible if you don't have a sense that the community is more important than you, than you are. It's why the church is growing in Africa and Asia and not in North America. So they understand that and they understand that we live in an. It's an illusion for us to think otherwise. And so chesed represents that rock bottom commitment that God has made to us and that we must reciprocate to God and extend to our community, like it or not. And for God. It's quite evident in the Old Testament and I think in the New. God doesn't always like it either, but God's made the commitment and SOFA is sticking with it. Although there are times, you know, when. There are times when God might prefer to do otherwise, but thus far hasn't. So.
[41:58]
A
Yeah, and can I just a follow up here? So Are you sort of saying this is. This is sort of just like an implied covenant by our birth? Like this is just the. The covenant that God naturally has with the human family.
[42:11]
B
I'd say Christians is baptism.
[42:15]
A
Oh, okay.
[42:16]
B
That's, you know, that's where we commit ourselves. Or someone, in my own tradition of infant baptism, someone makes a commitment for us, which we then renew in certain ways, including again, in my own tradition, we renew it day by day, week by week, when we receive the new covenant in Jesus's body and blood and from God's side.
[42:52]
C
Do you see God as sort of having extended that covenant love to all of humanity, you know, regardless of. Regardless of humanity's action?
[43:00]
B
Yes. The prophets remind us that God is free and God is, you know, and that freedom, it's not. It's not thus far exercised. But the reason I put it a little bit conditionally is because the prophets always remind us of the cost of this. To stay, for God to stay in this relationship. And it's not to be presumed upon. It's to be. There's a difference between trusting God and presuming
[43:43]
A
are there. Is there? I would just love, as we kind of start wrapping up, to know if there is a psalm that you find yourself returning to or if you. You have a particular favorite.
[43:55]
B
Probably the psalm that I. I mean, different ones at different times. And an advantage of. Of living with a liturgy that depends so heavily on the psalms is that certain lines come into my head, and really then I find that, oh, that's one I need to be paying attention to. But a psalm that I think has a unique Status is Psalm 145. It's an alphabetical psalm. So it begins in order with each of the letters, the 22 letters of the Hebrew Alphabet. It's praising God. It is praise. The Psalter ends with this great crescendo from Psalm 145 to 150. It's just a whole crescendo of praise. And in Jewish tradition, Psalm 145 is said three times a day. And you say it on your deathbed, and so. But you say it three times a day anyway because you never know what you're gonna be, you know, when death is going to come to you. It's pure praise. It's praise A to Z, as I say. And yet the fact that, as you know, juice have through 1600 years, very often been in conditions of persecution. And so that psalm was said when people were standing in the lines at Auschwitz, in the selection lines, and whether or not they knew that they were going to die. They said it three times a day, so they said it. I find. I find that very powerful. It's a psalm that has very little to say about directly about humans. And it ends by saying, may my mouth speak the praise of the Lord. May all flesh bless his holy name forever and ever. So it's a reminder that every creature of God has a capacity to offer praise to God by their being. The Psalter, again, does not have. Certainly it foregrounds the human voice as we've spoken about, but in this last crescendo of phrase, the human voice sort of recedes. It's joined with all the voices of all flesh in 145. And in Psalm 150, there's no human voice at all. It is. It's the timbrel, it's the hug, it's the flute that is praising God, the drum. And the very last line of the Psalter is, every breath praises God. Hallelujah. And so every breathing creature is praising God.
[47:36]
C
Thank you so much, Ellen. I wonder if just maybe. Final question here. Aubrey, I think, mentioned that our church is going to be spending, I think, three weeks in Psalms. You know, it is a very lengthy book, and I just wonder if there's any other counsel for us that you'd like us to keep in mind as we spend that time in the book.
[48:00]
B
I don't know how this is done in the church, but I would recommend using different translations because it is said that biblical Hebrew poetry is the most difficult of the Semitic languages. And every. Having just translated the Psalms, I could say that every line could have been otherwise in dozens of different ways. And I had to make choices, as every translator does. And so if you look at different translations, it will give you a sense of. At least of some sense of a range of possibility, because I think we tend to forget that insofar as we read the Bible in translation, as most Christians do, we are already reading other people's interpretation of the text the best that they had to offer. And yet it is an interpretation. And so simply being aware of that counsels modesty.
[49:15]
A
Thank you so much. That makes so much sense. Any translations in particular that you would want to call out?
[49:22]
B
My teacher, Robert Alter, has done a. Alter has done a translation of the Psalms that is aimed at being as transparent to the Hebrew as he can make it, and it's annotated. So I think it's one excellent resource. And mine will be out in January.
[49:42]
A
Yes, we'll be watching that.
[49:44]
B
And it's more for singing, because at Duke Chapel, we sing.
[49:51]
A
Well. Thank you so much, Ellen. This has just been so fascinating, so many insights, and you've made me excited to keep digging back into the psalms. So we really appreciate that you'd be here with us this morning.
[50:03]
B
Well, thank you for careful preparation and your excellent questions. God bless.
[50:08]
A
Thank you. All right. Thanks so much for listening. We hope that this conversation gives you a new way into the Psalms and maybe a little more permission to bring your whole self into prayer. We're so grateful to Ellen for sharing her wisdom with us. And as always, you can check out more@faith matters.org.

