Jerome F. D. Creach. <i>Discovering Psalms: Content, Interpretation, Reception</i>. Discovering Biblical Texts.

Jerome Creach’s introduction to the Psalms has virtues that commend its use in the classroom, especially but not only in confessional settings. The bulk of it presents a lucid account of issues that pertain to anyone who wishes to read the Psalms seriously. The final chapters push into questions that will matter most to those concerned with the Psalter’s ongoing religious value, above all in certain Protestant traditions. The book addresses academy and church with insight sufficient to make it useful in both domains.Discovering Psalms has three parts. Part one, “Issues in Reading the Psalms and the Psalter,” covers the basics with an admirable blend of depth and economy. It opens with an anatomy of Ps 6, which it augments with characteristic details about the collection known as the Psalter. The Psalter’s arrangement is “purposeful,” though “the exact placement of each psalm” cannot always be explained (p. 26). Poetic features of individual psalms, including parallelism and metaphor, are then introduced with clear examples and standard terms, and with reference to a judicious selection of scholarship since Robert Lowth. David’s association with the Psalms is discussed in a way that should help bring people with strong presumptions of Davidic authorship to see the sense in traditional figural readings of “David as type of Christ” (p. 55), as well as more recent apprehensions of David as exemplar at prayer (p. 60). Finally, the form-critical legacy of Hermann Gunkel, with its focus on pre-literary forms and cultic setting, is given its due in two chapters. Notable here is the older critical model’s subordination to the newer paradigm that sees the Psalms as a book.Part two, “Reading the Psalms Together,” brings that now-dominant paradigm to the fore. One chapter unpacks some of the basic structural observations that had been made at the outset. Five books of 150 total psalms have a “theological shape”: Pss 1 and 2 frame the “two ways” of the righteous and wicked; David shows what it means for the righteous to seek refuge in God through prayer in Books 1 and 2; Book 3 faces the apparent failure of David’s prayers, experienced nationally through exile; Moses intercedes in Ps 90 and across the rest of Book 4; gradually, Israel’s lament turns into the praise that culminates in Pss 146–50, the five hallelujah psalms at the end of Book 5. The next two chapters turn from the Psalter’s overarching shape to the unity of its contents, as Creach discerns it. They answer a pair of questions. Who is God? God is the Lord who reigns in Zion and administers justice through His anointed one, and instruction through Torah. What are human beings? If they are righteous like David, then they are those who acknowledge God’s reign, seek refuge in God, and so render service and praise.Part three, “The Psalms as Prayers,” builds on this theological sketch by addressing the status of the Psalms in the modern church, where it is said to suffer from neglect and alienation. Creach explains why this should not be. “Christian prayer in the modern period often proceeds without accounting for the Psalms in any serious way,” but “to ignore the prayers that complain to God is to ignore the human condition” (p. 150). Rather, to encounter the Psalms as prayers is to open oneself fully to God. This openness does not exclude Psalms that pray for vengeance. In Ps 137:7–9, for example, “the psalmist offers the prayer to God in these verses instead of acts of violence” (p. 175). Such a prayer is consistent with OT and NT testimony that “vengeance belongs to God alone” (p. 180). Finally, in a brief conclusion, Jesus Christ is described as a fitting extension of the psalmic figure of David, his “type,” since “the Gospel writers portray Jesus like the righteous in the Psalms who suffer at the hands of the wicked” (p. 187). When Christians pray the Psalms, they ultimately amplify the Lord’s prayer to let “thy kingdom come.”Academically engaged and confessionally specific, Discovering Psalms also has some limitations. One can imagine assigning the text in undergraduate and graduate environments, for example, religious or secular, but it lacks utility as a portal to more advanced research. The footnotes are proportional to the work’s aims, reassuring rather than overwhelming the reader, and pointing to further reading for those with interest. However, the discussion tends to gloss over debatable points, summarizing finished solutions rather than introducing active problems. Without additional information, it would be hard to see what has animated recent scholarship on the Book of Psalms, why this displaced form criticism, what challenges attend the current debate, and how they might be engaged. This disposition impedes students who might want to develop critical purchase on the material.Recency bias is a second problem. The subtitle promises content, interpretation, and reception, but reception is almost exclusively contemporary. Most references to historic Christian reception beyond the NT period are confined to epigraphs, and these appear without source attribution or context. Also, Susan Gillingham is cited for her theory of Levite editorial composition, but her leading work in reception history is not engaged. Further evidence appears in the selection of some psalms for extended discussion: Ps 82 in alignment with John Dominic Crossan, for instance, or Ps 88 with Walter Brueggemann, or even Ps 137 as the arch problem text. These are all distinctly modern choices. Seen with historical perspective, Ps 82 is not “the single most important text in the entire Christian Bible” (so Crossan, quoted on p. 126)—not by some distance. The narrow framing of reception hinders the book’s suggestive but underdeveloped conclusion, on the Psalms and Jesus Christ. Psalm 110, which is, historically, a more likely candidate for the most important Psalm in the Christian Bible, would be a natural companion in that discussion. It hardly appears. Martin Luther’s commentary on it, by contrast, runs to 100 pages. But these and other shortcomings should not obscure the work’s value as a highly competent introduction.

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