(This post is a 5 minute read.)
The Psalm for Trinity Sunday is one of my favourites. It is headed ‘To the director of music. Upon Gittith. A psalm of David.’ It is not clear what ‘Gittith’ means in this context. It can be translated as ‘winepress’ but may refer to the name of the tune the psalm is to be sung to or it could perhaps be the name of an unidentifiable instrument.
The Common Worship Psalter has slightly different verse numbering than most Bibles as it splits the first verse into two and renumbers to the end of the psalm. For once, it is obvious why this has been done as the new verse 1 is the same as the final verse 10. I have used this verse as the refrain.
The psalm opens by calling on God with the words ‘Yaweh, adoneynu’. The first word is the name of God. In most English Bibles, this is usually rendered as ‘Lord’ (in small caps) in order to respect the Jewish taboo on pronouncing the holy name. The second word means ‘our Lord’ in the sense of feudal lord, slave master or ruler.
It occurred to me that the distinction between these words would not be apparent when the psalm is sung, if I stuck to the usual convention of translating them as ‘O Lord, our Lord’.
How is this tackled in other translations?
Most Bibles (including the Authorised Version) use ‘O Lord, our Lord’, although a few have ‘Jehovah, our Lord’. Modern Church of England Liturgical translations have followed the Book of Common Prayer in using ‘O Lord our governor’, which isn’t very meaningful in a UK context where I can only think of prison governors. The New Revised Standard Version (updated edition) (NRSVue) uses ‘O Lord, our Sovereign’. I quite like this because it has a more meaningful modern word for ‘adoneynu’ but it is probably quite tricky to set and sing in a short refrain. In the end, I went for ‘our ruler’ and maintained the convention of using Lord for God.
The verse continues with the psalmist praising the name of God. The liturgical psalters describe the name of God as ‘glorious’, while Bible translations are more varied and include excellent (AV), majestic (NIV, NRSVue), and magnificent (CSB). I decided to go with ‘majestic’ as it reinforces the sense of ‘ruler’.
Turning to the first stanza, verses 2 and 3 in the CW psalter are quite different from the translations given in most Bibles, where they are numbered 1b and 2.
Bible translations mostly interpret verse 1b along the lines of ‘You have set your glory in the heavens’ (NIV) or ‘You have displayed your splendour above the heavens.’ (New American Standard Bible). The Common Worship Psalter has ‘Your majesty above the heavens is praised’. I can find no other translation that interprets it in this way, although the Revised Standard Version has ‘Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted’. This interpretation may be derived from the Septuagint (LXX), which has ‘For thy magnificence is exalted above the heavens’ (BES) which could imply ‘praise’ rather than a literal lifting up. This has the advantage of making more sense of the next line.
My first draft of this line about young children – ‘from the mouths of toddlers and babies’ – retained the Hebrew word order, referring first to a young child, an infant or toddler, then to a baby that is being breastfed. However, when I came to look at the pointing I realised that this order breaks the unwritten rule of English that prefers the vowel sounds the other way around. It also breaks the general preference in English for chronological order, so ‘babies and toddlers’ sounds more natural.
To my mind, it makes more sense for children to be praising God than for God to have ordained strength from their mouths. (The NLT rationalises this as ‘You have taught children and infants to tell of your strength, with a note to say the Greek says ‘to give you praise’.) And because the lectionary specifies the versification of the CW psalter, I have decided to follow this interpretation.
However, it was still difficult to put the idea into an easily graspable phrase. I tried ‘Praise of your splendour above the heavens comes from the mouths of toddlers and babies.’, which is too cumbersome. I then tried ‘Toddlers and babies praise your splendour above the heavens from their mouths’ which was still too wordy. In the end I ditched the mouths and combined both ideas (which also helps make the stanza four lines long).
The word used for what God established is ‘oz’. This means ‘might’ or ‘strength’ but apparently can be used in a very wide variety of contexts that would be better suited to other translations. The Brown Driver Briggs Lexicon suggests a ‘loud voice’ for this sort of context. Maybe the whole line is something like, ‘you have given babies and toddlers loud voices’! But the Common Worship psalter, like the NIV, interprets ‘oz’ as a stronghold: ‘you have founded a stronghold against your foes’. In the end I decided to stick with strength.
2 Lord, you have set your splendour above the heavens,
even toddlers and babies praise your glory.
3 Because of your foes, you have established strength
to silence the enemy and the avenger.
Verse 4 is one of my favourite lines in the psalms. I love the idea of contemplating the night sky! In the BCP the psalmist ‘considers’ the heavens’. The word translated ‘consider’ can be ‘contemplate’ or simply ‘look’. But the former has too many syllables and ‘observe’ seems appropriate for looking into space.
The BCP continues in verse 5 with ‘what is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou visitest him’.
Clearly, for an inclusive modern language version ‘man’ (the original Hebrew is masculine gendered too) needed to be ‘humanity’ or ‘humankind’. I also wanted to use a more natural English word order so it would flow on from the previous verse, so I used ‘I wonder’ rather than asking ‘what is’ or ‘why’.
In the second line of verse 5, I considered retaining ‘son of man’ as a potential reference to Jesus, but I decided that wasn’t really the sense here. In the end, I decided to go with ‘children of Adam’ as a bit of a nod to CS Lewis’s sons of Adam and daughters of eve.
4 When I observe your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you made,
5 I wonder why you remember humanity,
why you care for the children of Adam.
Verse 6 literally starts, ‘For you have made him..’ As this is the beginning of a stanza, the object needed stating explicitly, hence ‘you have made humans’
My initial draft of verse 7 was, ‘And you appoint them ruler over the work of your hands.’ To shorten this, I first removed the superfluous ‘and’. Then for clarity, I decided to put the verb into the simple past.
The language of human domination over the animal kingdom is problematic in our age of over-exploitation rather than good care and husbandry. However I decided to retain this in the translation of verse 7.
6 You made humans a little lower than the angels
and crown them with glory and honour.
7 You appointed them to rule over the work of your hands;
You put everything beneath their feet.
The final stanza is still talking about how humans are to rule over creation, but this will not be obvious when the refrain is inserted. This means the context needs to be added in verse 8. I decided to make this an opportunity to temper the language of domination slightly and contrast the place of humanity as lower than the angels with being over animals.
The second line of verse 9 was tricky. My initial draft was, ‘The travellers through/all that crosses the paths/highways/shipping lanes of the sea’! I did wonder if this was a reference to the people of Israel crossing the red sea, but that doesn’t really fit with the theme of the rest of the psalm.
Most translations see this as expanding on the fish in the sea. Several (New Living Translation and Christian Standard Bibile) interpret the ‘paths’ as ‘currents’, which I quite like. The verb can mean ‘pass through’, ‘moves through’ or ‘swims in’. I decided to go with ‘moves with the ocean currents’ as that would cover all sorts of creatures from blue whales to microplankton.
8 You placed humans over all sheep and cattle,
indeed, over every animal in the fields,
9 the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea,
all that moves with the ocean currents.
As this is my favourite psalm and we won’t be singing it in our church this year (we have a special Holiday Club service) I decided to use this psalm for my very first experiment in producing a recording with harp accompaniment. You can listen to it by clicking through to Psalm 8 on Psaltery and Harp, where you can also get the sheet music.
You can also get psalms for the related readings track (propers 5 – 8 so far) so if you’re planning music for the next couple of months do take a look.
Image Credit: Bill Anders, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons