The Irrepressibility of Scripture: Psalm 1
between Jews and Christians
Mike Higton,
University of Exeter
1Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2but his delight is in the law of the
Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
3He is like a tree
planted by streams of water,
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
4The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff which the wind drives away.
5Therefore the wicked will not stand in
the judgement,
nor sinners in the congregation of the
righteous;
6for the Lord knows the way of the
righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
A Psalm lives in its repeated recitation.
Generations of readers make it their own, reciting it
as part of their own prayer, becoming now its author,
now its audience. With such a text, it is easier to
imagine that one's task as an academic reader may not
be to unearth its one, original meaning, but rather
to explore the many meanings it has carried and
generated in the contexts in which it has lived. Yet
such an exploration requires more than a patient
cataloguing of differences: the many recitations that
echo through this Psalm have fed into, jostled, and
reacted against one another; the Psalm has sometimes
been more battlefield than sanctuary.[1] If meditation on
this Psalm day and night is to make for fruitful,
unwithered, well-watered life, its readers will need
wisdom to know how their differences may be
negotiated.
Psalm 1 is itself a text that implicitly asks
where wisdom is to be found. It speaks in a tone of
voice that an Israelite reciter might have recognised
from wisdom literature, its basic form a contrast
between two ways of life that would be familiar to
any reader of Proverbs. We might expect such a form
to contain, say, advice at once poetic and domestic
on how an individual should live his life: advice
from a father to a son, perhaps; advice on how to
live a well-ordered, fruitful and peaceable life.
Psalm 1, however, fills this sapiential form with
slightly different content. Jerome Creach, focusing
on verse 3a ('He is like a tree planted by streams of
water'), argues that Israelite reciters would have
assumed this to be a tree planted and tended
specifically in the temple precincts and then
would have found that this temple-flavoured imagery
had been used to speak about the security provided by
Torah.[2] For an Israelite
reciter, the Psalm might have suggested that wisdom
(both the kind of 'knowledge of what to do' that
fathers pass on to sons, mothers to
daughters,[3] and the kind of wisdom
that is the shape of a life well-regulated by
participation in the temple cultus) is anchored and
established most securely by Torah. Torah is
where the Israelite reciter can hope to find the true
shape of living. Where shall wisdom be found,
according to the Israelite's recitation of this text?
In the delightful Torah of God.
For other reciters, the Psalm will mean something
different. When the reciter of the Psalm is no longer
an Israelite follower of Torah, but a North African
Christian bishop, for example, the context in which
the recitation takes place decisively reshapes the
meaning. Augustines commentary on the Psalm
begins:
'Blessed is the man who has not gone off
(abiit) in the counsel of the ungodly.' This
should be understood to be about our Lord Jesus
Christ, the man of the Lord (homine
Dominico). 'Blessed is the man who has not gone
off in the counsel of the ungodly,' as the earthly
man did [i.e. Adam see 1 Corinthians 15:47], who
gave in to his serpent-deceived wife, and
transgressed the commandment of God. 'Nor stood in
the way of sinners.' For although he entered the
way of sinners, by being born as sinners are, he
[our Lord Jesus Christ] did not 'stand' in it,
because the enticements of the world did not hold
him.[4]
The Psalm's contrast between the righteous and the
wicked is no longer read as a contrast between the
Torah-observer and the mocker. It is re-read as the
contrast between Christ and Adam, and Augustine sees
the Psalm as a description of the roots and nature of
sin and righteousness, the legacies respectively of
Adam and Christ.[5] And it is hard to see,
in the context in which he recited the Psalm, how
Augustine could have read any differently. If this
Psalm presents any kind of paradigmatic description
of sin and righteousness, then of course it is
about Adam and Christ. That is simply obvious, for
Augustine.
