Noah (Psalms)

Psalms 29 and 93: The Flood Psalms

Two of the psalms seem particularly appropriate to the Torah portion in which we read the story of the Flood. Psalm 29 and Psalm 93 are both filled with water imagery, and especially of the sense of might and grandeur felt in torrents of water, which in turn reflect God’s might in the flood. Both of these are familiar from liturgy for Shabbat: the former is the last of the six psalms recited in the first part of Kabbalat Shabbat, as well as being sung (among Ashkenazim) when returning the Sefer Torah to the ark on Shabbat morning; the latter is the Levitic psalm recited every Friday, as well as appearing at the very end of Kabbalat Shabbat. Even the musical setting with which Psalm 29 (Mizmor le-David) is sung in the synagogue express some of this sense of grandeur and awe, whether in the classic Germanic-cantorial tradition, in that of Sephardic Jews, or in the Israeli style of unison singing.

Psalm 29 begins with an invocation addressed of the b’nei elim to worship God, to render unto Him “glory and strength,” to honor His Name, and to worship and prostrate themselves before Him. It is unclear who is addressed by this phrase. Literally, the phrase means “the sons of gods.” Are these angelic or other heavenly beings? Creatures of celestial origin who live upon the earth among human beings, as in Genesis 6:2-4? Or, as in a midrashic reading, a poetic expression referring to the Jewish people, who are “sons of the mighty ones,” namely, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?

In any event, there follows a description of God’s might as seen as in a storm, whose sheer power is felt among the mighty trees in the deep forest, in the desert, and in causing the deer to calve. The phrase Kol Hashem, “the Lord’s voice,” heard in the thunder, appears repeatedly. Following this description, the scene returns to His worshippers: “and in his sanctuary all say, ‘Glory!.’” The response to this impressive natural scene is awe-struck adoration. (The final verse, “The Lord shall give strength to His people, the Lord shall bless His people with peace,” is so familiar to us from our prayers that we do not realize that is in fact unrelated to what precedes it. In point of fact, quite a number of psalms conclude with verses of a national character, invoking blessings upon the Jewish people, or upon Jerusalem and/or the Land, that are seeming non sequiturs. Thus, for example, Psalms 3, 12, 14, 36, 51, 53 and many others. Dr. Osnat Zinger of Tel Aviv University drew my attention to this phenomenon).

The penultimate verse seems emblematic: “The Lord sat enthroned upon the flood, and the Lord shall sit enthroned forever.” We have here mythic imagery: a primordial flood whose waters covered the earth, with God in the end sitting “enthroned” upon that flood. Is the flood alluded to here that of Noah, or the primordial Flood that preceded creation? Genesis 1 begins with a picture of the earth in a state of tohu vavohu, covered with water, and God’s spirit hovering over the water. In essence, the act of Creation is one of making order out of chaos, and particularly of subduing the primordial waters and placing limits upon them. This is the labor of the second and the third day of Creation; it is that described in Psalm 104:5-9, in Job 38:8-11, and elsewhere.

By extension, the Flood described in this week’s parsha is not simply a means of destroying evildoers by drowning, but was specifically chosen as a kind of return of the earth to the status quo ante. God regrets that he made man, and decides to destroy everything that He has made along with him—land animals, insects, and birds (Gen 6:6-7); the destruction is affected, simply by releasing the tight rein which he had placed upon the primordial waters, which confined to a certain delimited, circumscribed place.

Interestingly, this motif appears in one of the piyyutim for Yom Kippur, describing the suffering of the Ten Martyrs of the Hadrianic persecutions, great Torah scholars who were subjected to excruciatingly painful deaths. When the angels see this, asking God “Is this the Torah and this its reward?,” God answers, “Silence, or I will return the world to water….” That is, their claim is just, but it must not be evoked if they want the world to continue, for God is likely to return the world to its pre-Creation chaos.

Psalm 93 begins with an evocation of God’s majesty. “The Lord reigns; He is robed in majesty, girded with strength.” It too hearkens back to Creation: “He has established the earth, it shall never be moved”—perhaps in contrast to a world that would have been built upon the turbulence and instability of water, that could easily be moved or shaken. Against that majestic orderliness, “the floods [or: rivers; neharot) have lifted up their voices,” and even their “roaring” or “crushing power” (dakhyam). Hence, as in the previous psalm, there is more than a hint of the struggle between the forces of chaos, the power of water to crush and dissolve everything that lays in its path, and the majesty of God, who subdues the flood. “Greater than the thundering water, greater than the waves of the sea, the Lord is mighty on high…”

Interestingly, some Bible critics have noted a striking similarity between these psalms and certain Babylonian and Canaanite hymns, which evoke the pagan gods in relation to the subduing the waters of the flood. If so, what we have here is an example of pagan motifs turned to monotheistic purposes. To my mind, this in no sense detracts from the power, beauty, or holiness of these psalms. To the contrary, the literary motifs of, say, the Flood and the struggle with chaos (whether depicted as as abstraction or, as in pagan religion, personified as Yam, Tiamat, and so on), which were part of the general cultural milieu in which our ancestors lived, are here turned about to the service of the central message of Judaism: that the One God transcends the multiplicity of divinities and powers, to reign alone, exclusive, “above” the Flood. (The lesson regarding our relation to secular Western culture is, I think, obvious).