Gordon Wenham’s ebook, The Psalter Reclaimed: Praying and Praising with the Psalms is free this month (November 2021).
I’ve learned heaps from Wenham about understanding the Old Testament in context. Particularly, his commentaries on Genesis (2 volumes, WBC) and Leviticus (NICOT) and Numbers (TCOT) are so insightful, and Story as Torah: Reading Old Testament Narrative Ethically (T&T Clark, 2000) makes sense of difficult passages.
In this book, he guides us to the Psalms, showing us how to:
- celebrate the God revealed in the Psalms
- present our needs to him
- read Psalms in the context of the whole story of Scripture
- understand Psalms in light of the Messiah
- apply the ethics of the Psalms
- handle the imprecatory Psalms
He then pulls it all together with a specific example from Psalm 103, before the final chapter on how the other nations fit with the Psalms.
Do you treat the Psalms as stand-alone songs? Or were they assembled in a meaningful way, so that one Psalm relates to the others around it? How do you read them in context?
Chapter 7 shows how. From Psalm 103: The Song of Steadfast Love:
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