Of course, there are others in the Patristic
tradition who don't provide a Christological reading
of the Psalm including such substantial figures as
Basil of Caesarea in the East and Hilary and Ambrose
in the West; there are some who reject the whole idea
more forcefully, such as Diodore of Tarsus and
Theodore of Mopsuestia. But the reading of this Psalm
that takes it to be about Jesus seems to have become
dominant in the West before long, and was embedded
not just in standard commentaries, but found its
place in Western liturgy. A Christological reading
became the plain sense reading of the text, for
generations of Christian readers.[6]
The Christological reading is, for Augustine and
the tradition, the literal reading of this
prophetic text. This is a text that, for them, speaks
straightforwardly about Jesus, and there no trips or
traps to suggest to the alert reader that time needs
to be spent unearthing a deeper, still more edifying
meaning: allegory appears only as playfulness around
the edges. The text is given by God for the building
up of life in Christ; reading it, understanding its
meaning, is an aspect of the believers journey deeper
into the life of God:
The fulfilment and the end of the law, and of all
holy Scripture, is the love of one who is to be
enjoyed, and the love of those who can enjoy that
other in fellowship with ourselves.[7]
Where shall wisdom be found, according to
Augustines recitation of this text? In Jesus Christ,
the wisdom of God.
This Christian recitation is not, however, the
only successor to the earlier Israelite recitation.
If it were, we might be able to talk about a simply
plurality of meanings: the Psalm meant x here, but y
there. Things are not so simple, however, nor so
peaceful, and we can be sharply alerted to that fact
if we look at another Christian reading of the Psalm,
that of Martin Luther.
In the preface to his first lectures on the
Psalms, delivered between 1513 and 1516, Luther
rejects those who
explain very many psalms not prophetically but
historically, following certain Hebrew rabbis who
are falsifiers and inventors of Jewish vanities. No
wonder, because they are far away from Christ (that
is, from the truth).[8]
With regard to Psalm 1 specifically, he says:
Whatever is said literally concerning the Lord
Jesus Christ as to his person must [also] be
understood allegorically of a help that is like
him, and ... tropologically of any spiritual and
inner man against his flesh and the outer man. Let
this be made plain by means of examples. Blessed is
the man who walks not [in the way of sinners] (Ps
1.1). Literally this means that the Lord Jesus
Christ made no concessions to the designs of the
Jews and of the evil and adulterous age that
existed in his time.
In his second cycle of Psalms lecture, from
1518-19, Luther offers the following explanation of
the Psalms description of the wicked as chaff which
the wind drives away:
he does not simply call them chaff, but chaff which
the wind drives.... This applies to the Jews first
of all. They are driven about in a threefold
manner. First, in a bodily manner by the whirlwind.
That is, by the will and indignation of the mean
among whom they live. As we can see, they have no
fixed home but at every moment are exposed to such
a wind, which drives them here and there. Secondly,
their minds are carried in all directions by the
wind of many doctrines taught by unholy doctors,
since they are not planted in the Christian
faith.... Thirdly, on the Last Day they shall be
scattered by the eternal stormwinds of the
unbearable wrath of God....[9]
'[D]riven about ... in a bodily manner ... by the
will and indignation of the mean among whom they
live.' In Luther's hands, in other words, Psalm 1
becomes a mandate for pogroms.
Now, one could argue that this is simply the
frothing up of Luther's all too well known
anti-Semitism, as he uses the Jews as fuel for the
fire on which he wishes to burn the teachings and
practices of Rome. One might, that is, suggest that
however violently objectionable his reading is it
shouldn't be allowed to taint the whole tradition of
Christological readings of this Psalm. I'm not so
sure. I think one could rather more convincingly
argue that Christological reading of this kind, even
when it is dressed up in less offensive garb, is
inherently supersessionist and that Luther simply
displays the logic of this supersessionism with
frightening clarity. If the Christological
interpreter says (as we saw Augustine say) 'This text
is really about Jesus, the wisdom of God' and
so implicitly or explicitly says, 'This text is
not really about any Torah-wisdom for
which Jesus is irrelevant or peripheral,' then he or
she is saying that readers who do not find Christ
here are kept from the Psalms proper meaning; they
are outsiders to this text. In other words, ownership
of the text is claimed, and previous owners are
disinherited — superseded. Jewish readers of the
Psalm are either condemned by it, or they have not
understood it; they are placed on the side of the
wicked who do not truly meditate on the
scriptures day and night, and are therefore those
whose hermeneutical advice, whose interpretive path,
whose exegetical seat will be shunned by the
righteous — and whose unChristed readings will blow
away like chaff before the wind. Where shall wisdom
be found, according to Luther's recitation of this
text? Not from the Jews, that's for certain.
