Читать книгу Psalms Through the Centuries, Volume 3 - Susan Gillingham - Страница 17

Psalm 74, like Psalm 78, is entitled ‘A Maskil of Asaph’ and each has an instructional element. Each looks back to the past as a means of facing the future, but whilst Psalm 78 is more positive, Psalm 74 does this by way of lament, using mythical traditions, with Babylonian and Canaanite associations, concerning God’s battle with the chaotic sea (the ‘Chaoskampf’). It falls into three strophes: verses 1–11, beginning and ending with the question ‘why?’; verses 12–17, which is a hymn on God’s kingship; and verses 18–23, which form a series of imperatives, echoing verses 2–3. We have already noted its links with its neighbouring psalms, pointing to the probability that its inclusion here was deliberate.³¹

Although the setting is most probably the Babylonian attack in 587/6 BCE, later Jewish reception applies the theme of grief for a city torn apart with strife to new situations. One obvious period is when Antiochus Epiphanes took over the Temple, burnt swine’s flesh on the altar and erected a statue to Zeus in c. 167 BCE. The *Targum’s addition to verse 22 (‘remember the dishonour of your people by the foolish king all the day’) seems to be an implicit reference to this Gentile king.³² Another period of strife was the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE: later Jewish commentators on this psalm refer explicitly to Titus’ acts of desecration (lying with a prostitute on a Torah scroll, slashing the curtains of the Temple) as if the psalm were a prophetic witness to this period.³³ Other Jewish comments on verse 1 (‘O God, why do you cast us off forever?’) interpret the psalm in the light of the experience of ongoing exile, still under ‘Rome’, but now symbolised, even after Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410 CE, as all hostile Gentile powers: ‘The first (Babylonian) exile was limited to seventy years; but this second (Roman) Exile still continues, with no end in sight.’³⁴

The Christian reception also has examples of using the psalm as part of an expression of grief over a lost homeland. Such a literal appropriation is found, for example, in the Huguenots’ use of it, when in the seventeenth-century, under Louis XIV, they were driven out of their homes, and entered Geneva singing this psalm.³⁵ In the twentieth-century we read of a comment pencilled by *Bonhoeffer in his Bible against verses 8–11 (‘…they burned all the meeting places of God in the land…’). He simply wrote 9.11.38—the date of Kristallnacht and the start of the pogroms, so in this case we see a Christian empathy with the Jewish cause: Bonhoeffer’s identification with the Jews, even though it took him to his death, is well known.³⁶

Christian reception in the earlier commentary tradition has, however, usually read the psalm allegorically. *Athanasius viewed the psalm as about Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion; *Augustine developed this and explained the phrase ‘Yet God my King is of old, working salvation in the earth’ (verse 12) as a reference to the pre-existent Christ who achieved such salvation ‘in the midst of the earth’ through the womb of a Virgin, by his incarnation.³⁷ *Cassiodorus read ‘God my King’ in the same verse also as a reference to Christ, and verse 13 (‘you divided the sea by your might’ as not only an allusion to the crossing of the Red Sea but also a prefiguring of Jesus’ Baptism, when the water was purified by ‘breaking the power of the heads of the dragons’ (unclean spirits), also in verse 13.³⁸

The *Utrecht Psalter (fol. 42r) connects verse 12 with the incarnation. Here we see an image of the birth of Christ, and two midwives are bathing the Christ Child in the presence of Mary and Joseph; at the bottom of the image the sea is writhing with serpents.³⁹ The same interpretation is captured more clearly in the related *Eadwine Psalter (fol. 128v), as seen in Plate 1.

An example of an image of baptism is found in the historiated initial letter for Psalm 74 in the *St Albans Psalter. The image is of a haloed Christ, with a hammer, slaying a dragon held by a figure personifying the waters.⁴⁰

Visual exegesis in the Byzantine tradition, with its propensity for anti-Jewish polemic, focusses neither on the incarnation nor on Jesus’ baptism but on the cross. Both the *Khludov and *Pantokrator Psalters (fol. 82v and fol. 98r respectively) use this image.⁴¹ The illustration next to verse 12 depicts Jerusalem at the centre of the cosmos (referring back to verse 2: ‘Remember Mount Zion, where you came to dwell’) but the image is also of Christ on the cross outside the city, with Mary and John on the right, and a figure (apparently a Jew) stabbing with a spear at the cross. This is a statement against both Judaism, which denied the passion of Christ, and Islam, denying Christ actually died on the cross. The reference in verse 9 (‘we do not see our emblems.,’) is read as the refusal to see the cross, specifically the ‘emblem’ of the Greek letter Tau, as pertaining to Christ. A similar image is also found in the *Theodore Psalter (fol. 96r).⁴²

These different illustrations also reveal the use of the psalm in various forms of Christian liturgy: at Christmas in the western churches, at Easter in the eastern churches, and at Epiphany in both traditions when the Baptism of Christ was commemorated.

An interesting musical association of this psalm with Christmas is found in J. S. *Bach’s ‘Gott ist mein König’, composed in 1708 for an annual church service in Mühlhausen. Parts I and IV were based on Psalm 74, verses 12 and 16: God in Christ has been born as a King, working salvation from of old.

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