PSALM 29

    ¹A David psalm.

    Grant to the LORD, O sons of God,

          grant to the LORD glory and strength!

    ²Grant to the LORD His name’s glory.

          Bow to the LORD in holy majesty!

    ³The LORD’s voice is over the waters.

          The God of glory thunders.

                The LORD is over the mighty waters.

    ⁴The LORD’s voice in power,

          the LORD’s voice in majesty,

    ⁵the LORD’s voice breaking cedars,

          the LORD shatters the Lebanon cedars,

    ⁶and He makes Lebanon dance like a calf,

          Sirion like a young wild ox.

    ⁷The LORD’s voice hews flames of fire.

    ⁸The LORD’s voice makes the wilderness shake,

          the LORD makes the Kadesh Wilderness shake.

    ⁹The LORD’s voice brings on the birth pangs of does

          and lays bare the forests.

                And in His palace all says glory.

    ¹⁰The LORD was enthroned at the flood

          and the LORD is enthroned as king for all time.

    ¹¹May the LORD give strength to His people.

          May the LORD bless His people with peace.

PSALM 29 NOTES

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1. O sons of God. This is the first clue of many that have led a whole line of scholars (H. L. Ginsberg, Moshe Held, Mitchell Dahood, Theodore Gaster) to see this psalm as a translation or close adaptation of a Canaanite psalm. It has been variously claimed that in the original text, it was Baal as thunder-god, not YHWH, who imposed his fearsome voice over the whole world. None of these arguments is entirely convincing. Although there are parallels to certain wordings here in Ugaritic poetry (the one cache of Syro-Palestinian poetry, several centuries prior to the Bible, that has physically survived), that scarcely proves that this poem is a translation. The same is true of the proposed linguistic and prosodic evidence (too technical to take up here) that has been put forth to support the same claim. Canaanite poetry was the literary tradition that constituted the most immediate background for biblical poetry. It would be surprising if the biblical poets did not make use of images, phrasing, and even mythological elements from the antecedent tradition with which they and their audience were acquainted. The relation of this psalm, and a good many others, to the Syro-Palestinian tradition is roughly like that of Paradise Lost to the Aeneid and the Iliad. Virgil and Homer gave Milton a model, and a repertory of devices and topoi, with which he could frame a cosmic epic from his own monotheistic perspective, but he was not merely “transposing” the pagan epic poets into English. As to the address to the “sons of God” at the beginning of the psalm, it should be noted that these celestial creatures appear not infrequently elsewhere in the Bible (here they are beney ʾelim; more commonly, they appear as beney ʾelohim). They are best thought of as the flickering literary afterlife of a polytheistic mythology—God’s royal entourage on high, His famalia, as Rashi called them, invoking a Latin term that had entered Hebrew during the time of the Roman empire. Literal belief in them may have survived in popular religion but is unlikely to have been shared by the scribal circles that produced Psalms.

2. Grant to the LORD. The verb for “grant” or “give,” y-h-b, is a relatively rare synonym (though the standard term in Aramaic) for the more common n-t-n. Perhaps it may actually have been called out in its imperative form, havu, as here, on ceremonial occasions, having something of the effect of “hail!” The use of the whole phrase at the beginning of the psalm in a pattern of incremental repetition may be evidence of the antiquity of the poem because incremental repetition is a device favored in the oldest stratum of biblical poetry (as, notably, in the Song of Deborah, which might date back as far as 1100 B.C.E.).

3. The LORD’s voice is over the waters. Though the image is a naturalistic one of thunder—often imagined by the Hebrew poets as God’s voice—rumbling over the sea, the line registers a recollection of old Canaanite myths, in which creation is effected through the conquest of a primordial sea monster by the god who rules the land. In the incremental repetition here, the phrase “the mighty waters” has an especially mythological resonance in the Hebrew.

5. the Lebanon cedars. Throughout biblical poetry, these trees are the great emblem of proud loftiness. An excessive literalism has led some interpreters to see the mention of the northern mountains of Lebanon and Syria as evidence of a Syrian provenance for the poem. These place-names appear equally in the late and distinctly un-Canaanite Song of Songs. Lebanon is not only a place of towering forests but also the northern border of Israel. In verse 8, God’s thunder rakes the Wilderness of Kadesh, presumably in the eastern half of the Sinai, so the poet imagines God’s power sweeping over the whole land of Israel and beyond from north to south.

8. makes the wilderness shake, / the LORD makes the Kadesh Wilderness shake. These two versets are a textbook illustration of incremental repetition, with the added element giving the second verset additional specificity, as is generally true in the use of poetic parallelism in the Bible.

9. lays bare the forests. A commonly proposed emendation turns “forests” (yeʿarot) into “gazelles” (yeʿalot) in the interests of neat parallelism. But then the verb “lay bare” would have to have something to do with calving, a meaning not otherwise attested. It is certainly possible to imagine the fearsome assault of lightning and thunder triggering birth pangs and also devastating the forests.

And in His palace all says glory. It is probably a mistake to translate heikhalo as “His temple” rather than “His palace,” because the context suggests God’s celestial palace, where, while the earth roils in the storm below, everything bespeaks God’s glory. The awesome power manifested on earth in thunder and lightning is celebrated ceremoniously on high in the divine palace populated by angelic or quasidivine courtiers.

10. The LORD was enthroned at the flood. The mention of the primordial Flood is a measure not only of the eternity of God’s reign but also of His supreme dominion over the forces of nature. It is, of course, in a storm that the poet has imagined God’s power in this psalm.

11. May the LORD give strength to His people. Whether or not this line is a stock coda added by an editor, it does pick up a verbal motif from the beginning, as the Israeli scholar Yitzhak Avishur has noted. The psalm starts with a verb meaning “to give” or “to grant,” an act to be directed from the divine entourage to God, and concludes with the more common synonym for the act of giving, now directed from God to Israel.