In this conflicted situation, where is wisdom for
reading to be found? For me as a Christian
theologian, there is no easy way out. I read this
text as one for whom Jesus of Nazareth is unavoidably
the way in to the Hebrew Scripture. His words and
actions both make sense in the light of the Hebrew
Scriptures, and are in turn a way of making sense of
those Scriptures. Jesus' life is Christians primary
commentary or gloss upon the Hebrew
Scriptures, and they cannot deny this without giving
up either on their faith, or on reading the Hebrew
Scriptures altogether — and it would be ironic to be
saved from supersessionism only by clutching
Marcion's proffered hand.
Let me state this a little more carefully. When I
find a text in those Hebrew Scriptures that says,
this is what righteousness means, I cannot
properly avoid asking, Well, what does Jesus say
about that? I don't mean that I have to scan the
words attributed to Jesus to see whether he alludes
to or quotes the passage in question. Rather, I read
the life of Jesus as making a claim about the
nature of the righteousness that belongs to and
responds to the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. With
playful seriousness, therefore, it is quite proper
for me to ask what happens if I take this text about
righteousness and read it as describing the life of
the one who, for me, is the paradigm of
righteousness. What happens, I can't but ask, if I
take 'the man who walks not in the counsel of the
wicked' to be Jesus of Nazareth?
Well, what does happen if I take Psalm 1 to
be about Jesus? I might begin by pointing out that
the wicked in this Psalm at first sight seem to be
substantial, to amount to something: they have a
position, a path, a way of thinking. The righteous,
on the other hand, seem at first sight less
substantial than the wicked. If I read this contrast
with Jesus in mind, I might find the rejection of the
attractive stability of the ungodly sharpened. To
verse 1's progression of metaphors from walking to
standing to sitting,[10] I could add 'lying
down,' and note that Jesus was said to be one who had
no place to lay his head (Matthew 8:20 and
parallels). Put even more strongly, the only way in
which Jesus walks is the way of that leafless,
unwatered tree that grew on Golgotha. His way looks
like the way that leads to destruction, to the curse,
to the end of prosperity. And yet Christians claim
that this way of the cross is the way of life,
that it is watched over by God, and that it is the
only way that stands on the day of judgement. It is
the wicked who seem to have a place to walk,
stand, sit and lie down, the righteous who
seem to have no place to stand — but Jesus and
the Psalm announce that appearances can be
deceptive.
Note, however, that to head off in this direction
is, to pursue a trajectory of reading of the Psalm
that would already have been possible within the
Hebrew canon. You could put Psalm 1 alongside,
say, the book of Job and its critique of the
Deuteronomic equation between obedience and
prosperity. But you could also put it alongside any
number of other Psalms in which the prosperity of the
righteous and the come-uppance of the wicked is hoped
and prayed for, yet not seen — while the
'prosperity of the wicked' (Ps 73:3) is all too
evident. (In fact, someone has already put it
alongside those other Psalms: at some point, Psalm 1
seems to have been pressed into action, or even
composed, as a preface to the Psalter as a whole.) In
other words, the Christological reading of the Psalm
that I am suggesting simply twists the knife in a
fissure already opened up by the placing of this
Psalm within the Psalter and the wider Hebrew Bible.
There is no straightforward opposition between my
Christological reading and the field of possible
Jewish readings of the text.
