Psalm 65 – Silence Sings from Afar

TEXT (Hebrew text at end)

1. For the leader. A psalm. Of David. A song.

2. To You, 1-silence is praise,-1 God, in Zion; a vow to You will be paid.2

3. It is He Who hears prayer; unto You all flesh shall come.

4. Reports of sins overpowered me; our iniquities You will expiate.

5. Happy is he whom You choose to bring near and to dwell in Your courts; we will be sated with the bounty of Your house, the holiness of Your temple.

6. With awesome deeds of righteousness answer us, O God of our deliverance, O hope of the distant ends of the earth and sea,

7. Who by His strength has formed the mountains, Who is encompassed in power,

8. Who stills the roaring seas, their roaring waves, and 3-the tumult of-3 peoples.

9. Those who dwell at the ends of the world are awed by Your signs; You cause the portals of morning and evening to exult.

10. You watch over the earth and water it; You enrich it greatly, with a god(-like) stream full of water; You form grain for men; truly, indeed, You do form it.

11. Engorge its troughs, its ridges level; with showers You will soften it, its growth You will bless.

12. You have crowned the year with Your bounty; abundance4 will drip in Your paths;

13. the wilderness grasslands will drip; with joy the hills will be girded.

14. The pastures will clothe themselves with flocks; the valleys will drape themselves in grain; they will raise a shout; they will even sing.

Notes

1. Also means “praise is due.”

2. That is, promises made on condition of God’s beneficence will become due, for God is beneficent (as per Malbim).

3. Also means “multitudinous.”

4. Literally, "fatness" as a metaphor.

COMMENTARY

The speaker of Psalm 65 hears sounds that others do not detect. How does one sensitize others to such a phenomenon? The poet of Psalm 65 does so through two parallel journeys, one from silence to song-in-silence, and one from the Temple to the ends of the world and then back to an intimate closeness with the land. Ideally, the reader becomes aware of what he did not hear before.

First Overview

Struck by the daring and poetic creativity of Psalm 65, the reader faces an  initial test. On one hand, the structure is clear, but on the other, the complex connections among the sections only grows more challenging with each rereading. The three nearly equal sections are defined by subject: prayers in the Temple; the scope and power of God’s rule; and the blessings of rain. This division is reinforced by the framing term of the middle section (“awe”), the mention of “God” only in the first verse of each section, and the identical function of the last verse of each section (which reveals the effect of what is described immediately before).

Given the fluidity of tense translation in ancient Hebrew, it is unclear whether the final concentration on rain implies thanksgiving following an actual drought, thanksgiving for rain in principle, or a prayer for rain—all might be intimated. In any case, part of the psalm’s fascination lies in how the three sections are related.

Below I deal, respectively, with poetic aspects of the psalm, the very complex relationship to silence, and the universal scope of God’s influence.

The Poetry of Psalm 65

I choose two verses as examples of the poet’s creativity and then immediately comment on each of the three sections.

Verse 9, “Those who dwell at the ends of the world are awed by Your signs; You cause the portals of morning and evening to cry out in exultation” -  Here the poet expands scope through incremental reference to space and time. God’s central role builds, as focus shifts from human reaction on to God’s direct acts. The “portals” (literally, “going out places”) would seem to be the far East and West (possibly implying heavenly bodies), as anthropomorphism dominates. The “signs” are enticingly vague: are they only the heavenly bodies or also natural phenomena like lightning and thunder?

Verses 13, 14, “… with joy the hills will be girded. The pastures will clothe themselves with flocks; the valleys will drape themselves in grain; they will raise a shout; they will even sing” - The animation of nature intensifies. Here hill and dale don clothes: once clothes of “joy” (a tantalizing second metaphor) and once of the products of the wet year (the grazing sheep and the fields of grain). One almost sees the dots of white on a background of green and the undulating yellows, all enveloped in an aura of delight radiating from the land that is so “clothed.”

