Here’s the next set of material from Psalming Christ. Now—if you thought that the previous two posts on David were building to something important about Jesus, you’re totally right! They are! But this isn’t it… Indeed, I’m working on three different sections of the book simultaneously as the ability/energy/mood/Spirit direct.
There’s one line of thought on how reading more Scripture helps us pray the psalms better. The section I’m currently working on is how reading the prophets helps us understand the Psalms & vice versa. And yes, Ellen, this is one of the places where I’m tackling the imprecatory psalms with the suggestion that reading them in consonance with the prophetic destruction oracles can actually be a helpful thing.
There’s a second line of thought on how the psalms have been read in the voices of various biblical people, initially David and later Christ and how this is ok based on the insights of modern biblical scholarship. That’s what the previous two posts were leading to.
So—take a look, let me know what you think.
One of the biggest hurdles for modern readers of patristic biblical interpretation like Cassiodorus and Augustine is the idea of “allegorical interpretation.” Let me give you an example of what we’re talking about, then I’ll explain why I put that term in quotes and why it’s not nearly as much of a hurdle as we think it is.
When I look at this text, I see the psalmist speaking as one with a firm trust in God. The unnamed person to whom the psalmist speaks—the “you” in the first verse—lacks the same trust as the speaker. Hence, these lines beginning with “Flee like a bird to the mountains…” are the words of someone who does not have faith that the Lord is going to right all wrongs, especially when the wicked are in power. The rest of the psalm will continue to assert trust in God’s vindication of the righteous from a Wisdom orthodoxy perspective. If you wanted, you could almost see this psalm as a counter-argument from Proverbs against Ecclesiastes.
This is precisely the kind of thing that we are talking about when we refer to “allegorical interpretation.” Over the centuries certain patterns of substitutionary reading built up (“when the text says ‘mountains’ what it really means is X; when it says ‘sparrows’ it really means Y”). By the late medieval period, knowing and understanding these patterns of substitutionary reading were considered necessary for the proper interpretation of the biblical text. This is why the Protestant Reformation insisted so strongly on the perspecuity of the text—that is, that a normal lay person can read a biblical passage and, with the help of the Holy Spirit, can understand what it says without needing the layers of additional interpretation to read it rightly. The Reformers objected to the notion that the Bible had to be withheld from those who had not been trained in this extensive system of substitutionary and additional meanings. In their day it was about power, control, and who was allowed to have access to the biblical text. This is a key reason why “allegorical interpretation” gets a bad rap: it was used as a means of keeping the Word of God from the people of God.
Another key reason why both the Reformers and modern readers don’t like it is because it seems so arbitrary. Why, for instance, in the next verse of the psalm does Cassiodorus insist that: “We must interpret the bow as the divine commands which the heretic wields and orders according to his own wickedness[Cassiodorus, ExplPs 1.136.]”? Do we really have to use the word “must” here? Surely there are other ways that we can read this. Why does Cassiodorus fix upon this particular meaning to the exclusion of others?
In defense of Cassiodorus, there is a reason why he reads this psalm in this way. From his reading of the whole psalm and his theological context within the doctrinal disputes on the nature of Christ, he has decided that this psalm as a whole speaks about and against heretics who are troubling the church. Coming at it from this angle, he is going to interpret the details that he sees in ways that fit this reading.
The question that we need to ask is, what is prompting him to read this psalm in this way? Why does he believe that the psalm needs to be read in this way? And what are the limits on this kind of interpretive model? Furthermore, is there anything that we can take away from this model to assist our praying of the Psalms?
The first place we need to start is getting clear on terminology—specifically around allegory. As we’ve mentioned, the art of rhetoric involves quite a number of figures of speech and figures of thought. Allegory in its technical sense is simply one of these, one among many. According to the formal definition, an allegory is a statement or narrative that is intended to be read in a substitutionary way, where the actors or characters or references are intended to refer to something other than their literal referent. It’s usually a deliberate and conscious choice on the part of the author. Hence, when George Orwell sat down to write his barnyard classic Animal Farm he did so with a solid working knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union and its relationships to the rise of totalitarian powers in Europe. An uninformed reader will find a story about how the animals tried to free themselves from human control but then—slowly but surely—the leadership began acting in more and more human ways until the situation of the workers were no better under the new management than they were under the old. The story makes sense on its own. An informed reader having the allegorical key (“this story is actually about the progress of Communism in the Soviet Union”), though, will have no problem matching up certain characters with certain historical figures: Farmer Jones is Czar Nicholas II, Napoleon is Joseph Stalin, Snowball is Leon Trotsky, etc. This is intentional allegory.