I cant stop there, however. Once I have got this
far, I can't really avoid asking whether Jesus'
righteousness, the way of the cross, can be
understood as 'delight ... in the law of the
Lord.'[11] I might find myself
led to think of Jesus claim that not one stroke of a
letter will pass from the law until it is all
accomplished (Matthew 5:18), and that no-one whose
righteousness does not exceed that of the scribes and
the Pharisees can enter the kingdom of heaven
(Matthew 5:20); I might also find myself thinking of
Jesus' claim that the whole of the law and the
prophets hangs on the command to love God and to love
neighbour (Matthew 22:40). And so I might say that
the commentary upon this Psalm that Jesus' life
offers is not a commentary that must deprecate its
focus on Torah. It need not see delight in Torah as a
doctrine that needs to be rejected or overcome or
surpassed; it can accept that focus and then provide
a contestable but serious interpretation of what
delight in the law involves. In the reading of the
Psalm that Jesus provides, or is, the way of
righteousness is the way of the cross, the way of the
cross is the way of love and justice, and the way of
love and justice is the way of obedience to and
delight in the law. Once again, the Christian reading
need not be seen in opposition to the field of
possible Jewish readings, but as a particular
position within that field.
I'm being too irenic, however. A Jewish reader at
this point might draw my attention to one of the
elements that my exposition so far has ignored: the
reference to the 'congregation of the righteous.'
What this Psalm opposes to the way of the ungodly,
the Jewish reader might say, is obedience to Gods law
in the context of the people of Israel. It opposes to
the false stability of the wicked a different kind of
continuity and stability: the continuity and
stability of people and observance. Holiness and
blessing, in the Psalms terms, cant be detached from
these things. And yes, these contrast with the
visible stability of the ungodly (the history of the
Jewish people over the last two and half thousand
years is enough to show us that), but we should not
overdraw that contrast until it becomes a contrast
between the purely material stability and prosperity
of the ungodly and the purely spiritual stability and
prosperity of the godly. On a Jewish reader's lips,
therefore, the Psalm might become a challenge to
think about the material conditions of holiness in
the Hebrew Bible: law, people, land. Isn't that what
it really means, the Jewish reader might say, to be
in the congregation of the faithful, planted,
watered, and in the deepest sense prosperous? Isn't
it no accident that the stream and tree language in
the Psalm is redolent of land and of temple? To put
it another way, hasn't the Christian reading too
easily air-brushed out the full meaning of
'Torah?'
The Christian reader might respond by arguing that
the Psalm is precisely part of a trajectory in the
Hebrew Bible whereby land and temple are relativised
or redefined in favour of delight in and obedience to
Torah, and that the Psalm is therefore representative
of one of the shifts in the understanding of
righteousness which made the Jesus movement possible
as a Jewish righteousness sect in the first century.
And at this point the Christian reader could reach
for the weighty commentary by Hans-Joachim Kraus, who
insists that the Psalms original setting is in a
context in post-exilic Israel where '"the
congregation of the righteous" is no longer all of
Israel but a circle of those who have come out
through decisions and separations, a group that
thinks of itself as opposed to the mass of the
ungodly' (115); it is the congregation of those for
whom Torah is experienced internally as revelation —
for whom the heart of obedience, of observance, has
moved inwards so that (as von Rad says), the Sitz
im Leben of Torah has become 'more and more the
heart of man.'[12]
But the Jewish reader might interrupt to point to
the end of Krauss commentary on the Psalm:
The life-style of the [righteous person],
especially his all-encompassing love and delight in
the [Torah], is sustained ... by the Torah's own
lively power to communicate and influence.... But
everything that is stated in Psalm 1 about the
[righteous person] basically entails a character
that transcends any one individual.... The picture
of the fortunate [righteous person] definitely
bears the features of the super individual, the
paradigmatic person. The 'Pharisee,' with his
utmost rigoristic obedience to the Law, cannot fill
out this picture. The New Testament declares that
Jesus Christ, 'whom God made our ... righteousness'
(1 Cor 1:30) is the fulfilment of this original
picture that the Old Testament psalm had in mind
and already joyously embraced.[13]
Our Jewish reader might at this point ask whether
Krauss whole interpretation his whole reading of the
nature of Torah and its observance, his claim about
the Sitz im Leben of this Psalm, as well as
von Rads about the Sitz im Leben of Torah as a
whole has not been secretly determined by this
conclusion which is both Christological and
supersessionist, however dressed up it might be in a
history-of-religions narrative about
individualisation and internalisation. Once again,
the Jewish interlocutor might say, Torah is being too
easily spiritualised by the Christian reader.
