2. When 23 doesn’t follow 22 - Are the psalms in random order?

1. Trading in my iPsalm Shuffle

18th October 2008

How can someone say, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Ps 22:1) and then in the next breath claim, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I lack no good thing.’ (Ps 23:1) Welcome to the world of the book of Psalms, where 23 doesn’t really seem to follow on from 22.

I confessed in last blog that I have tended to read the psalms in a very random nature, dipping in and out all over the place, not seeing much by way of connection between the individual psalms themselves. How could there be? Even a quick reading of a few consecutive psalms reveals a very wide range of subjects and emotions – sometimes even apparently contradictory emotions – sitting side by side.

I was not alone in having this view of the Psalms. Philip Yancey, in his book on the Old Testment The Bible Jesus Read, tells of an experiment he conducted to try to get to grips with the Book of Psalms. He set out to read ten consecutive psalms each day. He says this of his experiment:

I felt confused while reading Psalms, especially because I had committed to ten in a row. Individual psalms seemed to contradict one another violently; psalms of bleak despair abutted with psalms of soaring joy, as if the scribes had arranged them with a mockingly Hegelian sense of humour. (p 110)

He goes on to talk of one of the most shocking examples of this:

The most startling juxtaposition of psalms occurs early on. Psalm 23, that shepherd song of sweeping promise and consummate comfort, follows on the heels of Psalm 22, which opens with the words Jesus cried from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ The two psalms, both attributed to David, could hardly form a more glaring contrast. True, David does find some sort of resolution in Psalm 22, by looking ahead to a future time when God will rule over the nations and the poor will eat their fill. But he makes it clear how he feels at the moment of writing: ‘I cry out by day, but you do not answer … I am a worm and not a man … roaring lions tearing their prey open their mouths wide against me … all my bones are out of joint.’ Such sentiments seem from another planter when you turn the page and read, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want … surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.’ (p118)

Yancey could discern no overarching pattern or rationale for the arrangement of the Book of Psalms. Tremper Longman III, (the American Professor of Old Testament who has written How to read the Psalms, one of the most widely used books introducing the Psalms) says, ‘…as we reflect on the overall structure of the Psalter, we don’t see any immediately apparent order in subject matter.’ (p43)

As an author wrestling with this apparently enigmatic book, the solution that Yancey could come up with to the seeming random nature of the psalms is that the jarring jumps in emotion and expression simply reflect the actual experience of everyday life. Life isn’t arranged systematically; things come at us unexpectedly. We can go from the heights to the depths very suddenly; we can find the deepest and most profound joys emerging from the darkest of places. As Yancey puts it, ‘the seesaw cycle of intimacy and abandonment is, in fact, what most people experience in their relationship with God.’ (p117)

And so, this has been more or less my view of the Psalms for some time. But, as I shared in the last blog, I’ve begun to see that perhaps it is possible to discern purpose behind the hand of the Editor of the Book. That perhaps there are patterns and that the arrangement of individual psalms is not as random as I once thought. And that, in discovering some of these patterns, there is an added layer of richness of revelation from God to be enjoyed and appreciated.

Next time, we’ll ask ourselves the question of whether or not it’s right to read the Psalms as a book with an overall purpose or if it’s reading too much into the Book to do so.

Alistair Hamill