Relocating To Elfland

A few posts ago I suggested (following Geerhardus Vos and Stephen Dempster) that the Psalter, while certainly useful in individual devotional piety, has also an important “second face”; it has not only an individual/devotional aspect but also a historical/eschatological one. I’d like to begin unpacking that now, starting with some observations about the first two Psalms, which Dempster calls “the doorway into the Psalter.”

Psalm 1 begins with the memorable words, “Blessed is the man.” Psalm 2 ends with the promise, “Blessed are all.” Already a kind of inclusio becomes visible, tying the two Psalms together, as well as a progression from what is basically individual blessedness to something more universal in scope. Here, too, we confront a contextual question: what would this word “blessed” have communicated to Old Testament readers in their historical and theological context?

Fundamentally, “blessedness” is the opposite of “cursedness” in the Old Testament. Adam was cursed; Abraham was blessed. This polarity of human conditions frames the entire canon of the Old Testament: the direction of canonical history is toward salvation from Adam’s cursed estate. It is not over-reading the text of Psalms 1 and 2 to say that, for their original readers, the promise “blessed is/are” was richly freighted with Abrahamic connotations.

This illuminates a number of things in Psalm 1 in particular. The living tree language in verse 3 harks back to Eden, the garden of God, and the rivers pouring out of Eden into the world. There is a way back into the garden-sanctuary of God: it is found by meditating/delighting in the Torah of God (v. 2). It is important to note here that Torah was much more than precepts, statutes, and judgments; it was the entire teaching or instruction delivered by Moses, including the patriarchal narratives, the history of Israel in Egypt and beyond, the account of the organizing of Israel into a “congregation of the righteous,” and the promises concerning the land of Canaan. The saint of old who lived out of this rich revelation through Moses, who believed the promises to Abraham and looked with Abraham (now through the full lens of Mosaic revelation) to Messiah to come, would flourish among God’s people as a dweller in the new Eden. The book of Proverbs speaks of such living in terms of the “fear of the Lord” – the beginning of wisdom and the antithesis of the scoffing of the wicked. Here in Psalm 1 it is described as not walking in the counsel of the wicked, nor standing in the way of sinners, nor sitting in the seat of scoffers (v. 1).

Psalm 1, then, is all about inheriting the land, which is the same thing as inheriting the new Eden. It is all about living by faith and thus entering into the blessedness of Abraham, over against the accursedness of Adam. Psalm 2, however, opens up a massive further dimension to all of this. I will explore that in the next post.