Expository Articles

JAMES L. MAYS
Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament
Union Theological Seminary in Virgina

Psalm 29
DOXOLOGY IS the quintessence of worship. In praise we say, "Glory be to
the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit." As we finish praying, we say, "Thine
is the kingdom, the power, and the glory." Psalm 29 is an Old Testament
form of that second sentence. The kingdom, power, and glory are its
themes. It is a magnificent expression of doxology and a marvelous text
for the exposition of doxology.
It has become the custom in current commentary to concentrate on the
issues raised by the psalm's use of a thunderstorm in theophanic descrip-
tion. Those issues are interesting and important, and call for attention, but
the connection between the glory of God and the thunderstorm is simply
one historic, poetic way to deal with abiding questions in the realm of
religious experience and human nature: doxology as a means of grace and
the human need and quest for a sphere of power in which to shelter
weakness and lostness. That is what Psalm 29 is really about. As a hymn for
use in liturgy, it is designed to confront human finitude with divine
majesty in a solving way.
This purpose of the hymn is apparent in its language and structure. It
begins with a summons to doxology addressed to divine beings (vs. 1-2).
The main part of the hymn (vs. 3-9) is a doxology which portrays a
theophany whose description uses the theme of the qol YHWH (sound/
voice of the Lord) in a seven-fold repetition, a veritable litany on "the voice
of the Lord," which accumulates verbal impressiveness in its growing
crescendo. The description is composed on the movement that underlies
theophanic texts in the Old Testament: the coming or appearance of God
(vs. 3-4) and its effect on the world (vs. 5-9). The description concludes in
verse 9c with the effect the majesty of the Lord has on the temple
congregation: They are saying (the Hebrew participle implies continu-
ously): "Glory!" Then in verse 10, as a statement about the meaning of
doxology, a proclamation of the reign of the Lord is made. The message of
the theophanic portrayal is that those who experience the majesty through
the doxology thereby know that the sphere of power in which they exist
has the Lord as its sovereign. It is that knowledge which grounds the final

60

Downloaded from int.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL on June 28, 2015

 Expository Articles
Interpretation

prayer (v. 11, the Hebrew could be construed as a promise); the reign of
the God of glory offers strength and peace to his people, the folk who
understand and enact their existence in the sphere of his sovereignty.
It is important to note that it is the hymn itself in which this is all taking
place. The text does not point the reader/singer to some meteorological
display and say go and be overwhelmed by wind and lightning and
thunder. It is the verbal, poetic re-creation of a storm composed on the
theme of the voice of the Lord in the hymn itself which fulfills the opening
call to doxologize and prepares the worshipper for the prayer/promise at
the end. To grasp better how this worked, we need to know how this hymn
and this language was understood in Israel's world.
1. The Motif "Glory" (kabod)
Kabod is used theologically in the Old Testament in two related
ways: honor/eminence and visible manifestation. One gives God the
honor/glory due him, first of all by conduct that honors God and second by
praise. One perceives the manifestation/glory in perceptible media
through which God lets the majesty and power of his sovereignty show
through. The first sense appears in verses 1-2, the second in verses 3 and
9. The theophanic recital evokes the reality of the God of glory who is
perceptible through the activity of his voice. Concurrent with that action,
the divine beings who make up the heavenly court keep saying in the
temple/palace "glory," thus naming what is happening. Several points may
be noted here. Doxology depends on doxa; the vitality and authenticity of
glorifying God comes only when one has perceived the glory. Doxology
does not mean giving him a glory that we create or possess, but ascribing to
him a glory we recognize. The doxology that is offered in the heavenly
temple is a model and motif for what must occur in the corresponding
earthly temple; the congregation in its praise is led by and joins in the
doxology sung by the "sons of God."
2. The Motif of "The Voice of the Lord"
In this hymn and in similar contexts, the phrase means an articulate
sound which communicates the awesome majesty and power of the Lord.
Elsewhere in the Old Testament and in verse 3 the sound is correlated with
thunder, undoubtedly the most impressive noise experienced in the an-
cient world. It is fascinating to see the finesse with which this motif is
handled in the hymn. The voice of the Lord is not spoken of as identical
with thunder and as only one feature of a storm along with wind and
lightning. Clearly the poetry does portray a thunderstorm. One can follow
its course from its generation over the "many waters" of the Medi-
terranean until its wind, lightning, and thunder cross the coast, crash
61

Downloaded from int.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL on June 28, 2015

against the mountains of Lebanon and move on into the wilderness,
shaking the earth and stripping swaying forests. Once "the God of glory
makes the thunder noise" and originates the voice, it becomes the actor,
the subject of attributions and verbs; that is the very point of the repetition
of the motif. The poet is putting a certain distance between the Lord and
the storm. The voice stands between the two and is a virtual surrogate of
God. What is there to be perceived in occurrence and poetry is not God
himself but a medium through which his power and majesty (verse 4) are
perceptible. It is his glory. The hymn does not focus the worshipper's
attention on the storm as divine or as a personal manifestation of the
divine, but rather uses the storm imagery to raise the thoughts to the
cosmic throne where the Lord sits and reigns. In the Bible the subject of
every doxology is in one way or another the sovereignty of God.
3. The Motif of Divine Kingship
The theophany is introduced by a summons to "the sons of God," the
divine beings who people the heavenly throne room in the mythopoetic
vision of the Old Testament, a vision formed in the era of religious
thought before there were angels. It is concluded by the confession that
the Lord is enthroned as king over the flood. This way of thinking about
God and his relation to the world has clear continuities with the intellectual
environment of ancient Near Eastern culture. Generally, reality was un-
derstood in terms of divine monarchical powers, functions, and rituals. In
that context the assertion that the Lord reigns over the cosmic sea is
tantamount to the claim that the entire cosmos is subject to his sovereignty.
Moreover, the notion of the thunderstorm as theophany was part and
parcel of this divine kingship cosmology. Before Israel existed, the thun-
derstorm was the provenance of the Canaanite god Ba'al-Hadad, whose
"voice" was said to be heard in its thunder. The autumn thunderstorms
which broke the summer drought were the manifestations of his escape
from the underworld and his victory over the sea god. In it he was on his
way to assume again his reign over the annual cycle of fertility. The use of
the thunderstorm to doxologize the Lord was a displacement of the
preeminent god of the culture, and it is viewed as the sign of the kingship
that is in force "forever" and not one assumed annually as a function of the
cycle of nature. In its time the hymn was a literary expression of the way in
which faith in the Lord drew Israel to oppose polytheism, to unify its view
of reality, and to see God's sovereignty as transcendent of rather than
immanent in nature. It is a liturgical act of obedience to the first command-
ment. It discloses the inner meaning of doxology in every time: the
orientation of life to the Lord and to the Lord alone.

62

Downloaded from int.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL on June 28, 2015