God and the Temple (vv. 2–5): God and the Temple dominate the first section. The concentration on God appears from a variety of perspectives. To Him praise is due (v. 2, note). The end of that verse evidently indicates that God, as opposed to pagan deities, is sure to respond to prayers offered as vows. Immediately the psalm goes on to indicate another difference, in that He can hear all (so Kimche) or that He (as opposed to human kings who assign underlings to hear petitions) personally listens to each request (so Malbim). He overcomes sins which man cannot. In every way, praise is indeed “due” Him, and the opening three usages—”to You,” “to You,” and “unto You”—emphasize the point. The locus of all this is the Temple, as stated (and if one accepts parallel terms as a framing device, this section is framed by “Zion” and “Temple”). Prayer, pilgrimage, expiation, and sacrifice are thus all given a geographical focus. Reinforcing the text, the terminology reflects that environment: “chosen” and “brought near” elsewhere refer to those chosen to be priests (Num. 16:5), just as “flesh,” “sin,” “iniquity,” and “expiate” appear elsewhere in relation to sacrifice.

Universal Scope (vv. 6–9) – The second section is tightly structured (a-b-b-a), the two outer verses dealing with the breadth (the ends of the earth) and the two inner verses with God’s daunting acts. It is appropriately framed by the terms “awe” and “ends,” and is set against geographical extremes. The broad scope picks up an earlier isolated reference [“unto You all flesh shall come” (v. 3)] and anticipates the later twin terms “paths” and “wilderness grasslands” [roughly equivalent to our “cities and fields” (vv. 13, 14)], as well as the large geographical expanse of the end of the psalm. It is of note that the poet includes the achievement of righteousness and deliverance (v. 6) within this broad physical framework.

His Bounteous Rain (vv. 10–14): This third section literally flows, as the reader is carried along in a few brief verses from rainfall to verdant pastureland and bountiful crops. This use of abundant water picks up on God’s previous stilling of the seas (v. 8).

Moreover, the poet appropriately connects sections through the use of “power” (vv. 4, 7), “bounty” (vv. 5, 12), “earth” (vv. 6, 10), and “ready” (vv. 7, 10).

The Silence

Since the earliest biblical translations, there have been two understandings of the first phrase (see note). The translation “praise is due” clearly fits the first reading, whereas “silence” reflects the poem's later progression. Granting the poet our own awareness of possibilities, he purposely included both readings. Still, the element of silence (and see Psalm 19 for other reflections on the silent praise of nature) emerges slowly in Psalm 65. The opening parallelism dictates that one first understands the opening phrase as “praise is due.” It is only later that we encounter the subject of sound again.

Inanimate objects make most of the sounds in Psalm 65. (“Answer” in verse 6 is specifically through deeds.) Two stages are involved. First, there are disturbing sounds―the roaring of the seas and the tumult of the peoples. These God stills. In their place, He causes the portals of morning and evening to cry out in exultation and the pastures and valleys to sing aloud. The opening and closing terms of the psalm define its celebration: silence sings.

The poet thus takes us, the readers, on a long journey, and only at the end are we even aware of it. The first term of the poem has slowly evolved to “silence,” as the inaudible sounds of the hills, dales, and heavens eventually burst into a song that is not, but ultimately is, heard.

That Creation bespeaks its Creator is a known contention of the Bible (cf. Amos 4:13; 5:8; 9:5, 6). That it celebrates the Lord (in its reverberating silence) is the contention of Psalm 65, as echoed elsewhere (Isa. 55:12; Pss. 96:12; 98:8).

(We do not know whether most ancients were attuned to this "sound" or, indeed, if moderns are sensitive enough to hear it. In that regard, I note the comments of two interpreters of Psalm 65. “Have we come to… such a reduction of Creation to commodity that we are incapable of speaking this way?” asks Brueggemann. Broyles writes, “This psalm invites us to hear something we have perhaps never heard: Creation ‘singing.’” Unrelated to the psalm, Wordsworth expressed similar concern in his sonnet, "The World is Too Much With Us:" "Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away…")

Ultimately, the poet is working against his own limitations. He works in words, but he can only lead the reader to sensitivity to this unheard sound. He cannot adequately communicate its content. Thus, to God “silence” is praise. The psalm, which began with “silence,” can and does end in a real, yet silent, song.

The Breadth

In Psalm 65 the three movements take place in different locales—the Temple, around the whole world, and across the topography. Never is a tension felt among them, however, and indeed, even to the Temple, “all flesh” comes. The universal scope is dominant, reflected not only in the types of locales, but also in the broad inclusions—land, sea, mountains, peoples, and sky. At the same time, worship in the Temple remains central.

