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In any text of the Bible one of the foundational questions we have to ask is ‘who is speaking?’ and ‘who is being spoken to?’ Identifying who the pronouns of a text belong to - and where we belong in that, if anywhere at all - is a key aspect of faithful reading of Scripture.
This is no less true for the Psalms; perhaps even more so. It's like seeing a photograph of our class - we can't help but immediately look for ourselves in the picture. When we read the Psalms we tend to look for ourselves in the Psalm. Whether it's the 'I' in the Psalm or the 'you', our habit of self-searching or our church habits of praying the Psalms encourages this identification.
But this equation needs to be challenged. Sometimes - even oftentimes - the 'I' and 'you' in the Psalm is not us.
Take, for instance, the ‘you’ in Psalm 20 (one of the Royal Psalms we’re not looking at this time around). The ‘you’ throughout is not plural, but singular, and the person being addressed is the King, not me or you. Once we realise that, the complexion of the Psalm is completely changed. Our role immediately goes from author or recipient, in the first instance, to observer of a conversation.
Or again, in last week’s Psalm (Psalm 18) we saw that the speaker in the Psalm is not ‘every Christian’. The ‘I’ who prayed to God throughout was David, God’s ancient ideal, prophetic, and model Messiah. In that vein, it becomes the prayer of the Christ. We, as Christ-ians, are privileged to ‘listen in’ on the prayer, and participate in it through Christ. Nevertheless, while other Psalms exist in the psalter which reflect similar sentiments to Psalm 18 and which are our prayers, the ‘I’ in Psalm 18 remains the Christ, not us.
In our Psalm for today (Psalm 45) we witness another phenomenon with pronouns and person in a text: how a song can change speaker and the one spoken to, more like a drama or an opera:
In verses 1-9 an individual - possibly the bride later in the passage, or possibly not - addresses the king: the ‘you’, which is singular.
But in v10-12 it all changes. Someone else - quite possibly the bride’s father - addresses the bride instead. And again in v13-15 the bride is spoken of in the third person and the psalmist speaks of both the bride and the occasion rhetorically.
Here’s where it gets tricky, and a Bible with good footnotes will help: v16-17 changes again and address the king, not the bride. We know this because the ‘you’ is masculine singular, not feminine.
Seeing this takes our reading of the Psalms, and the Bible, to a new level. And the rewards are great, because we understand our God better, and our place before him too.
Lest we be daunted, it's not actually as hard as it sounds. In fact, we do it intuitively all the time in other contexts in life, and we just need to be conscious of it in reading the Bible so as not to make mistakes. We make the mistake, more often than not, when reading the Bible because we know it's still God's word to us and to be applied: the temptation is to take shortcuts with that rather than read it as a plain text first.
As mentioned, it’s really not as hard as it sounds: we after all do it intuitively in normal living. Take the following statements. Who is the 'we' in each sentence?
If I said to you at church one Sunday:
- ‘We are gathered here today’;
- ‘We had a great holiday in July’; and
- ‘We only have to write 80,000 words at Cambridge, not 100,000’
would you not instinctively know that the ‘we’ in each sentence refers to three different sets of people?:
- ‘We are gathered here today’; [all of us in the building and no others];
- ‘We had a great holiday in July’; [some of us in the building - the Newling-family - but not everyone, and possibly some people not in the building as well (a child at home who is poorly)];
- ‘We only have to write 80,000 words at Cambridge, not 100,000’ [only one person in the building - me - and a whole lot of other people who are not in the building].
The tools of sound interpretation take many forms, but the question of pronouns (along with genre) stops a lot of misapplication of texts to ourselves.