 Expository Articles
Interpretation

Psalm 29, then, is one of the hymns in the Psalter which celebrate the
reign of God. As Scripture it has much to teach about the why, what, and
how of worship in general and doxology in particular. As liturgy it still has
poetic and mythic power to evoke the doxological moment when recited or
sung, especially by those who feel and think their way into its language. As
a poem for meditation, it can give rise to thought about many things. Here
are several.
One is the urgent importance of the doxological experience for the
human condition. How wistfully, how longingly one can read of this event:
being brought to cry "glory" in response to what is heard and seen. "Where
is the glory?" we ask in all sorts of ways without necessarily using the word.
So much that we see evokes a cry of "shame" or "woe," or the verbal knee
jerk of a cliched, "wow," or for those grown weary or callous, " so what's
new ... so it goes." So much that we see in the world weakens us, makes us
anxious, throws us into conflict. Yet at a deep level, we know weakness and
conflict tend toward death and understand the need for strength and
peace to be whole. Existence is subconsciously moved by the need of a kind
of ecstasy, not the ecstasy of possession, of being invaded, taken over and
used by another, but the ecstasy of the disclosure of another who is what we
are not, of the confrontation by another in the aura of whose power we
find possibilities not ours. It is a dangerous need because in the world of
entertainment and politics it can lead us to occupy our spirits with vacuous
excitement or to trust ourselves to posturing zealots or to idolize whatever
powers are operative in our society. Yet it remains an unquenchable need.
The marvelous possibility in worship is a use of time and space and sound
to create the doxological situation in which "glory!" is uttered in response
to the one true God.
Then there is the subject of doxology, the medium in time and space
through which God lets his majesty be perceived and which is taken up,
recited, and actualized in praise. Psalm 29 is the only text in the Old
Testament in which the glory of the Lord is so extensively and directly said
to be manifested in what we moderns call natural phenomena. In the
religious culture of Israel's time, the quarters were too close to the gods
whose provenance was the natural world. Confusion was always possible.
It required a long struggle to clarify the relation between creator and
creation. And the psalmists were careful, persistent but careful. The
dominant themes in Israel's praise were events in the Lord's way with his
people and in the processes of history. In the New Testament the subject
of doxology undergoes a surprising personal concentration. With few
exceptions, the subject is Jesus, the Son of God. For John the deeds of
Jesus were signs, a disclosure of his participation in the majesty of God

63

Downloaded from int.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL on June 28, 2015

(2: 11; 11:4, 40) and to know Jesus by faith as Son of God was to behold his
glory (1: 14). For Paul the crucified Christ is the Lord in whom glory is
manifest (I Cor. 2:8); the light of the knowledge of the glory of God is seen
in the face of Jesus Christ (11 Cor. 4, 6). It was the gospel in song and
proclamation which re-created the medium and provided the doxological
moment. Psalm 29 has often been used as the psalm for the first Sunday of
Epiphany when the focus is on the baptism of Jesus. The choice is a
profound interpretation of the occasion. The liturgical setting connects
the psalm's mighty theophany with the quiet epiphany in the waters of the
Jordan. The voice of the Lord in the thunderstorm is paired with the voice
from heaven saying "this is my Son." The storm says, "this is my cosmos;"
the baptism, "this is my Christ." The two go inseparably together. The
Christology is not adequate unless its setting in cosmology is maintained.
The Old Testament doxology is necessary to the gospel.
Finally, having recognized that the doxological orientation of the Bible
is not toward "nature," a plea on behalf of the thunderstorm, we must give
attention to the significance for us of its place in the psalm, where it is a
"sign" in the J ohannine sense of God's sovereignty over the cosmos. True,
Israel had to be careful because it had to lean against the merging of
natural and divine. Yet signals are also given of an understanding that the
creation contains signs of the creator, notably Psalms 8, 19,24 and Genesis
1:26 (cf. I Cor. 11:7). We need to attend those signals because we live in an
era in which consciousness of and thought about the natural world is
shaped in a quite different way by the science and technology of modern
culture. Our tendency is to see the world as a complex to be explained and
exploited, to take the unnecessary step beyond science of reducing the
world to the dimensions of our reason and needs. Our view is captive to
economics and research; the poetic and mythological vision is dimmed.
Calvin already saw the looming displacement: "It is a diabolical science,"
he said, "which fixes our contemplation on the works of nature, and turns
them away from God ... Nothing is more preposterous than, when we
meet with mediate causes, however many, to be stopped and retarded by
them, as by so many obstacles, from approaching God" (Commentary on
Psalm 29). Where physics and biology are allowed to empty the mytho-
poetic vision, our lives are cramped within horizons of our own making.
Religion and theology are increasingly dominated by psychology and
existentialism because they have retreated to inner space to contemplate
the human psyche and consciousness. The thunderstorm as theophany is a
sign that the Lord is God also of outer space. Perhaps Psalm 29 is in the
canon of Scripture to call us to see the world afresh as creation - and say
"glory!" before "the Lord, maker of heaven and earth."

64

Downloaded from int.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL on June 28, 2015