It’s not just Isaiah either in the prophetic literature. Jeremiah 12 uses this same agricultural image for Israel and the nations with regard to planting and plucking up (“Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard, /they have trampled down my portion, /they have made my pleasant portion /a desolate wilderness” Jer 12:10). So too does Ezekiel 19:10-14. Thus, the Old Testament itself uses allegory as a compositional tool.
Because of this fact, it’s therefore no surprise at all to see the use of allegory proper pop up in the New Testament. Indeed, knowing this allegory of the vineyard from the Song of Moses, Psalm 80, and the Prophets is essential to understanding the parable that Jesus tells in Mark 12:1-12 (and its parallels in Matthew 21:33-44 and Luke 20:9-18) that begins “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a watchtower…” (Mark 12:1). Anybody who knows Isaiah 5 will immediately recognize what’s going on here. Matthew’s telling in particular wants to be sure that the allegorical connection is made by concluding his passage with a focus on the fruits just like Isaiah 5 does: “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom” (Matt 21:43).
With these kinds of scriptural antecedents rolling around in our heads, then, what are we to make of the familiar passage from John 15 where Jesus begins speaking like this: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit…” (John 15:1-2)? Shouldn’t this address to the disciples at the Last Supper be heard as an allegory informed by Psalm 80 and Isaiah and the prophets where Jesus himself is the vine that God plants and all those connected into him are the people of God, called to bear fruit worthy of God’s kingdom?
The point I’m making here is that allegorical composition is not foreign to the Bible. To deny the legitimacy of allegory as a whole is an inaccurate reading of Scripture itself. However, what Cassiodorus and Augustine are doing goes far beyond recognizing allegorical composition. We need to make a distinction between allegorical composition which is something that a writer does, and allegorical interpretation which is something that a reader does. But here again, we have to look at the New Testament itself and how it teaches Scriptural reading.
Paul is doing something different than what we saw before. He has gone to a narrative text which does not contain any signals that it is allegorical in nature and asserts that there is, in fact, an allegory at work here—one that has bearing on Christian faith and practice. Nor is this the only time that he will do this.
Within this section of 1 Corinthians, Paul is rebuking the Corinthians for their moral and ethical lapses. Despite the fact that they are baptized people, souls incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ, they persist in immorality that would make pagans blush. He introduces the generation of the Exodus and the pre-figurement of Baptism in the Red Sea to go on to chronicle both the ethical lapses of that generation and also the punishments that they received. He frames this material with an appeal to the utility of the scriptural text: “Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. . . . These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor 10:6, 11). Paul is not saying that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the Exodus generation wandering in the wilderness and his Corinthian flock. Rather, he indicates that the biblical material has a bearing on and was intended to inform this present generation. These past events were written for our present instruction.
Paul’s emphasis is that the purpose of reading Scripture is to give hope and to constructively build up the community in Christ. That’s why we read: for the spiritual advancement of us all through the building up of the neighbor. Furthermore, whatever was written in Scripture is there in order to advance this purpose—to build up one another in love so that we may glorify God together in both our words and our works.
Paul’s point is that all scripture bears a spiritual meaning and that the purpose of that spiritual meaning is to build up the community so that we are equipped to do acts of love and service. This is what the Scriptures are for and how they ought to be read: they are God’s self-revelation intended to build the Church up through an understand of how God wills us to live in love and reconciliation with one another.
There is a suspicion of allegorical interpretation in the modern church.
That suspicion is warranted because of the ways that substitutionary readings became a way to keep the biblical text out of the hands of the laity.
However, certain texts of the Bible are demonstrably allegorical in composition.
Sparked by this recognition, Paul taught allegorical or spiritual reading to the Church for a specific purpose—the upbuilding of the Church for acts of love and service.
This entry was posted in Patristics, Psalms on September 3, 2018 by Derek A. Olsen.
“But when Aragorn arose all that beheld him gazed in silence, for it seemed to them that he was revealed to them now for the first time. Tall as the sea-kings of old, he stood above all that were near; ancient of days he seemed and yet in the flower of manhood; and wisdom sat upon his brow, and strength and healing were in his hands, and a light was about him.” (Tolkien, Return of the King, 246).
Tolkien constructs Aragorn as the ultimate messianic king. He is not just a monarch, but an idealized figure who rules with almost supernatural qualities of wisdom, justice, and mercy. He is a healer, a sage; he is both a prophet and a subject of prophecy, promised to return at a crucial time. Aragorn is not the sole possessor of these characteristics in English literature; Tolkien, a medievalist, was thoroughly familiar with the legends of King Arthur. Of course, the lord of the Round Table and its mighty warriors, is said to be not dead but sleeping on the Isle of Avalon to return at the hour of Britain’s greatest need (apparently neither the Blitz nor Brexit).
Behind both of these figures and broader character of the messianic monarch in Western Literature is King David. He represents an ideal figure because he simultaneously embodies three deep archetypes: the king, the priest, and the prophet.
As king, David was the ultimate warrior. Slayer of Goliath and a mighty war leader, David became the target of Saul’s wrath because of the people’s celebration in song: “Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Sam 18:8). David was responsible for defeating the Philistines and taking Canaanite cities. While Saul had favored his fellow Benjaminites, David unified the tribes of Israel into a coherent unit around the tribally-neutral city of Jerusalem where he centralized both political and sacred power. This unification was a difficult task, almost proving too much for him, exploited as it was by the revolt of Absalom. Nevertheless, David was able to pass a united kingdom on to his son Solomon after whom it would splinter again into the two nations of Israel and Judah.
As priest, David was responsible for bringing the worship of Yhwh to Jerusalem and centralizing the worship of the God of Israel around the ark of the covenant. While he did not suppress the old shrines like Gilgal and Shechem, he identified the ark with the presence of God and tied its presence in Jerusalem to the royal court. In his day, royalty retained some priestly functions as it had in former days—remember that Melchizedek the king of Salem (Jerusalem) was both a king and a priest (Gen 14:17-24). Thus, when David brings the ark into Jerusalem in 2 Samuel 6 he does so with dancing and sacrifice, performing the sacrifices himself while wearing an ephod, the distinctive garment of the priests (2 Sam 6:13-14, 17-19). Similarly, David offers atoning sacrifices to avert a plague from his people in 2 Samuel 24:18-25. The materials in 1 Chronicles further ties David himself to the Jerusalem Temple. David is identified as the mind behind the entire project and Solomon just the hands that carry it out, contradicting the Kings account where Solomon has the larger role.
Thus the giving of the spirit to David went hand-in-hand with its removal from Saul; it proceeded from the king-making ritual. In David’s case, though, it did not depart from him. While the Spirit operates in a prophetic frenzy for Saul on several occasions (1 Sam 10:10-13, 19:18-24), David never displays this kind of behavior. Rather, his oracular last words connect it with his poetry: “The spirit of the Lord speaks through me,/ his word is on my tongue…” (2 Sam 23:2). Later interpreters would pick up this theme. Second Temple literature including both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament routinely refer to David as a prophet or to the psalms as prophetic documents (see Matt 22:43; Mark 12:36; Acts 1:16; 2:25; 2:31; 4:25; etc.).
When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with a rod such as mortals use, with blows inflicted by human beings. But I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established” (2 Sam 7:12-16).
From a narrative perspective the initial lines of this passage refer to Solomon. As time went on, though, they were interpreted more broadly. David represents a godly king who rules a restored people of Israel with justice. God’s covenant with the house of David became both a challenge to the throne’s current incumbent (does he measure up?) and a promise that God would restore Davidic rule if this succession was ever broken. The Zion theology of Isaiah emphasizes this point: God will raise up and protect godly kings and, conversely, all kings of Judah are vassals of the true King, Yhwh. This brings us back to those psalms we discussed above, Psalms 45, 72, and 89 that sketch out the lines of an aspirational messianic figure.
The exile to Babylon and eventual restoration caused a theological crisis: how was God remaining faithful to the promise with David? How would God make good on this promise in the present situation? Thus, this post-exilic period became one of intense messianic expectation. The victories of Judas Maccabeus and the restoration of a line of priest-kings in Israel described in the books of the Maccabees seemed an initial answer, but the Roman occupation crushed the people’s hopes once again.
At the turn of the millennium and at the time of the birth of Jesus, this is what the faithful of Israel were hoping for: God’s Messiah (anointed one) who, like David, would be anointed with oil as a sign of his kingship, receive the Spirit of God with power, and act in a Davidic way by driving out the foreign oppressors, restoring the house of David, and ruling with justice and equity from Jerusalem. This is what it meant to be “Son of David” in the world that would birth the New Testament.
This entry was posted in Psalms on August 22, 2018 by Derek A. Olsen.
Of all of the figures of the Old Testament, David is the richest and most complex. His story begins in 1 Samuel 16 and extends through the remaining 15 chapters of 1 Samuel, though all 24 chapters of 2 Samuel, and even into 1 Kings where David’s death is recorded in 1 Kings 2:10. Through almost 1,200 verses, we get a deep and intimate portrait of this pivotal king of Israel.
On one hand, there are signs that certain portions of his story have the air of political propaganda: the image of the handsome young shepherd boy fighting the Philistine Goliath with just a sling is calculated to play well in its Ancient Near Eastern setting. Kings were referred to as “shepherds of their people” and were expected to be successful warriors. Emphasizing David’s youth and apparent naivety implies that it would take a (literal) miracle for him to win, and thus his victory is a demonstration of God’s favor, recalling other divinely sanctioned victories against overwhelming odds like Gideon’s (Judges 7). But contrary to this portrait (and every Sunday School illustration you have ever seen), David is described to Saul the chapter before the Goliath episode as already being a full-grown and accomplished figure: “One of the young men answered, ‘I have seen [David,] a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite who is skillful in playing [the lyre], a man of valor, a warrior, prudent in speech, and a man of good presence and the Lord is with him’” (2 Sam 16:18). Saul—already on the lookout for “any strong or valiant warrior” (2 Sam 14:52)—not only brings David into his household to play the lyre but also promotes him by the end of chapter 16 to be his own armor-bearer, a position of importance and trust. Thus, it’s odd that Saul barely recognizes him in chapter 17.
The fact that there would be this kind of idealization of David comes as no surprise at all. After all, he was the founder of a dynasty, the man who freed Israel from Philistine control, united the divided north and south, captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites, and established it as the centralized capitol of his kingdom. Rather, what does come as a surprise is that we hear of so many things that David did wrong! From his days as a bandit captain to his sinful taking of Bathsheba to the revolt of his son Absalom, we hear of all kinds of things that could have been covered up and expunged from the historical record altogether—but weren’t. The picture we get is far more interesting because of the ways that it wasn’t sanitized by court historians. We are shown a fully human David, warts and all.
The David we meet in the books of Samuel and Kings is a shrewd, rakish fellow who lives by his wits, his sword—and also his faith. He is a complicated person: a canny opportunist, a lover of many (married!) women, a wise king, and a loving father who we see grieving the death of an infant son and the betrayal and subsequent death of another. He is a devoted follower of the God of Israel and—despite his many moral lapses—is nevertheless a man after God’s own heart. He is the only character in the Old Testament with such a complete emotional spectrum. After all, we don’t see Moses feeling a lot, and the only feelings we get from Job are bad ones! Add to this portrait the several references to David as a musician and it’s no surprise that not only is a large early collection of psalms named after him, but that they are interpreted through and connected with episodes in his life.
This is David the man. But there’s more to the biblical picture of David than this—and that’s what we have to turn to next. We must reckon not just with David the man, but also with David the ideal.
This entry was posted in Psalms, Scripture on August 17, 2018 by Derek A. Olsen.