A Psalm a Day Keeps Satan Away: The Podcast

Psalm 46 – A Mighty Fortress Is Our God We have noted already the preponderance of lament psalms in the Psalter. More than a third of the Psalter’s 150 poems are laments (complaints), all written within a certain structure that we have noted and studied. But sometimes, in the midst of lamenting and complaining, in the midst of shaking your fist at G-d, you have a day where you recognize the power...

Psalm 45 – Spiritual Leadership Now that we have read and reflected on 44 psalms, it is instantly clear that Psalm 45 is different. The purpose of the psalm is not to complain to G-d, to praise G-d, to thank G-d or to marvel at His Word or Temple. Psalm 45 is classified as a royal psalm because its focus is on the king, and specifically, it is a liturgical poem that seems to have been recited at t...

Psalm 44 – The Church A faith community worships together, loves together, lives together, serves together and … suffers together. Doesn’t it feel like the Christian community is on the ropes today and is suffering? Post-COVID, church attendance (which was already on the slide) is plummeting, gross indiscretions by church leaders derail any positive momentum that the church can muster, the educati...

Psalm 43 - Community In addition to the repeated chorus in both Psalms, further evidence that Psalms 42 and 43 were originally one text is that Ps. 43 does not have a superscript, whereas Ps. 42 (and most others in this section of the Psalter) does have a superscript, implying that the poem should continue without a separation. Also, thematically, the desire in Psalm 42 for the writer to be in the...

Psalm 42 - The Face of G-d “As a deer pants for water, so my soul pants for you, O God.” These opening lines to Psalm 42 are some of the most cherished words in all of Scripture. This is the soul cry of so many G-d believers and they need little commentary on my part. But I would be remiss to not offer some reflections on this top-fiver. Almost certainly Psalms 42 and 43 were originally one psalm...

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Psalm 41 – Amen and Amen Fun fact about the psalms: they are divided into five "books." Psalm 41 ends the first “book” of Psalms. Scholars speculate that the reason is that those who compiled the psalms wanted to mirror the five books of Torah. Note the way the psalm ends in verse 13: “Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel. Amen and Amen.” The “Amen and Amen” is repeated at the end of Book II a...

Psalm 40 – A New Song Psalm 40 is a top fiver for sure! Many scholars believe that it consists of two psalms: a thanksgiving psalm in verses 1-10 and a lament psalm in verses 11-17, with the lament portion being duplicated in Psalm 70. Given that duplication, we will focus on the thanksgiving portion for now. The psalmist begins by recounting a period of helplessness. He is metaphorically stuck in...

Psalm 39 – The Brevity of Life … and Mitzvahs Trivia question: Given Israel’s long and storied past, with heroes of the faith like Abraham, Moses and David, and with amazing events like the parting of the Red Sea, what day is considered the greatest day in Jewish history? You might note a different tone and mood to this psalm. It is melancholy and reflective as the psalmist contemplates the brevit...

Psalm 38 - Confession By now, you know my fascination with the psalm superscripts. Today’s psalm includes an interesting one. The NIV translates/interprets the superscript as “A Psalm of David. A petition.” If you have a phone Bible app, toggle amongst the NASB, the NRSV, the ESV and some other translations and you will see a wide variety of translations/interpretations of מִזְמ֖וֹר לְדָוִ֣ד לְהַז...

Psalm 37 – The Next Right/Just Thing … Again Psalm 37 is yet another acrostic structure that has been masked in translation. It is most definitely a top fiver for me. It is classified as a wisdom psalm, and as you read, you can also imagine it being part of Proverbs, with a bunch of pithy and random do’s and don’ts stitched together. Yet the acrostic structure gives it a foundation upon which seve...

Psalm 36 – Righteousness/Justice/Peace/Love Verse 1 presents another translation/interpretation challenge. Evil/Sin/Transgression seems to be personified, and Evil/Sin/Transgression seems to be speaking to the ungodly. This is a strange construct for the Scriptures, so much so that the NIV totally rejects the personification and puts these words completely onto the lips of the psalmist. Compare th...

Psalm 35 – Righteousness/Justice/Peace Occasionally, in attempting to bring some theological clarity to the text, my mind drifts. That happened while reading verse 21: “They gape at me and say, “Aha, Aha!” The question I asked myself is, how does one decide to translate such an utterance? The Hebrew phrase is הֶאָ֑ח הֶאָ֑ח and is pronounced ‘hay-YAH, hay-YAH.’ All the major English translations go...

Psalm 34 - Community Fun fact about Psalm 34: it is the fourth acrostic psalm (each line beginning with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet) that we have read. EXCEPT there is no line for the ‘vav’ which is the sixth letter of the alphabet! There are very few Hebrew words that start with a ‘vav.’ Fun fact #2 about Psalm 34: the superscript at the beginning is quite lengthy and recounts an...

Psalm 33 – Transcendence and Immanence This psalm declares itself to be a new song (v. 3) to be sung by the congregation of YHWH believers. Fittingly then, the predominant metaphor employed by the psalmist uses Creation language and images from Genesis 1 and the worshipers singing this hymn re-orient themselves as a community to a perfected Creation filled with His righteousness and justice and ru...

Psalm 32 – The Sequence We start our commentary today on Psalm 32 (another top fiver) in the most logical place, which is Genesis 15. A frustrated Abram (he was not yet Abraham) was lamenting to the LORD that the life YHWH had promised him if Abram would “go, go forth to the land I will show you” (Gen. 12:1) had not yet materialized. Where were the children and where was the blessings of a great n...

Hello Again, Psalm-a-Dayers! It’s been 35 days since my last devotional entry. As mentioned in the podcast portion from January 31, Noelle and I journeyed to NZ and Australia for the better part of February. Since returning, and having gotten out of the habit of writing and recording, I have struggled to return to my normal spiritual formation disciplines. And that’s the faith lesson for today: if...

Psalm 31- Rabbis and Disciples “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.” These are some of Jesus’s last words as he died on the cross, praying from Psalm 31:5 (confer with our discussion on Psalm 22, the other psalm that Jesus prayed as he died). Remember the rabbinic mantra that we discussed with Psalm 22: learn the text, live the text, teach the text, pray the text, die the text . As discip...

Psalm 30 – Tenacity, Thanksgiving, Confession On February 11, 1986, a Ukrainian born Jew named Natan Sharansky stood on the tarmac at Bykovo Airport outside of Moscow. He was about to board a plane that would take him to East Germany where he would be part of a well-publicized prisoner exchange between the then Soviet Union and the West. Sharansky, a dissident of Soviet authoritarianism, had been...

Psalm 29 Fun fact about Psalm 29: Scholarly consensus is that the source of this psalm is a Canaanite hymn to Ba-al, the storm god of whom much is written about in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. This makes many Christians squeamish: why would the ancient Israelite psalmists use a ‘secular’ song and violate the purity of our belief in the One True God? The reality is that the Scriptur...

Psalm 28 This psalm follows the classic lament structure of complaint/petition, deprecation against enemies, and affirmation/trust in YHWH. How many times have we seen this pattern just in the first 28 psalms? The psalmist in verse 1 begs G-d to not be silent lest he n(the Psalmist) be “like those who have gone down to the pit.” This implies others have gone down in the pit and as verse 3 says, th...

Psalm 27 - Be Strong and Courageous In our reflections we have talked about passages of orientation/re-orientation towards YHWH which affirm our trust and confidence in G-d, and we have talked about passages of disorientation which describe times of trouble and suffering (and these passages often show the psalmist shouting at G-d and shaking his fist at G-d). We have also noted that in the psalms...

Psalm 26 - Blameless Psalm 26 gives us our first opportunity to circle back to a question that I raised in our Psalm 15 reflection: what is the difference between being blameless and being sinless? The Hebrew Bible (what we call the Old Testament) speaks of many blameless people (i.e., Job and Noah), but no one that I recall who was sinless. Today’s psalm is a lament. The psalmist needs vindicatio...

Psalm 25 - The ACT of Remembering Today is a good day for another lesson in Hebrew. Psalm 25 is our first example of an acrostic psalm (each line starts with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet – in English, it would be line 1 starts with “A,” line 2 starts with “B” and so on). Sadly, that structure is lost in most translation/interpretations. I have attached a picture from my Hebrew bible...

Psalm 24 – A Big, Big God! Imagine being a Jewish slave in ancient Egypt, arguably the greatest empire ever to exist. You and your people work tirelessly to build great monuments to the gods of the empire like the Edfu temple in the attached picture (notice the height of the gate, which was built to accommodate the greatness of Horus, the Egyptian “protector god” of Pharaoh). You cry out to the un...