Summary6 min read

Faith Matters Podcast

Episode Title: Unfiltered Before God: Praying the Psalms, with Ellen Davis
Date: August 16, 2026
Host: Faith Matters Foundation
Guest: Dr. Ellen Davis, Amos Reagan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School

Episode Overview

This episode explores the Book of Psalms as a profound script for the full range of human experience before God. Host Aubrey Chavez and Dr. Ellen Davis delve into the Psalms’ remarkable permission to bring every emotion—gratitude, lament, rage, even cursing—before God. Drawing on Dr. Davis’s extensive academic work and translation of the Psalms, the conversation challenges listeners to expand their understanding of prayer and spiritual life, dissolving the boundaries between the spiritual and physical and between praise and lament.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Are the Psalms? (02:23)

Oral Tradition: The Psalms are ancient prayers and songs, passed down orally across generations—the “hymn book” and “prayer book” of ancient Israel.
Authorship: While traditionally associated with David, their precise origins are intentionally obscure, emphasizing communal worship over individual authorship.
Use Across Traditions: Psalms have been central to both Jewish and Christian worship—Christians and Jews have “never prayed without the Psalms.”
Quote:

“They really are unique in the Bible… the dynamic of speech is not God taking the lead, but us taking the lead speaking to and of God.”
—Ellen Davis (05:44)

2. Psalms as First Amendment for Faith (07:38)

Room for All Emotions: The Psalms give explicit permission to express every part of the human experience, including anger, lament, and cursing (imprecatory psalms).
Why Lament & Cursing Matter: These are often overlooked in worship because they are uncomfortable, but they provide honest scripts for prayer and healing.
Quote:

“The psalmists don’t feel about their enemies the way Jesus felt about his enemies… it’s a tacit acknowledgment that we are not Jesus.”
—Ellen Davis (08:24)
Healing Through Honesty: The Psalms are an “anatomy of all parts of the soul”—exposing every aspect for spiritual healing.
Structure of Psalms: The book’s shape teaches that lament gives way to praise gradually, mirroring spiritual development.

3. Expanding Prayer Beyond Petition & Praise (13:15)

Breaking Narrow Expectations: Often, religious education narrows prayer to gratitude and requests; Psalms push us to bring anger, pain, and even complaints to God.
Friendship with God: Citing Moses and God’s relationship, Davis says sincere friendship involves deep honesty—not always easy comfort.
Quote:

“I think that the Psalter is giving us the material out of which to construct a genuine friendship with God.”
—Ellen Davis (14:37)

4. The Role and Limits of "Cursing" Psalms (17:59)

Context Matters: Cursing Psalms aren’t for daily use—rather, for moments of acute pain or injustice.
Supervised Use: Davis recommends praying them with pastoral support and limiting their duration.
Communal Suffering: Lament and cursing psalms can be essential in situations of horrific violence or trauma—examples include clergy using them in times of crisis.
Quote:

“If you’re still praying [cursing psalms] six weeks from now, we’ve got a problem…”
—Ellen Davis (19:27)
Appropriate Application: Matching the psalm to the current spiritual or communal need is like good medicine—wrong application can harm.

5. Intertwining Lament and Praise (23:01)

Integrated Experience: Psalms of lament and praise are not separate—they’re mixed throughout, sometimes even within one psalm, reflecting the complexity of real human emotion.
Empathy and Solidarity: When not personally in need of lament, one can pray such psalms on behalf of others or even enemies.

6. Translational Insights: "Soul" and the Body (25:40)

Rethinking “Soul”: The Hebrew word “nefesh,” often translated as “soul,” more accurately means “the whole embodied self,” challenging dualistic Western ideas separating body and spirit.
Embodied Spirituality: This insight deepens physical engagement in worship and prayer—vital, for example, to dancers interpreting the Psalms.
Quote:

“Mentally…replace [‘soul’] with ‘my whole embodied self.’ Do those psalms sound different to you? And she said, totally.”
—Ellen Davis (25:56)

7. Prayer as Dialogue—And Silence (33:12)

Mostly Human-to-God Speech: Most psalms are humans speaking to God, not receiving direct answers—teaching humility and modesty in claiming divine messages.
The Quiet of Prayer: Psalm 65: “To you, silence is praise, O God in Zion,” underscores the holiness of silence and God’s attentive listening.
The Chorus of Creation: Later psalms show nature itself joining praise; “the fields…shout out, they even sing.”

