Bible Study for Sermon on June 3, 2012

Psalm 29 is a hymn of praise to Yahweh, whose power is manifested in the storm. The appearance of a deity to humans, called a theophany, is always portrayed in the OT in naturalistic terms, e.g., in the sound of the afternoon breeze (Genesis 3:8), as a smoking pot (Genesis 15:17), as a burning bush (Exodus 3:2), as a lightning-filled storm cloud (Exodus 13:21), and, most commonly in the case of Israel's patron deity, the storm itself (Exodus 20:18; Deuteronomy 4:12; 1 Kings 18:38 and many others). Even in the cases where an individual receives direct revelation (phrased as "the word of the LORD came to ..."), the natural remains an essential element in the divine-human interaction. Although the bulk of the composition that is today's psalm comprises nature imagery, the concluding verse links the Lord of nature with the historical God of Israel. The natural and the historical are united in the divine. Psalm 29 is a good example of this basic idea of biblical theology.

Structurally, the psalm falls into five identifiable parts: verses 1-2 ("Ascribe"); verses 3-4 (the voice of the LORD on the waters); verses 5-6 (Lebanon); verses 8-9b (the wilderness and forest); and verses 10-11 (the LORD enthroned).

The verb repeated three times in the opening two verses, "Ascribe," is an infrequent Hebrew verb (yahav) that means "give, set, provide, come now." These verses are parallelled at Psalm 96:7-8 and 1 Chronicles 16:28-29, with the significant substitution of "families of the peoples" for "heavenly beings" and the insertion in Psalm 96 and 1 Chronicles of "bring an offering and come before him" before "worship the LORD in holy splendor."

The "heavenly beings" referred to in Psalm 29:1 (but not in Psalm 96 or 1 Chronicles) are referred to also in Psalm 89:7 (as bene elim, "sons of gods,"). In Genesis 6:2, 4 and Job 1:6; 2:1, the same beings are called "sons of God" (bene ha-'elohim), and in Job 38:7, the same beings are referred to with yet a third Hebrew form, bene 'elohim, "sons of God," without the definite article. The class of being is the same with all three Hebrew variants: divine members of the heavenly assembly presided over by Yahweh. These divine beings differ from other heavenly denizens, such as angels ("messengers" in Hebrew), seraphim (literally "burning ones") and the heavenly host (i.e., armies). The "offspring of God" partake of the same essential nature as God, which angels, etc., do not share. Being in the same class (or of the same nature or essence) as the deity did not, however, denote equality (cf. the description of equality with God as "a thing to be grasped" [RSV] at Philippians 2:6). The members of the heavenly court functioned as the Lord's "servants and worshippers", reflecting the henotheistic perspective of early Israelite religion (in which the existence of deities other than Yahweh was taken for granted, but Yahweh was regarded as supreme). The issue of divine sonship, appearing early in Israelite religion in royal contexts (e.g., Psalm 2:7) became the wedge issue dividing Pharisaic (Rabbinic) Judaism from the Messianic sectarians eventually to be known as Christians (Acts 11:26) at the turn of the Common Era.

The instructions in the opening tetrastich (vv. 1-2) to ascribe "glory and strength" to the Lord understand the verb not in its literal sense of "to give" but more in the sense of "to acknowledge." The poetic parallelism is elegantly varied:

Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings,

Ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.

Ascribe to the LORD the glory of his name;

Worship the LORD in holy splendor.

The bulk of the psalm (vv. 3-10) is a description of a storm theophany. That manifestation of the divine is represented, pars pro toto, by "the voice" of the Lord (vv. 3, 4 bis, 5, 7-9), Although the voice certainly refers at times to thunder (vv. 3-4), it also includes the other meteorologic phenomena associated with the thunderstorm, e.g., wind (vv. 5-6, 9) and lightning (v. 7). Interestingly, there is no direct association here of rain with the deity's power. The only reference to waters and the deity depict the Lord (or his voice) being "over the waters/flood" (vv. 3, 10). This may reflect one of the earliest strata of Israelite religion, in which Israel's God battled the water-demon Tiamat (transmuted into tehom, "the deep" of Genesis 1:2) to bring created order and the habitable world from watery chaos.

Following the opening imperative (vv. 1-2), the description of the storm theophany consumes the next seven verses. Only once in this otherwise thoroughly Yahwistic composition does the generic Hebrew word for God appear (v. 3b, "the God of glory thunders") and in that context the word probably is the common noun rather than the proper name and so should not be capitalized.

Which waters are envisioned in verses 3 and 10 (referred to in the latter verse as "the flood") is not certain, but at least three candidates from ancient Hebrew cosmology present themselves. The earth was conceptualized in the OT as a flat pancake protected from the waters above (cf. Genesis 1:7) by the sky. The earth itself rested on pillars (1 Samuel 2:8), which held it above the watery abyss ("the deep," Genesis 7:11). Finally, there were the vast waters of the seas and oceans, an arena in which Israel never felt completely at home (being largely cut off from the Mediterranean by Philistines in the south and Canaanites in the north). Of these three watery sources, the waters above the heavens may be the object of the Lord's dominion.

The destructive forces described in verses 5-9 appear to be a combination of earthquake ("shakes the wilderness," v. 8) and violent wind ("causes the oaks to whirl and strips the forest bare," v. 9). Lightning ("flashes forth flames of fire," v. 7) and hail may also be included in the storm imagery.

The references (in vv. 5, 6, 8) to cedars, Lebanon, Sirion (the Phoenician name for Mt. Hermon) and Kadesh (in western Syria, not the southern Negev) suggest a geographical origin for this psalm north and west of biblical Israel. The imagery of the heavenly court, well known from Ugaritic texts, further suggests an originally Canaanite setting for this psalm that has been adapted for the Hebrew psalter.

The closing entreaty (v. 11) flows logically from the preceding extended description of the Lord's power: may the Lord grant the same sort of strength to his people he manifests regularly in the storm, and may those same people be granted peace by the same deity whose power is abundantly clear. The psalm is a concise and memorable linking of the heavenly with the historical via the medium of the natural. Psalm 29 is elegantly comprehensive in its theological perspective.