![]() ![]() ![]() The Psalms pulsate with reflections of life: its tribulations, its moments of elation, the search for consolation in times of distress, the natural urge to offer gratitude, the quest for justice (including the natural if base human inclination for retribution), the hunt for a path to contentment, the struggle to maintain faith in the face of diversity, the tendency toward doubt when practitioners of evil seem immune to defeat or justice, the spiritual struggles of transgressors to find their way, the hunger for virtuousness, and the pursuit of triumph over despair. Their subject matter may be classified according to several basic poetic typologies, including hymns of praise and thanksgiving elegies pilgrim songs meditations paeans to God in history celebrations of God’s glory and greatness in nature and poems of moral-ethical instruction. Unique among liturgies in their singular blend of majestic grandeur, lofty sentiments, and poignant simplicity, the Psalms embrace virtually every basic human emotion and mood, always in the context of faith. ![]() It gropes for an experience of the divine Presence. The human soul extends itself beyond its confining, sheltering, impermanent house of clay. In the Psalms, human beings reach out to God. “In the Torah and the Prophets,” wrote biblical scholar Nahum Sarna in his trenchant study of representative Psalms, aptly titled Songs of the Heart, The Psalms have been viewed by theologians as expressions of man’s thirst for moral, ethical, and spiritual grounding and his search for a guiding faith-all of which amounts essentially, in theological terms, to man’s pursuit of God. This is because they encompass a broad spectrum of human experience vis-à-vis God-rooted in the special relationship provided by the framework of the biblical covenants-while avoiding the level of abstract or philosophical theology that would be limited to scholarly hierarchies. The Psalms have been cited as manifestations of a form of popular theology, in the most positive sense of that perception. In terms of notated music alone, their continuum as an inspiration for musical interpretations and expressions stretches back in time for more than ten centuries and their unnotated traditions of musical rendition predate Christianity, extending to Jewish antiquity and the Temple era. As literature, the Psalms are also basic to Western culture. C OMMON TO THE LITURGIES, HISTORIES, AND THE SPIRIT OF JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY, the Book of Psalms is one of the most widely familiar and most frequently quoted books of the Hebrew Bible. ![]()
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