8. The Centrality of Hesed—Covenant Love (37:24)

Defining Hesed: Davis coins “covenant-love,” signifying God’s steadfast, binding, not purely emotional commitment to humanity.
Communal Commitment: Hesed is both vertical (human-to-God) and horizontal (human-to-human)—impossible to understand scripture’s claims without recognizing the primacy of community.
Quote:

“[Chesed] is covenant glue…rock bottom commitment that God has made to us and that we must reciprocate to God and extend to our community, like it or not.”
—Ellen Davis (37:45)

9. Favorite Psalm: Psalm 145 (43:43)

Alphabet Psalm: Psalm 145 uses all 22 Hebrew letters—a symbol of totality.
Power in Persecution: Recited three times daily in Jewish tradition, even at Auschwitz—embodying unwavering, communal praise amid suffering.
Crescendo of Praise: The Psalter ends with all creation’s voices, not just humanity’s, praising God—culminating in Psalm 150 where musical instruments, not words, hold the praise.

10. Practical Counsel for Studying Psalms (48:00)

Use Multiple Translations: Every translation is an interpretation; comparing versions illuminates the range and depth of meaning.
Recommended Translations: Davis recommends Robert Alter’s translation (“transparent to the Hebrew” and annotated) and mentions her own forthcoming translation (intended for singing).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“The Psalms are the First Amendment for the life of faith—permission to bring everything before God.”
—Aubrey Chavez, summarizing Davis’s idea (07:38)
“The art of using the Psalms is to know what psalm needs to be used on what occasion. It’s like medicine. It can do much damage if you don’t use the right treatment at the right moment.”
—Ellen Davis (22:12)
“Every breathing creature is praising God.”
—Ellen Davis (on the final Psalm, 47:12)
On silence and prayer:

“To you, silence is praise, O God in Zion.... Sometimes you just have to shut up and listen to what’s going on around you.”
—Ellen Davis (34:10)

Timestamps for Key Segments

02:23 — What are the Psalms? Historical and communal origins
05:44 — Psalms vs. other biblical genres; human voice leading prayer
07:38 — The Psalms as spiritual First Amendment; embracing lament and cursing
14:37 — Friendship with God: honesty and breadth in prayer
19:15 — When and how to pray "cursing" psalms
23:01 — How lament and praise are interwoven in the Psalter
25:40 — Translational choices: “soul,” “nefesh,” and embodiment
33:12 — Psalms as a script for prayer; the role of silence
37:24 — "Hesed": Translating covenant-love and its communal dimension
43:54 — Psalm 145 as a favorite and model of praise
48:00 — Tips on studying Psalms: use multiple translations

Takeaways for Listeners

The Psalms offer a radical script for honest, embodied prayer—holding nothing back from God.
Lament, anger, and even cursing are valid stages of prayer, not signs of spiritual failure.
Language in the Psalms is deep, layered, and best experienced through multiple translations.
Covenantal love (hesed) is communal and reciprocal—binding together humanity and God.
The ultimate movement of the Psalms, and by implication our spiritual lives, is from pain and complaint toward communal, creation-wide praise.

Resources Mentioned

Translations Recommended: Robert Alter’s translation of Psalms; Ellen Davis’s forthcoming translation (for singing, out January at Duke Chapel)
Connect Further: faithmatters.org

This summary was prepared for those wishing to deepen their engagement with the Psalms and prayer, whether or not they have heard the episode. Non-content sections, advertisements, and introductions have been omitted for clarity and focus.

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Transcript47 lines

[00:00]
A
Hey everybody. We're thrilled to announce that Restore tickets are on sale now and we're so excited to tell you about the new format for this year. We're calling it Restore Connect. It's designed to make your experience more interactive, more embodied and more communal than ever before. This year it's September 24th through 26th at the Nordisk center at UVU. We'll have an opening social on Thursday evening with two days of smaller, more intimate sessions so that you can choose the topics that are most important to you and have lots of time to connect with other attendees. And the presenters space is limited, so you're going to want to get your tickets fast. You can go to faithmatters.org restore today. We can't wait to see you in September. Hey everybody, this is Aubrey Chavez from Faith Matters. Most of us can probably recall a verse or two from the Book of Psalms, something comforting or words inside a hymn that we know. But Psalms is the longest book in the Bible, and tucked inside this same book of Scripture are psalms of rage, cursing, and despair, and they're a lot harder to make sense of. Today, Dr. Ellen Davis joins us to talk about this ancient, essential book and describes the Psalms as a kind of script for the full range of human experience, experience before God. The Psalms, she says, expose all parts of our soul for healing. In this conversation, Ellen, who has spent years translating the Psalms, shows us just how expansive this ancient prayer book really is. She calls the Psalms a kind of First Amendment for the life of faith, permission to bring everything before God. Even the shape of the book reflects that, with lament gradually giving way to praise by the book's end. Ellen also takes us beneath some familiar translations with words like nefesh, which is usually translated soul. Ellen says this actually probably means something closer to our whole embodied self, challenging the idea that our spiritual lives are somehow separate or at odds with our physical ones. It's another way that the Psalms widen our sense of prayer. It's a vision spacious enough to hold our grief, our anger, our bodies, our silence, and our joy, trusting that all of it belongs in our relationship with God. Dr. Ellen Davis is the Amos Reagan Kearns Distinguished professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School and the author of several books exploring Scripture and the life of faith, including extensive work on the Psalms. We hope that you enjoy this conversation. All right, Ellen, thank you so much for joining us. We've been so looking forward to this conversation about Psalms, and we're excited to get to talk with you. So welcome.
[02:20]
B
Thank you. It's my great pleasure to be with you.
[02:23]
A
I would love to start with. I'm imagining some kind of orientation, actually. I think it was. It's been really helpful, as I've read your work, to just have a better understanding about what the psalms even are. You know, what. Where they come from, who wrote them, what's the point? Like, what is the book of Psalms generally?
[02:42]
B
Well, the first thing to say is we don't know exactly where they came from and who wrote them and when, because the Psalms are. They're oral literature, they're prayers, they're songs. They've been passed from mouth to mouth from generation to generation. And so to some extent, deliberately, I think, and inevitably the historical particularities have kind of been worn off because they keep being used like our hymns used. This is, one might say, the hymn book, the prayer book of ancient Israel. I think there's no question that David the King wrote what we would call psalms, but I would not want to try to identify which ones David wrote. When the Psalter says in Hebrew of David, that's a general term, associating the Psalms with the royal house of David, which stood cheek by jowl with the temple in Jerusalem. So we really have common prayer, common worship, to use some of the terms I'm familiar with, of Israel represented here. And the other thing I would say is that while this prayer was ancient already, by Jesus's time, Christians have never prayed without the Psalms. It's the book of the Bible, of the Bible being what we call the Old Testament. It's the book of the Hebrew Bible most quoted in the New Testament. And when Paul speaks to the early Christians about what they do when they gather for worship, he says, bring a psalm, bring a hymn. So historically, there's never been a body of Christians nor Jews who have not read recited sung psalms when they gathered for worship.
[05:18]
A
Wow.
[05:18]
C
And, Ellen, I wonder if you could sort of compare maybe the book of Psalms to the rest of the Bible, Although obviously the rest of the Bible is many. Is many things. But it is a little bit tricky because obviously these. The psalms seem to be written not so much in the voice of God. And, you know, traditionally, many Christians sort of like, need to see the Bible as somewhat infallible. So how do you. How do you think about the book of Psalms in those terms?
[05:44]
B
Okay. It's a really important question. In a sense, the Bible is, rhetorically speaking, one might say it's almost the opposite of the prophets. The prophets say repeatedly, thus says the Lord. As you have observed, Tim, the psalmists or the psalms are words formulated for our mouths to speak to God or about God. So they really are the unique in the Bible. Interesting because they're the longest book in the Bible. And Martin Luther called the Psalter the Bible in miniatures. So it represents the Bible in a sense. And yet the dynamic of speech is not God taking the lead, but us taking the lead speaking to and of God. And yet, by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, these psalms have been canonized. So they've been accepted into our scripture and give us scripts, so to speak, in the common sense of a script script that delineates kind of the range of possibilities of prayer. And what we discover is that the range is much, much wider than most of us had thought it was.
[07:39]
A
I love you. Write that the, the Psalms are sort of first Amendment to, for a life of faith, this, this explicit permission to speak freely to God. And, and so I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit because I think that the, the psalms you're, you're referencing specifically are so unfamiliar to me. I like, I, I'm. I've been surprised over and over as we've been preparing for this interview, how many of these psalms, especially of lament and, and cursing. I just feel like I've, I feel like I've never even read them before. I think I just pass over them and that we don't talk about them really in church because they're kind of weird, I want to say, like they're uncomfortable. So what types of prayer are you talking about specifically? That the Psalms are sort of giving us permission to, to speak to God.
[08:25]
B
Okay, so you've already identified the two kinds of psalms that are least likely to be known to us. Laments and imprecatory psalms, as they're called. Psalms of cursing, psalms directed at our enemies. There are relatively few of the psalms that actually say to God in so many words, damn them, let their children beg bread, take everything from them, frustrate their plans. Frustrate their plans. That's a pretty common appeal in the Psalms. There are not too many that actually actively seek the. Actively seek the destruction of the enemies. But there are some. And yes, I would say that you've not heard them or seen them, even if you've read sort of over them, because we are trained not to hear them, if not the way Christians speak about their enemies. But the psalmists don't feel about their enemies the way Jesus felt about Jesus's enemies. You know, that's a shock, but it's given to Us as scripture, in one might say, a tacit acknowledgment that we are not Jesus and we have a way to go to get to a place where we can pray sincerely and part for our enemies, for their well being. And part of the way that we have to travel to get there in sincerity is to acknowledge our anger, our bewilderment, our, yes, hatred of our enemies so that we can ask God in all honesty to keep transforming us. So I think that's part of what they do for us. John Calvin, the great 16th century theologian, Swiss theologian, called the Psalter an anatomy of all parts of the soul. I think it's a really beautiful phrase, an anatomy of all parts of the soul. And so what the Psalms are doing is exposing all parts of our soul for healing. And another thing that may be telling in this respect is the shape of the book of Psalms. The book of Psalms, Psalmos is a Greek word meaning hymns, songs of prayer. But the Hebrew name of the Psalter is te lim praisings. But it's an interesting thing that the first half of the Psalter is much heavier on lament than it is on straight out unalloyed praise. This praise and lament, which would be the two main categories, two main ways of addressing God here praise and lament are mixed all the way through, but it's heavier on lament at the beginning, heavier on praise in the second half. And I think that says something about the process of prayer that we have to become expert in the language of pain and suffering for ourselves and for others if we're going to pray honestly in the world in which we live rather than, as so many people outside the church think that Christians all about, and prayers all about pie in the sky till you die and. But the Psalter keeps our feet planted on the ground.
[13:16]
C
I would love to talk a little bit more about that and maybe, you know, removing ourselves from, for a moment from the Psalms themselves and more into the sort of the general questions of the life of faith. Like if I think about my upbringing, I was taught, and of course you children are taught in, in simple and even simplistic ways. And I think that's fine, you know, but I, you know, I was taught the primary that prayer is primarily made up of gratitude and petition. Those were sort of like the, you know, it's like I'm going to thank God for a variety of things, then I'm going to ask God for, for what I need. And there wasn't, I mean even I would say well into Adulthood. It didn't really occur to me that maybe I could open up a little bit more to God and bring in not just strong feelings of desire or gratitude, but feelings of lament or anger or frustration even not. And not just toward other people or circumstances, but even toward God. So I'm curious, Ellen, if you wouldn't mind talking about maybe why you think, to the extent you agree that that's sort of a broader experience that I'm describing, why you think that might be. And even. And this is. This is maybe a little bit tough to ask you to do, but if God maybe wants more from our prayer life than that.
[14:38]
B
You happen to be speaking to somebody who this morning was working on a sermon on the relationship between Moses and God. So I'm going to be speaking out of that to some extent because I think that we have all those details about the 40 years of intimacy between Moses and God because they are friends. And. And I think that what's happening at the burning bush is God saying to Moses, this is the situation. Are you going to be with me in this situation? And then over that period of time, over the 40 years in the wilderness, Moses finds that he's in for a whole lot more than he bargained for. But it's a friendship. And in a friendship you speak honestly. And so this brings me to the psalms. And of course, there are parts of the history of the relationship between God and Moses. There are parts of Torah that sound very much like the psalms. And there is. There is praise of God, and there is. Some of those petitions come out of a place of discontent, acute disappointment, a sense of having been betrayed by family and friends, a sense that God has turned away from us. I began with Moses because Moses is, you might say, the person we know best in certainly the Old Testament, maybe the Bible altogether. But all of those are parts of our experience. And so I think that the Psalter is giving us the material out of which to construct a genuine friendship with God. Not sure that we often speak in the church about what it takes genuinely to be friends with God. We have kind of a cozy notion of God as an uncle in tweeds, sort of. But again, that's just not the reality of the situation. And it's not, as you've already suggested, Tim. It's not what we really need from a friendship. We don't want someone to say, they're there, it'll be fine.
[18:00]
A
And so when I still. I'm stuck on the cursing psalms because some of them are just. They're like, so Intense. It's almost like a tantrum. It's just like the worst of ourselves just being fleshed out onto the table. And, And I feel like when I've experienced that, when I. I know that feeling, but when I, When I have that experience, I definitely also have this expectation that I shouldn't. I. I should be able to like, metabolize this quickly and, you know, have a more Christ like, perspective and love my enemy. Enemies quickly. You know, I want to, like, get over these feelings. And, and so I think if I'm. If I'm putting these psalms in my own life, what it feels like is indulgent. I feel like it's like too much. It's like I'm leaning into all the anger and the frustration. And in my real life, I always wonder if that's productive or if what I should be praying for is peace and, you know, help me forgive and like, help me move on and let this go. And so I'm wondering about those, like, those really acute experiences of just like, extreme frustration and anger. Like, is that really the answer the Psalms is providing? The Psalms are providing.
[19:16]
B
First of all, I would say that those Psalms and many other psalms, they're not psalms for all occasions. They're psalms for a moment.
[19:27]
A
Okay?
[19:27]
B
You should want to get over being in the place. You should want to get out of that place. And I remember, which is why I think the psalms should. Of cursing should be used with supervision if you're going to pray them, and I hope you have no need of them, but if you do have need of them, then I. Then I hope you will pray them. But someone should know, someone you trust in Christ should know you're praying them and you should report back. Because as someone once said to me, if you're still praying, someone who prescribed them to me, so to speak, said, I want you to pray these psalms, but if you're still praying them six weeks from now, we've got a problem. And I found that, you know, actually even setting a time frame, after a while, they came to feel just as you. Just as you've said, Aubrey, they came to feel self indulgent. I thought, okay, get over yourself. You know, it's. But I had to. But I also had to feel heard. Yeah. And so Psalm 65, God show me to fill up God cues prayer. I felt heard, and then I felt ready to move on. And. And I have, you know, I had someone, one of my former students who perhaps read the same book that you've read of mine, phoned me up one Day and said, one of my parishioners is being held at gunpoint by her estranged husband, and I'm here with the family. We're praying the cursing psalms. I wanted you to know that in the courses, in the course of the night, two lives we lost. And a week later, my friend, my former student, a priest, was saying, the funeral for both the person who held the gun and the person who was at the other end of it, that was a place for the cursing Psalms. Those were certainly not the psalms she used at the funeral services for those two people. She used a different set of psalms that are in the burial office. And there's psalms that call for mercy and comfort, including in the face of the incomprehensible. So the art of using the Psalms is to know what psalm needs to be used on what occasion. It's like medicine. It can do much damage if you don't use the right treatment at the right moment.
[22:41]
C
And do you see those psalms of cursing or psalms of lament as sort of just independent of, you know, psalms of praise, or do they in some way lay a foundation for an eventual. For an eventual prayer or song or psalm of praise?
[23:01]
B
What a good question. Absolutely. I think that they are quite literally in our Bibles, bound up with them. And it's. One of the interesting things about the arrangement of the Psalter is that they haven't separated it. If I were editing the Psalter, I put all the laments here, and then I have a little corner, you know, where I'd put the psalms of imprecation. They'd all be carefully delineated. It's not the way it's given to us. They're mixed up together, and sometimes they're mixed up in a single song. And I think that that reflects the movements of the human heart. And sometimes, and it's not as though sometimes you have to go back to something that you thought you were already through with, and then you discover it's popped up again. And that happens in the Psalter. If you, many religious communities especially, pray them seriatim, pray them in order, and you find yourself, you know, it's a lovely day in July, and you find yourself sang psalms of lament or cursing, and you're not feeling that at all. But it's a reminder, oh, you know, this is. This has popped up. It's popping up somewhere in my community in the world. And I think also it's when you're not feeling the vague yourself, it gives you the freedom to think, for whom should does this psalm speak today who might even feel this kind of anger toward me or toward the community that in some sense I represent? Whether I'm willingly, wittingly representing that community? I do. And so when you're free of some of your own baggage, so to speak, then use that freedom to think about someone else for whom. This is a very legitimate prayer today.
[25:40]
A
I know you've spent years translating the Psalms, and so I'm curious if there are words or phrases or song or specific psalms that you think we've maybe misunderstood or that you'd like people to understand better.
[25:57]
B
Oh, that's a big question. I think I'll just. I'll say one thing. And this came out of experience that I began almost 10 years ago now when a group of Christian contemporary ballet dancers asked me to work with them on the Psalms. And one of the things that they said to me was, what do we do with the word soul? S O U L. It occurs all the time in their English translation of the Psalter, probably almost any English translation of the salt. And not everyone but most is going to use the word soul on almost every page. She said, but we're dancers, you know, and so we use our bodies to interpret these texts. What do we do with that? And I said, the. The Hebrew word that is being translated, soul and all. But maybe a couple of places in the Psalms, it is the word nephesh. Nephesh. And it denotes this part of my body. It denotes the neck. So it's what you speak with, breathe through, eat and drink through. And so in Hebrew, it most often means my whole embodied self. There are a few places in my translation of the Psalms where I do use the word soul because it seemed phony not to. Bless the Lord, O my soul, Psalm 103, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. That one. I may even have used self. But there are a few words where. A few places where I know I use soul, but most of the time, the best English translation of it is me, myself, I. And so I said to the dancers, mentally, every time you run across the word soul, if you scratch that out and replace it with my whole embodied self, do those Psalms sound different to you? And she said, totally. Well, there you go, you know, that's. You know, that's what you need. Because for many of us, and this is especially true of white Western Christians, the realm of the soul and the realm of the body are different. And sometimes they are in conflict with each other. That's not true in black church language. That's why we talk about soul food. So it's not a problem for my African American students, but it is a problem for my Caucasian students.
[29:33]
A
That is so fascinating. I, I've never heard that before. Do you. How have you sort of reconciled that when you, you know, when you get into the New Testament and it does feel like maybe there, there's a case being made? You know, I'm thinking of Paul specifically against the body. Do you. Are you thinking about that differently? Like, I would just love to hear how you put that all together.
[29:56]
B
That's a pretty big question.
[29:59]
A
And I know we didn't plan to go here, but I'm so fascinated by this idea.
[30:04]
B
I would say that the Greco Roman world is a. It's a somewhat different thought world. Most of the Psalms are coming out of Iron Age Israel, which has not been touched by Greek philosophical thought and Neoplatonic thought and separation of soul and body. So. Ok, so, you know, I'll say that, I'll also say that when Paul is a rhetorician and he is not using words in a highly clinical sense and so there are times when he speaks about certainly the body needs to be disciplined, but that's not a damning thing in itself. When Paul uses words like world, cosmos sometimes, or sarks flesh sometimes, that has a negative cast to it. Not. I certainly don't think in the New Testament cosmos invariably has a negative cast. It definitely doesn't in the Gospel of John entirely. I mean, it's. So you have to kind of take it passage by passage. I think the very fact that the New Testament is citing the Psalms more than any other book of the Bible, they haven't repudiated it.
[32:01]
A
Yeah.
[32:02]
B
Wow. So thank you. And of course, part of the trick for me was not making it sound phony. You know, you don't, you can't use my whole embodied self in a poetic text. You have to find ways of expressing that. And there are places where it means neck. So in Psalm 69, Save me, O God, for the waters that are already ad nadesh up to my neck. That's literally what it means.
[32:32]
A
Yeah,
[32:35]
C
I. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm under the impression that the vast majority of the Psalms are sort of one way speech, you know, the, the psalmist to God. And in some of the Psalms, God, God responds. I'm curious maybe what to you that might teach us about, about prayer, but also, you know, feel free to draw from your own life and your own, you know, your own experience in, you know, in what ways does prayer, or should prayer be sort of a two way, A two way dialogue? And how, how might we learn from the Psalms or more generally to hear God's voice?
[33:13]
B
Excellent question. You're right though I wouldn't draw the inference that because they are mostly in a human voice speaking to God, that means I definitely would not draw the inference that prayer is a one way communication. It's. This is the way the scripts are written. There are, as you say, there are moments when we hear God's voice and, and people scholars debate, would a priest have, have uttered that in a worship setting? Is it kind of a, an oracular statement? You know, we don't know very much about how the Psalms were actually used in ancient Brazil. But I guess I'll say two things. I think it, I think the fact that God's voice is relatively muted here might teach us something about modesty in what we claim to have heard. Not a prohibition, but modesty. So you know, I'm thinking of Psalm 62. Once God has spoken twice of ihood, that power belongs to God and hesed, covenant love belongs to you, O Lord. That's a, that's a modest, It's a strong claim, but it is a limited claim. Power belongs to God and God is present to us in covenant love. We're told that God, as I said to you earlier, in Psalm 65, God is called Shomer Phila, the one who hears prayer. But Psalm 65 begins, and your translations may or may not have this. To you. Silence is praise, O God in Zion. So silence is a language out of which we speak to God. And then the very next line refers to God as the one who. Shomert Phila, who hears prayer, hears that silence as praise. Again, I think it is, I think that's despite the abundance of human speech in the solitude right here pretty much in the middle, it's reminding us sometimes you just have to shut up and listen to what's going on around you. And Psalm 65 is all about the praise of the non human creatures. And so it, the very last verse in there is speaking about the fields and it says that they are robed with flocks and the valleys draped with grain. They shout out, they even sing. Those are the valleys and the fields that are making those sounds of praise, not human beings.
[37:25]
A
You mentioned this word, this Hebrew word, hesed. And I think if I'm remembering that word appears over a hundred times or something in, in the Psalms. And that's, that's one word I, I think you just Translated it covenant love just now. Is that right? Is there. How would you describe that? What does that actually mean?
[37:45]
B
It's the, the word, it's the one. Neologism, you know, new word or phrase that I actually created for this translation because everything else I use just standard dictionary English, but that one, I felt I used a hyphen, covenant, hyphen, love, because I felt that both parts of that were essential. It's the word that is very frequently translated steadfast, love, loving kindness. I think that loving kindness might be the authorized version of sometimes it's translated mercy kindness. None of those is a wrong translation. But what they don't express and I decided was essential for this, my translation is it is going to appear in the new hymnal that Duke University Chapel is producing in honor of its hundredth anniversary. So, so it'll come out in January. And I wanted, what I wanted to express is the notion of covenant that hesed the accents on the first syllable. Chesed is, I often tell my students, it's covenant glue. It's the, it's the adherent that holds us in permanent relationship on both the vertical level between humanity and God, but also on the horizontal level amongst human beings. And that notion is that our lives are bound together with each other in the presence of God. That is basically the understanding of our situation that pervades Hebrew scripture and the New Testament. And so we are, of course, we live in general, we live in a highly individualistic society. This may be somewhat less true of your church and I wouldn't be able to judge that, but most North Americans live in a highly individualistic society. It's a dominant context. It's very hard to understand the theological claims of the Bible if you don't have a sense that the community is more important than you, than you are. It's why the church is growing in Africa and Asia and not in North America. So they understand that and they understand that we live in an. It's an illusion for us to think otherwise. And so chesed represents that rock bottom commitment that God has made to us and that we must reciprocate to God and extend to our community, like it or not. And for God. It's quite evident in the Old Testament and I think in the New. God doesn't always like it either, but God's made the commitment and SOFA is sticking with it. Although there are times, you know, when. There are times when God might prefer to do otherwise, but thus far hasn't. So.
[41:58]
A
Yeah, and can I just a follow up here? So Are you sort of saying this is. This is sort of just like an implied covenant by our birth? Like this is just the. The covenant that God naturally has with the human family.
[42:11]
B
I'd say Christians is baptism.
[42:15]
A
Oh, okay.
[42:16]
B
That's, you know, that's where we commit ourselves. Or someone, in my own tradition of infant baptism, someone makes a commitment for us, which we then renew in certain ways, including again, in my own tradition, we renew it day by day, week by week, when we receive the new covenant in Jesus's body and blood and from God's side.
[42:52]
C
Do you see God as sort of having extended that covenant love to all of humanity, you know, regardless of. Regardless of humanity's action?
[43:00]
B
Yes. The prophets remind us that God is free and God is, you know, and that freedom, it's not. It's not thus far exercised. But the reason I put it a little bit conditionally is because the prophets always remind us of the cost of this. To stay, for God to stay in this relationship. And it's not to be presumed upon. It's to be. There's a difference between trusting God and presuming
[43:43]
A
are there. Is there? I would just love, as we kind of start wrapping up, to know if there is a psalm that you find yourself returning to or if you. You have a particular favorite.
[43:55]
B
Probably the psalm that I. I mean, different ones at different times. And an advantage of. Of living with a liturgy that depends so heavily on the psalms is that certain lines come into my head, and really then I find that, oh, that's one I need to be paying attention to. But a psalm that I think has a unique Status is Psalm 145. It's an alphabetical psalm. So it begins in order with each of the letters, the 22 letters of the Hebrew Alphabet. It's praising God. It is praise. The Psalter ends with this great crescendo from Psalm 145 to 150. It's just a whole crescendo of praise. And in Jewish tradition, Psalm 145 is said three times a day. And you say it on your deathbed, and so. But you say it three times a day anyway because you never know what you're gonna be, you know, when death is going to come to you. It's pure praise. It's praise A to Z, as I say. And yet the fact that, as you know, juice have through 1600 years, very often been in conditions of persecution. And so that psalm was said when people were standing in the lines at Auschwitz, in the selection lines, and whether or not they knew that they were going to die. They said it three times a day, so they said it. I find. I find that very powerful. It's a psalm that has very little to say about directly about humans. And it ends by saying, may my mouth speak the praise of the Lord. May all flesh bless his holy name forever and ever. So it's a reminder that every creature of God has a capacity to offer praise to God by their being. The Psalter, again, does not have. Certainly it foregrounds the human voice as we've spoken about, but in this last crescendo of phrase, the human voice sort of recedes. It's joined with all the voices of all flesh in 145. And in Psalm 150, there's no human voice at all. It is. It's the timbrel, it's the hug, it's the flute that is praising God, the drum. And the very last line of the Psalter is, every breath praises God. Hallelujah. And so every breathing creature is praising God.
[47:36]
C
Thank you so much, Ellen. I wonder if just maybe. Final question here. Aubrey, I think, mentioned that our church is going to be spending, I think, three weeks in Psalms. You know, it is a very lengthy book, and I just wonder if there's any other counsel for us that you'd like us to keep in mind as we spend that time in the book.
[48:00]
B
I don't know how this is done in the church, but I would recommend using different translations because it is said that biblical Hebrew poetry is the most difficult of the Semitic languages. And every. Having just translated the Psalms, I could say that every line could have been otherwise in dozens of different ways. And I had to make choices, as every translator does. And so if you look at different translations, it will give you a sense of. At least of some sense of a range of possibility, because I think we tend to forget that insofar as we read the Bible in translation, as most Christians do, we are already reading other people's interpretation of the text the best that they had to offer. And yet it is an interpretation. And so simply being aware of that counsels modesty.
[49:15]
A
Thank you so much. That makes so much sense. Any translations in particular that you would want to call out?
[49:22]
B
My teacher, Robert Alter, has done a. Alter has done a translation of the Psalms that is aimed at being as transparent to the Hebrew as he can make it, and it's annotated. So I think it's one excellent resource. And mine will be out in January.
[49:42]
A
Yes, we'll be watching that.
[49:44]
B
And it's more for singing, because at Duke Chapel, we sing.
[49:51]
A
Well. Thank you so much, Ellen. This has just been so fascinating, so many insights, and you've made me excited to keep digging back into the psalms. So we really appreciate that you'd be here with us this morning.
[50:03]
B
Well, thank you for careful preparation and your excellent questions. God bless.
[50:08]
A
Thank you. All right. Thanks so much for listening. We hope that this conversation gives you a new way into the Psalms and maybe a little more permission to bring your whole self into prayer. We're so grateful to Ellen for sharing her wisdom with us. And as always, you can check out more@faith matters.org.