Bible Review

Again following Dahood, I redivide the consonants to read *w‘nw hṣdq, vs. the Masoretic Text’s w‘nwh ṣdq “and humility, justice.”

With a minor modification I follow Dahood, reading *gəbar hôdəkā wahădārəkā hadrēk. The vocalized Hebrew text literally says, “Hero, your glory and your splendor and your splendor,” which is hard to parse as poetry.

To the Freudian fundamentalist, the tongue and the pen are phallic symbols, while cooking and eating symbolize sex. In some contexts, I would agree. But in Psalm 45, the focus is on the sexuality of bridegroom and bride, not the poet. (On some deeper level, admittedly, the psalmist might be competing with the king’s masculinity—but it is hard to be sure without putting the author on the couch.)

The term yədîdōt may also pun with yədûtûn, perhaps a type of song (Psalms 39, 62, 77) but later understood in Nehemiah and Chronicles as a man’s name: Jeduthun.

These Levitical singers are supposed to have authored or transmitted Psalms 42, 44–49, 84–85, 87–88. Archaeological evidence of their existence comes from an eighth-century ostracon from Arad mentioning “Korah’s sons”; see Yohanan Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1981), text 49.2, pp. 180–182.

The vowel points were added to the text in the late first millennium C.E. When confronting a difficult passage, modern scholars often reject this received vocalization and focus on the consonants alone, which are of greater antiquity. A major exponent of this approach to the Psalter was Mitchell Dahood, whose controversial commentary on Psalm 45 has influenced my own readings and reconstructions (Psalms 1:1-50, Anchor Bible 16 [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965], pp. 269–276).

See the fascinating study of Theodor H. Gaster, “Psalm 45,” Journal of Biblical Literature 74 (1955), pp. 239–251.

For citations to texts, see Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, “The Mesopotamian God Image, from Womb to Tomb,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 123:1, p. 147.

Angelika Berlejung, “Washing the Mouth: The Consecration of Divine Images in Mesopotamia,” in The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconicism and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. Karel van der Toorn (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), pp. 45–72.