The reader is left to confront the unity of all of this. In terms of the three sections, the penitent of the first seems to find great comfort in a God Who is not only transcendent, but Who also animates nature throughout the earth and sky. Concerning place, while some grant centrality to one locale or the other, I prefer Weiser’s summary, which leaves the relationship as self-contradictory as was early Israelite monotheism: “To have God at one point means to have him in all his fullness.”

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Additional Notes

Some commentators seek to connect the middle section with the international myth, reflected in other parts of the Bible, of Creation through a battle of God against the forces of nature. However, there is no hint of a battle here, and such an assumption is not necessary to appreciate the psalm.

Many commentators seek a specific drought as the occasion on which this psalm was written. Israel is in fact a land of two seasons (dry and wet), which has known many periods of drought, but the reduction of the psalm to a one-time reaction only serves to divert the reader from its poetry. In other words, even if Psalm 65 was written in response to a specific drought, the poet in any case immediately transcended those limitations to create a timeless piece of poetry. Hence (as is the case with many a psalm) any such proposed origin is quintessentially irrelevant.

The author of these essays is Rabbi Benjamin Segal, former president of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and author of The Song of Songs: A Woman in Love (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2009). This material is copyright by the author, and may not be reproduced. If you are interested in using the texts for study groups, please be in direct contact with the author, at psalmblog@gmail.com.

HEBREW TEXT

א) לַמְנַצֵּחַ מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד שִׁיר:

(ב) לְךָ דֻמִיָּה תְהִלָּה אֱלֹהִים בְּצִיּוֹן וּלְךָ יְשֻׁלַּם נֶדֶר:

(ג) שֹׁמֵעַ תְּפִלָּה עָדֶיךָ כָּל בָּשָׂר יָבֹאוּ:

(ד) דִּבְרֵי עֲוֹנֹת גָּבְרוּ מֶנִּי פְּשָׁעֵינוּ אַתָּה תְכַפְּרֵם:

(ה) אַשְׁרֵי תִּבְחַר וּתְקָרֵב יִשְׁכֹּן חֲצֵרֶיךָ נִשְׂבְּעָה בְּטוּב בֵּיתֶךָ קְדֹשׁ הֵיכָלֶךָ:

(ו) נוֹרָאוֹת בְּצֶדֶק תַּעֲנֵנוּ אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׁעֵנוּ מִבְטָח כָּל קַצְוֵי אֶרֶץ וְיָם רְחֹקִים:

(ז) מֵכִין הָרִים בְּכֹחוֹ נֶאְזָר בִּגְבוּרָה:

(ח) מַשְׁבִּיחַ שְׁאוֹן יַמִּים שְׁאוֹן גַּלֵּיהֶם וַהֲמוֹן לְאֻמִּים:

(ט) וַיִּירְאוּ יֹשְׁבֵי קְצָוֹת מֵאוֹתֹתֶיךָ מוֹצָאֵי בֹקֶר וָעֶרֶב תַּרְנִין:

(י) פָּקַדְתָּ הָאָרֶץ וַתְּשֹׁקְקֶהָ רַבַּת תַּעְשְׁרֶנָּה פֶּלֶג אֱלֹהִים מָלֵא מָיִם תָּכִין דְּגָנָם כִּי כֵן תְּכִינֶהָ:

(יא) תְּלָמֶיהָ רַוֵּה נַחֵת גְּדוּדֶהָ בִּרְבִיבִים תְּמֹגְגֶנָּה צִמְחָהּ תְּבָרֵךְ:

(יב) עִטַּרְתָּ שְׁנַת טוֹבָתֶךָ וּמַעְגָּלֶיךָ יִרְעֲפוּן דָּשֶׁן:

(יג) יִרְעֲפוּ נְאוֹת מִדְבָּר וְגִיל גְּבָעוֹת תַּחְגֹּרְנָה:

(יד) לָבְשׁוּ כָרִים הַצֹּאן וַעֲמָקִים יַעַטְפוּ בָר יִתְרוֹעֲעוּ אַף יָשִׁירוּ: