Holy Lit: The Bible

Let's set the scene. Sometime between the tenth century BCE and the return from Babylonian exile in the late sixth century BCE, Israelite pilgrims traveled to Jerusalem three times a year for the major festivals. Jerusalem sits on a ridge, so no matter which direction you're coming from, you end up walking uphill for the last stretch. Someone took fifteen separate poems and strung them together as a kind of playlist for that climb. That's Psalms 120 through 134. Today we're covering the first seven: 120 through 126.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18kpFN2hFW5oIERDAOcmkw0lHvGvwHd8F/view?usp=sharing

Let's set the stage first. Psalm 119 was likely written after the Babylonian exile, somewhere around the fifth or fourth century BCE. Jerusalem had been destroyed. The temple was gone. The monarchy was gone. The people had spent two generations in Babylon. When they came back, they didn't have a king anymore. What they had was a text: the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Without a throne to rally around, the written law became the center of Jewish identity. This psalm is what that devotion sounds like when someone turns it into art.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XAzGFbX-V6FZ2K-pgokmSy9SAsQGSgLR/view?usp=sharing

Before we get into the text, picture where and when this was being sung. We're most likely in the Second Temple period, sometime after 538 BCE, after the Babylonian exile ended and Jews started returning to Judah under Persian rule. That matters, because these six psalms, Psalms 113 through 118, aren't random hymns stuck together. They're a unit. Jewish tradition calls them the Hallel, which means "praise," from the Hebrew word halal. This particular set is called the Egyptian Hallel, because of what they're about: Israel's exodus from Egypt. They were sung, and still are sung today, at Passover and the other major festivals: Weeks, Tabernacles, Dedication, and the New Moon.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12g3LjYPRCt1m3ygxXgDhIDWdVhlTk-kt/view?usp=sharing

Before we get into the text, you need a bit of orientation. We're not starting at the beginning of Psalms. We're at a seam. The book of Psalms isn't one document. It's five smaller books stitched together, like five albums packaged into one box set. Book One runs from Psalm 1 to 41. Book Two, 42 to 72. Book Three, 73 to 89. Book Four, 90 to 106. And today we're starting Book Five, which runs from Psalm 107 to the end, Psalm 150. You can see the seams if you look. Each book ends with a short "blessed be the Lord forever, amen and amen" line, kind of like closing credits before the next album starts.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GWQKMiuNYlCjFS0HqrqK_lHJfzuZ4Lxc/view?usp=sharing

Let's set the scene. This is the era of the Israelite and Judahite monarchy, roughly 1000 to 600 BCE. Nobody can pin down exact dates for individual psalms, and we'll get into why in a bit. This was a world of small kingdoms squeezed between empires. A king's legitimacy wasn't just about winning battles. It was about being seen as ruling on behalf of a god. The temple and the palace worked like two departments of the same government. Keep that in mind, because both psalms we're covering today, Psalm 101 and Psalm 103, are credited to David, and both assume an audience that already saw kingship as a sacred job, not just a political one.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DR_K7s2J_qscI1qim0FaCPCO1WW1_2mq/view?usp=sharing

We're somewhere in the middle of the first millennium BCE, probably during or after the Babylonian exile. Nobody can pin down an exact date. Israel's monarchy has collapsed. The temple in Jerusalem is either destroyed or a memory people are trying to rebuild around. The community is doing what displaced people do: telling their own story again, trying to figure out who they still are. Psalms 105 and 106 are part of that. Scholars call them "historical psalms." Instead of a personal prayer or a hymn about creation, they walk through Israel's national history to make a point. And here's what makes them worth reading together: they tell the same history twice, from opposite angles. Psalm 105 tells it as one long tribute to God's faithfulness. Psalm 106 tells almost the same story as a confession of Israel's failures. Same events, completely different mood. Hold onto that, because it explains everything that follows.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12F34WDVnLODKmmRKOIeT-bnX08ZKuTzN/view?usp=sharing

Let's set the scene. We're somewhere around the sixth to fifth century BCE, though scholars argue about the exact date. This is after Babylon destroyed Jerusalem's temple in 586 BCE. Some Judeans were living in exile in Babylon. Others were back home trying to rebuild a broken city. When your world falls apart like that, you don't write an essay about it. You write a song, because a song gets memorized and passed down by people who've lost almost everything else. That's the world these two psalms come from.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_yCdRIM3Nkz0gdyZHCLIF83p-zEE7rw6/view?usp=sharing

Let's set the scene. We're in ancient Israel and Judah, most likely during or after the Babylonian exile. The Second Temple was the center of worship, and the book of Psalms as we know it was still being put together. This poetry wasn't private reading. It was liturgy. People sang it, chanted it, recited it out loud, often with instruments, as part of formal worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, and later in synagogues once the Temple was gone. Today we're looking at two psalms that sit next to each other in the collection, Psalm 92 and Psalm 94. They feel almost nothing alike, even though the same editors probably compiled them and the same community sang them.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a3xBopIwBjdMZthv0cyJlR8w0fTZUX0O/view?usp=sharing

Here's the setting. We're in ancient Israel and Judah, most likely sometime after the Babylonian exile, though nobody can pin down an exact date. That uncertainty is actually part of the story. Israel had watched its kingdom collapse, its temple get torched, and its people get dragged off to Babylon. When they came back, they came back to a world full of empires that each had their own royal gods. Babylon had Marduk. Assyria had Assur. The Canaanites next door had Baal. Every empire told the same basic story: our god fought chaos, won, and got crowned king of the universe for it. So when Israelite worshippers stood in the rebuilt Jerusalem temple and shouted "YHWH malak," Hebrew for something like "the LORD reigns," they weren't just being devotional. They were making a claim in the middle of a neighborhood full of people who thought their own gods ran the show.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yXJfKe1TnUA9DLYoEvMRAR1VKDVJSPwp/view?usp=sharing

Let's set the scene. We're somewhere in ancient Israel, most likely during or after the monarchy period, somewhere between 1000 and 500 BCE. Nobody can pin down an exact date for either of these two poems, and that's fine. Here's what matters more: this was a world without germ theory. No concept of viruses or bacteria. When people got sick suddenly, or disaster struck at random, the explanation wasn't bad luck or infection. It was spiritual. Sickness, sudden death, disaster at noon, disaster at night, these things had personalities. They had names. In the wider Canaanite world Israel came out of, they had faces and temples and priests. Hold onto that. It matters a lot in Part 2.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-3hgld5Kkn19wujPW_V-ky42Ropvw0BX/view?usp=sharing