SBL in San Diego is fast approaching, particularly as I travel that way early to see my family and home state (Oregon) for the first time in ages. My paper on Psalm 102 (or read the proposal) is nearly ready, and for those of you who may wish to acquaint yourselves with the subject matter, I post below Robert Alter's new translation of the psalm in question.

1 A prayer for the lowly when he grows faint and pours out his plea before the LORD.
2 LORD, O hear my prayer,
and let my outcry come before You.
3 Hide not Your face from me
on the day when I am in straits.
Incline Your ear to me.
On the day I call, quickly answer me.
4 For my days are consumed in smoke,
and my bones are scorched like a hearth.
5 My heart is stricken and withers like grass,
so I forget to eat my bread.
6 From my loud sighing,
my bones cleave to my flesh.
7 I resemble the wilderness jackdaw,
I become like the owl of the ruins.
8 I lie awake and become
like a lonely bird on a roof.
9 All day long my enemies revile me,
my taunters invoke me in curse.
10 For ashes I have eaten as bread,
and my drink I have mingled with tears—
11 because of Your wrath and Your fury,
for You raised me up and flung me down.
12 My days inclined like a shadow,
and I—like grass I withered.
13 And You LORD, forever enthroned,
and Your name—for all generations.
14 You, may You rise, have mercy on Zion,
for it is the hour to pity her, for the fixed time has come.
15 For Your servants cherish her stones
and on her dust they take pity.
16 All the nations will fear the name of the LORD,
and all the kings of the earth, Your glory.
17 For the LORD has rebuilt Zion,
He is seen in His glory.
18 He has turned to the prayer of the desolate
and has not despised their prayer.
19 Let this be inscribed for a generation to come,
that a people yet unborn may praise Yah.
20 For the LORD has gazed down from His holy heights,
from heaven to earth He has looked
21 to hears the groans of the captive,
to set loose those doomed to die,
22 that the name of the LORD be recounted in Zion
and His praise in Jerusalem
23 when peoples gather together
and kingdoms, to serve the LORD.
24 He humbled my strength on the highway,
he cut short my days.
25 I say, “O my God.
Do not take me away in the midst of my days!
Your years are for all generations.
26 Of old You founded the earth,
and the heavens—Your handiwork.
27 They will perish and You will yet stand.
They will all wear away like a garment.
Like clothing you change them, and they pass away.
28 But You—Your years never end.
29 The sons of Your servants dwell safe,
their seed in Your presence, unshaken.”

My only question: I get why you'd want to keep as much of the ancient character in the translation as possible, but does "Yah" in verse 19 really count as a translation? Seems like punting.

Tags: Psalms

I'm still digging into Psalm 102 for my upcoming SBL paper. Today I left the dusty library shelves and turned instead to a few online resources. Commentators of note include:

• Augustine (and here and here in the Confessions)
• Thomas (OK, not yet to 102, but mentioned here etc)
• Calvin (esp here and here; cf Gn 36, 25, Ex 15, 32, Lam 5, Is 16, 29, 37, 49, 51, 54, 63, 66, Jonah, Dn 2, 7, Jer 19, 31, Ps 22, 51, 72, 114, 109, and here, here, here, etc)
• Adolf Harnack on Athanasius
• Metered by Isaac Watts
• Calvin and Augustine are also here

I'll keep looking, of course.

Tags: Psalms, PhD

James Kugel and Robert Alter, two of the most notable American Hebraists working today, have both surfaced in mainstream media publications recently. (This via PaleoJudaica, which mentioned the stories here and here [compare here].)

The New York Times reviewed James Kugel's gargantuan How to Read the Bible on Saturday. Kugel, who calls himself and American and a Zionist, and who proved his conviction by relocating from Harvard to the Orthodox Bar-Ilan Univeristy outside Tel Aviv (he says he did it for the tomatoes), has started a web site in connection with the new book, www.jameskugel.com. The site is a work in progress, though it does already contain an appendix on "Apologetics and Biblical Criticism."

The NYT review focuses on Kugel's thesis that "ancient interpreters" and "modern scholars" have interpreted the Bible in radically different ways.

Charles Augustine Briggs, a 19th-century pioneer of modern biblical scholarship, declared that by sweeping away the “rubbish” of centuries of biblical interpretation, modern scholars would finally “recover the real Bible.” Professor Kugel admires the audacity and genius of scholars like Briggs, but he believes that in their contempt for the “rubbish” of ancient interpretation, modern scholars have let the “real Bible” elude them. They have been left, instead, with “the raw material that made up the Bible.”