And so the argument might go on, and on, and on. I
have not reached, and see no easy route by which I
could reach, a resolution which would be at once
Christological and entirely free from criticism by
Jewish readers. But such a resolution is not
necessarily the point, and is not the only way by
which supersessionism can be overcome. What I have
tried to begin sketching is not a pathway towards
consensus, but the way that the Psalm can host
productive disagreement. It can open up for a
discussion that probes Christian and Jewish
constructions of righteousness and tries to challenge
simplistic binary construals (national-legal versus
individual-spiritual) or simplistic narratives
(internalisation, individualisation) connecting the
two. The Psalm can become both touchpaper and fuel
for a wider Jewish-Christian argument about the
conditions for righteous life, for the shape of
living, for wisdom.
This kind of ruminative, argumentative attention
to the text does not lead to any decision about the
one thing that this text really says. It leads rather
to attention to the different things that the text
says in different company, to the difficulties that
are generated when one tries to read it in those
different companies, and to what happens when,
instead of letting one of those companies speak to
the exclusion of all others, we set ourselves to
follow the conversations or arguments that these
differing companies of readers can generate
together.
The Christian response to the supersessionism of
some of their traditions of reading cannot be for
them to abandon Christological reading. If
supersession was the act by which Christians evicted
the previous readers of this Psalm from their seats,
the rupture between peoples caused by this act will
not be repaired if Christians simply vacate that seat
in turn, leaving it to its original owners. Rather,
the evils of supersessionism can only be repaired by
Jews and Christians sitting down together,
around the text, with a commitment to read alongside,
to read in conversation with, to read interrupted and
needled and bewildered and delighted by one another —
supersessionism overcome by co-sessionism.
Christian readers will have their own, Christian
theological reasons for doing this, and for trusting
that it will lead somewhere interesting, reasons
distinct from (though possibly analogous to) Jewish
reasons. Generically, Christians will say that it is
in conversation with Christ that all things find
their fullest meaning, but that it is only in
conversation with all things that they themselves
will understand Christ most fully. They have more of
Christ still to receive, and as they don't own
Christ, so they don't own any texts or the people
through whom that 'more' will be received. More
specifically, though, Christian theology will say
that the God of Jesus Christ is and remains the God
of the Jewish people, and that the God of the Jewish
people is the God of Jesus Christ, and that it is the
dialectic between these two claims that is embodied
in a commitment to read together, in conversation,
holding on for a blessing.
This theoretical, theological commitment and hope
is reinforced, however, by the discovery in practice
(in conversations like those of Scriptural
Reasoning), that the text is indeed capacious enough
for this expansive, argumentative conversation, that
to read alongside those who read differently does
indeed drive the participants deeper into the
unexpected resources of their own houses' wisdom, and
that the debates and discussions involved need not
always be a matter of earnest and agonised
seriousness, but of friendship and of delight.
When freed from our control and rediscovered in
conversation, the text yields more abundant fruit. It
becomes an arena for delighted, multi-voiced,
sometimes cacophonous exploration; it becomes more
uncontrollable, more surprising, more irrepressible.
If it is, as this Psalm 1 suggests, a stream of
water, then it is not a slow, calm and silent
upwelling from which one may sip in a controllable,
predictable way. It is something more like a garden
hosepipe in the hands of unruly toddlers.
And that vision of the irrepressibility of
Scripture, enthusiastically soaking all those within
range, firing off in unexpected directions amidst a
babble of voices and laughter, and captivating all
around with snatches of unexpected wisdom — well, I
suspect that all those who have met him will
understand why this seems to me an appropriate image
to have in mind when honouring David Ford.
ENDNOTES
[1]See, for example Uwe F.W.
Bauer in 'Anti-Jewish interpretations of Psalm 1 in
Luther and in modern German Protestantism,'
Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 2 (available
online at
<http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/Articles/article8.pdf>,
10/09/07.
[2]Thus tr is
implicitly compared to the temple, and is perhaps
seen as the temple's replacement; Psalm 1:3 seems to
indicate a shift in the perceived source of safety,
from temple to tr. Jerome Creach, 'Like a Tree
Planted by the Temple Stream: The Portrait of the
Righteous in Psalm 1:3,' Catholic Biblical
Quarterly 61.1 (1999), 3446: 46.
[3]Stuart Weeks, 'Wisdom in
the Old Testament' in Stephen C. Barton (ed.),
Where shall Wisdom be Found? Wisdom in the Bible,
the Church and the Contemporary World (Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, 1999), 1930: 25.
[4] Augustine, Enarrationes
in Psalmos, PL36, on Ps 1.1; Latin text available
online at
<http://www.sant-agostino.it/latino/esposizioni_salmi/index2.htm>;
translation loosely based on that in A. Cleveland
Coxe and Philip Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post
Nicene Fathers: First Series, vol. 8 (New York:
Christian Literature Co. 1888), 1, available online
at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library,
<http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf108.I_1.html>,
10/09/07.
[5] It is worth noting in
passing, by the way, that Christians were not the
only ones up to this sort of thing. Rabbinic comments
identify the righteous man variously as Adam, Abraham
and Levi. See The Midrash on the Psalms, tr.
W.G. Braude (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959),
2.13, 2.18, 2.19.
[6] For the Patristic (and
Medieval) data, see Chrysogonus Waddell, 'A
Christological Interpretation of Psalm 1?: The
Psalter and Christian Prayer,' Communio 22
(Fall 1995), 50221.
[7] De doctrina
Christiana 1.35(39), in Philip Schaff (ed.),
Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers: First Series,
vol. 2 (New York: Christian Literature Co. 1886),
533, translation slightly altered; available online
at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library,
<http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.v.iv.xxxv.html>,
10/09/07.
[8] Luther, First Lectures
on the Psalms [Dictata super Psalterium] I:
Psalms 175, in Hilton C. Oswald (ed.) Luther's
Works, vol. 10 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1974),
Preface to the Scholia, 7.
[9] From Works on the
Psalms (Operationes in Psalmos), in Jaroslave
Pelikan (ed.), Selected Psalms III, Luthers
Works, vol. 14 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1958),
306.
[10] Commentators are divided
on whether the three clauses of verse 1 are a
progression or a simply parallelism. See, for
example, Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 159: A
Commentary, tr. Hilton C. Oswald from the
5th German edition, 1978 (Minneapolis:
Augsburg, 1988), 115: 'The climax is worth noting';
but compare Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 150, Word
Biblical Commentary 19 (Waco TX: Word, 1983), 60: it
would be stretching the text beyond its natural
meaning to see in these lines three distinct phases
in the deterioration of a persons conduct and
character. For a detailed discussion, see G.W.
Anderson, 'A note on Psalm 1:1,' Vetus
Testamentum 24.2 (April 1974), 231'3 — though his
discussion does not actually touch on the progression
of the verbs, simply demonstrates that there
is no progression in the descriptions of the
wicked.
[11] Augustine's discussion
of this 'delight in the law' distinguishes between
those for whom the law is a heteronomous burden, and
those for whom the law is discerned by the mind
(mente conspicitur), who strictly speaking do
not need the letter of the law. In this latter
sense, it is entirely appropriate to speak of Jesus
as delighting in the law. (Enarrationes in
Psalmos on 1.2; NPNF translation — see n.4
above). Hilary, on the other hand, thinks this clause
forbids one to understand the Psalm as a description
of Christ (See Hilary of Poitiers, Homilies on the
Psalms 1.1, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace
(eds), Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers: Second
Series, vol.9 (New York: Christian Literature
Co., 1898), 236; available online at the Christian
Classics Ethereal Library,
<http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209.ii.vi.ii.i.html>,
10/09/07).
[12] Gerhard von Rad, Old
Testament Theology vol. 1: The Theology of Israels
Historical Traditions, tr. D.M.G. Stalker from
the 2nd German edition (Edinburgh: Oliver
and Boyd, 1962), 200.
[13] Kraus, Psalms
159, 121.
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