Susan Gillingham - Psalms Through the Centuries, Volume 3

Poetic reception has responded especially to the grief expressed in this psalm. Mary *Sidney, for example, compares the destruction of the Temple (verses 4–7) with the destruction of a forest, thus circumventing the difficult Hebrew in these verses and maintaining a sense of urgency through her use of rhyme and rhythm: 43

As men with axe on arm

To some thick forest swarm,

To lop the trees which stately stand:

They to thy temple flock,

And spoiling, cut and knock

The curious works of carving hand.

A late twentieth-century Jewish perspective which takes up the same theme of grief and bereavement is Laurance *Wieder’s ‘Why always angry, O God?’: here we see many connections with the post-Holocaust reflections by *Buber on Psalm 73 previously. 44

Why always angry, God? Why smoke against us and inhale

Sacrifices? Zion’s rubble. Temple hacked

To splinters, they burn children with their teachers…

You taught us, now deliver us

From those who worship templed darkness. Look,

We blush for you, your name,

Though we are poor, and weak, and strangers roar.

It does seem as if the integrity of the psalm as a whole is best understood when it is attuned to the perspective of the Jewish people. As a recent Jewish commentator observes, it is as if ‘Asaph’ asks throughout this psalm why God has abandoned his people for eternity; when the Holy One responds that they have abandoned him (Hos. 8:2), the people reply that the Holy One’s reputation will be imperilled if he does not save them. The Shepherd of Israel comes to protect, not to destroy (verse 1). 45

Psalm 75 contains an additional title ‘Do not destroy’, showing a link made by the editors with ‘Do not forget’ in the last verse of Psalm 74. Psalm 75 has several associations with 1 Sam. 2:1–10, the Song of Hannah (which also refers to insolent talk, to the arrogant horn, to the world on pillars, and to God casting down and lifting up) although the direction of borrowing is difficult to ascertain. The psalm can be divided up into the following strophes: verse 1 is a hymn, verses 2–5 appear to be a divine oracle, verses 6–8 are a prophetic-like judgement speech by the psalmist, verse 9 is another hymn, and verse 10 suggests another oracle where God speaks through the psalmist. 46These prophetic elements have played an important part in the psalm’s reception history, as also have three vivid metaphors: the world being shaken on its pillars (verse 3), the cup of foaming wine (verse 8) and the horns of the wicked (verses 4, 5 and 10). The second of these has been particularly potent in Christian interpretation, as will be seen below.

The only pertinent addition in the *Septuagint which changes the tenor of the psalm is the reference to the ‘boastful’ in verse 4, who are now the ‘violators of the law’, reflecting the debates about the authority of the Torah in later Judaism. *Targum makes other changes: verse 1 (Heb. v. 2) is expanded to read, somewhat typically, ‘the *Shekinah of your name’ and the references to ‘east and west’ in verse 6 are expanded to include ‘the north, the place of wilderness’ and ‘the south, the place of the mountains’. These changes suggest a greater sense of God’s transcendence and hence power over the entire cosmos. The most significant addition is in * Midrash Tehillim : the reference to the ‘horns’ in verse 10 (Heb. v. 11) is seen to allude to the ‘ten horns’ in Jewish tradition (of Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Samuel, Aaron, the Sanhedrin, Heman the Levite, Jerusalem, the King Messiah, and David the King to come). This is seen as a messianic reference to the coming king (also using Hannah’s Song in 1 Sam. 2:10), soon to become the light of the world (Ps. 132:17). 47

As was seen in Psalm 75, the main tenor in Jewish commentary tradition is to read this psalm from the viewpoint of a community still in exile: hence, according to *Rashi and *Kimḥi, for example, ‘the righteous’ in verse 10 (Heb. v. 11) are Israel, the people of God. 48The ‘cup of foaming wine’ (verse 8 (Heb. v. 9)) is the one which Israel has been compelled to drink from first (Isa. 51:17) but when the exile is at an end Israel’s enemies will then be forced to drink it. 49Not surprisingly the psalm is one of those recited throughout the day the week before *Rosh HaShanah .

In Christian reception this ‘cup’ had a very different connotation. *Cassiodorus focusses on the reference in verse 8 to the wine being ‘well mixed’, and notes that the Jews had the ‘unmixed wine’ of the old covenant, whilst the Christians possessed the ‘mixed wine’ of the old and new covenants; this is actually an attack on the *Manicheans, whom Cassiodorus saw as having only the ‘unmixed wine’ of the New Testament, in their rejection of much of the Old, and so as guilty of false religion as the Jews. 50This interpretation does not seem to fit the context of judgement on the wicked in the rest of the verse; hence a different reading might be to read verses 8 and 9 together, so that the Cup is of the Passion of Christ; verse 8 is thus about judgement on the Jews and verses 9–10 are a reference to Christ’s kingdom, achieved through his drinking the cup to its dregs. 51This association of the ‘cup’ with the passion of Christ has resulted in this psalm being frequently used on Maundy Thursday. As with Psalm 74, Christian reception of this psalm is more optimistic than Jewish reception. *Augustine, for example, saw verse 3 (‘it is I who keep the pillars [of the earth] steady’) as Christ speaking about the victory of his judgement in the light of Rev. 20:12. 52

Although there are few arrangements of this psalm in music, J. S. *Bach’s triumphant ‘Wir danken Dir, Gott’ is based on the hymns of praise in verses 1 and 9: composed in 1731, on the election of councillors in Leipzig, it is therefore a celebratory piece, with an orchestral sinfonia, motet-like chorus, and ends with ‘Now Praise My Soul the Lord’ accompanied by trumpets. 53Similarly the seventeenth-century Dutch composer Henry Du Mont’s ‘ Confitebimur tibi Deus ’ is taken from verse 1; the same verse is the focus of the eighteenth-century Dorset composer Joseph Stephenson, in his ‘To Thee, O God, we render praise’: each is a Christian reading (although Stephenson actually became a Unitarian) and each emphasises the psalm’s more positive aspects. The same mood is captured in the more strident metrical psalm by *Tate and Brady, which praises God as the great disposer:

His hand holds forth a dreadful cup,

With purple wine ‘tis crowned;

The deadly mixture, which his wrath

Deals out to nations round.

Of this his saints may sometime taste;

But wicked men shall squeeze

The bitter dregs, and be condemn’d,

To drink the very lees. 54

This sort of vindictive emphasis contributed to the political use of this psalm in England and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Isaac *Watts transformed Tate and Brady’s words to contemporise the psalm for the court of George I, so it was subtitled ‘Power and Government belong to God alone: to be applied to the Glorious Revolution by King William, or the Happy Succession of George I to the Throne’. Watts’ Psalms of David Imitated was popular in New England: hence by 1787 John *Mycall had revised the title so it read Applied to the Glorious Revolution in America, July 4th , 1776 . 55Conversely, in Lamentation over Boston , ascribed to William *Billings (1778), parts of this psalm—now a protest hymn against the horrors of the aftermath of the American Revolution—were used alongside Psalm 137.

One of the most vivid interpretations of this psalm is in the *Utrecht Psalter (fol. 43r), which depicts the earth on its columns, fast dissolving (verse 3) whilst on a solid part the wicked are trampling on the just. In the heavens is a haloed Christ, with his angels, pouring out wine from one cup to another (verse 8). In the top right the psalmist, with a group of ‘the just’, holds a stag’s head, and with a rod is attacking the antlers of another stag held by the wicked (‘all the horns of the wicked are cut off’: verse 10). 56