“The psalms are all poems of the lyric kind, that is, adapted to music, but with great variety in the style of composition.—Some are simply odes, elegiac, or pathetic, or moral; but a great proportion of them are a sort of dramatic ode, consisting of dialogues between persons sustaining different characters. These persons are frequently the Psalmist himself, or the chorus of Priests and Levites opening the ode with an introduction declarative of the subject; and sometimes closing the whole with a solemn admonition. Sometimes Jehovah himself speaks; and Christ, in his incarnate state, is personated either as a priest, or as a king, or sometimes as a conqueror; and in those psalms in which he is introduced in this latter character, the resemblance is very remarkable to the warrior on the white horse in the book of Revelations.
“If this idea were kept in the mind,” continued my uncle, “it would greatly conduce to the right understanding of the psalms; and any reader, of ordinary penetration, would easily perceive to what speakers the different parts of the dialogue belonged.”
My uncle read to us, as an example, the twenty-fourth psalm, from Bishop Horsley’s translation. “It opens,” he says, “with a chorus, proclaiming the divinity of Jehovah, the creator and Lord of the universe. It then describes in questions and answers, sung by different voices, the sort of righteousness which consists not in ceremonial observances, but in clean hands and a pure heart. And the song concludes with a prediction of the Messiah, under the image of the entry of Jehovah into his temple.”
Chorus.
1. To Jehovah belongeth the earth and all that therein is.
The world and its inhabitants.
2. For he hath founded it upon the seas;
And upon the floods hath established it.
First Voice.
3. Who shall ascend the mountain of Jehovah,
And who shall stand within the precincts of his sanctuary?
Second Voice.
4. The clean in hand, and pure in heart,
Who hath not carried his soul to vanity,
And hath not sworn to the deceiving of his neighbour: