The Beauty of the Symphony of the Psalms
The book of Psalms is a literary musical, and a number of the book’s features demonstrate that the individual psalms have been strategically arranged to create an impressionistic movement of thought. One of the joys of Bible study is finding the clues left by the authors, clues that give us leads to solving the mystery. Are there breadcrumbs on the path if we know what to look for?
We want to suggest that certain features of the Psalter were deliberately dropped to help us find our way, and these features include the doxologies at the end of each of the Psalter’s Five Books, the way each book opens with a different author in the superscription, the arrangement and distribution of the superscriptions across the Psalter, and the link words between individual Psalms creating a coherent and cohesive feel as we move from one psalm to the next. In addition, Psalms 1 and 2 function like an inspired overture, introducing the whole book and its big ideas. Understanding the way these features work together is like noticing the ways that repeated melodies and rhythms link the numbers in a musical. The artist obviously intended to create the repetitions, and once we see or hear them, we begin to think about what they are meant to communicate to us.
What mystery is being solved? To what solution do the clues point? The psalms were intended to be read against the backdrop of earlier Scripture, which tells the true story of how God’s image and likeness, the first man and woman, rebelled against him and transgressed his commandment, bringing sin and death into God’s pure world of life. God, however, spoke words of judgment over the serpent in Genesis 3:15 that promised a seed of the woman, and in that promise is the suggestion that sin and death will be overcome, that the defiled will be made pure, that God will accomplish his purposes. Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise of the seed of the woman, and the Psalter pervasively anticipates his coming in the same ways that the other Old Testament books do. The Old Testament, we might say, is a messianic document, written from a messianic perspective, to sustain and provoke a messianic hope. Read as a book, this is the story sung in the Psalms.1
We turn to the aforementioned indicators that give the Psalter a “bookish” feel. We can categorize them as “seams” and “themes.”
Excerpt from James M. Hamilton Jr. and Matthew Damico’s Reading the Psalms as Scripture. Used with permission by Lexham Press, 2024).