The reviewer wonders if the two approaches have to be seen as irreconcilable. Given this summary, I imagine I can see why Kugel was among the few who came to the Childs session in Vienna this summer (mentioned near the end of this post).

Yesterday, NPR's All Things Considered (one of the things I miss most about commuting in the US of A) broadcast Robert Siegel's interview of Robert Alter, about his new translation of the Psalms. In the interview Alter explains why "soul" is a bad translation of "nephesh." Translations can be "like those thick layers of veneer that were put down on paintings in the Victorian period so you couldn't see the true colors." They impose later ideas about the division of body and soul, or about the soul surviving after death, onto the ancient text. "I scrupulously avoided 'soul' in order not to give the wrong impression."

Alter also reads Psalm 8, drawing attention to translation choices that aim to preserve the strong rhythms and compactness of the original Hebrew. He comments about the strange mythical language preserved in Psalm 82, which has God among the gods. "Our God, the big guy, presides over the assembly." He summarizes the message to the small-g gods: "You're going to be demoted to human status because you haven't done your job of administering justice."

Listen to the entire interview. It's not long. NPR also includes an excerpt of Alter's translation and commentary on Psalm 23.

Very much looking forward to browsing both books when I can get my hands on them.

POST SCRIPT (20 Sept): Kugel's online appendix is worth reading. In it he actually goes after Alter a bit (similarly Jon Levenson, whose Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son I reviewed just last night), proving that the alignment which brought them together here does not entail alignment in other matters—obviously.

Professor Kugel, if you should happen to find this, thank you for your efforts on your web page, especially for publishing some real content there.

Tags: Psalms

I am slotted to give a paper in San Diego on 17 November 2007. My focus is on a few verses towards the middle of Psalm 102. Full details for the session, including links to abstracts, are as follows.

S17-108

Book of Psalms

11/17/2007
4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Room: Windsor BC - GH

William Bellinger, Baylor University, Presiding

Daniel R. Driver, University of St. Andrews
For a Generation to Come: The Addressee of Psalm 102 in Reception and Recent Research (30 min)

Robert E. Wallace, Shorter College
Back to the Beginning: Yahweh as King, Moses as Mediator and Psalms 104-106 (30 min)

Judith Gärtner, Universität Hamburg
The Tora in Psalm 106 and Psalm 136 (30 min)

Jinkyu Kim, Nyack College
Strategic Arrangement of Royal Psalms in the Last Two Books of the Psalter (30 min)

Charles Rix, Drew University
Note the Silence: Reading Psalm 137 Through Messiaen and Bak (30 min)


Since my proposal was supposed to have a paragraph break in it, and since what else is a blog for?, and since it'll be good to keep the thing out in front of me as November approaches, here's my proposal/abstract:

In recent years, some attention has been paid to Psalm 102 by scholars interested in the canon’s final form, though in very different ways. Odil Steck, for instance, has argued not just that the psalm be read as a whole (contra an older form-critical understanding), but that its singularity be explained with reference to a body of scripture largely extant at the time of its composition. For him, the psalm arises at a late redactional phase in the formation of the canon, testifying to the confluence of distinctive prophetic and sapiential streams of tradition. Somewhat differently, Brevard Childs has discussed Psalm 102 as an instance of the authority scripture increasingly accrued in textualized form: it was “recorded for a generation to come” (19a). Despite fairly substantial disagreements in a number of areas—including about the place of intentionality as such—Steck and Childs agree that the intended audience is in the remote future. On analogy with late prophecy, perhaps, the generation addressed is not near, but distant; in Steck’s word, the psalm voices “Fernerwartung.”

The burden of the present paper is to query the history of reception of Psalm 102, particularly verse 19, to see whether there is any “family resemblance” (Childs) with these more recent interpretations. Which generations have been found in the psalmist’s purview? The results may have an important bearing on Childs’s program, which has long sought to hold the history of interpretation together with modern research (most recently, cf. The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture). If preoccupation with an original cultic context is a modern oddity, what can be said for the theory of a radicalized eschatology?

Obviously, the whole thing is kinda supposed to relate to the last chapter of my dissertation.

Tags: Childs, Psalms, PhD