Psalms...: Why is there a whole book of the Bible written as songs?

Why does God choose to speak through songs?

Genre and impact

Different types of writing impact readers in different ways. We teach kids this in school. Those of us who are primary school teachers know that students need to understand what the “aim” or “impact” of their writing should be. For example:

Factfile = to inform

Advert = to persuade

Fable = to teach a moral

I believe that the best communicator ever is God. He must be. He made us, he invented language, and he created all the things which words can refer to. His factfiles would be the most informative, his adverts the most persuasive and his fables would most clearly and thought-provokingly teach their morals.

But what would songs do? What impact do they achieve? And what would a collection of songs which God has inspired likely aim at?

Clues from the start of the Psalms

Psalm 1 tells us what the “blessed man” avoids (1:1) and then what he does (1:2). This is the positive side: the things the blessed man does do:

1. his delight is in the law of the Lord,
2. and on his law he meditates day and night.

Both of these things relate to the law: probably referring to the law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, and all that God has revealed about himself and his plan of salvation through those books.

And there are two ways to respond to this law which will lead to blessing:

1. delight
2. meditating day and night

Emotions and memory. These are also, incidentally, two big contenders for why people might write songs. We write songs to convey emotions, and then those songs get stuck in our heads. I’ll probably write more about memorising at a later stage, as Psalm memorisation is a big passion of mine. But from now on, in this post I’ll focus on the first half of Psalm 1:2, which deals with emotions.

Patterns from popular songs

When people write songs, it is usually because they are getting across something of their personal emotional experience. Sure, people can write autobiography to simply narrate, chronicle or curate their personal experience, but songs in particular help to focus on emotions.

Have a think about the contrast between these texts:

I had a terrible time with my ex-boyfriend. He treated me really badly in the last few months, now that I look back at it. In hindsight, I'm so glad that we broke up.

WE are NEVER! EVER! EVER! Getting back together!

The content of these is fairly similar, but the emotional impact is very different. The text on the right (which most will recognise as Taylor Swift) has an immediacy about it. You know what the singer is feeling straight away. In fact, you know what she’s feeling instinctively in far greater detail than you can probably explain. If you were to put into words what Taylor Swift’s emotions are in that song, it would probably take quite a lot of words: there’s anger, but there’s also defiance, which makes the anger almost something that’s being celebrated, as a wronged party rejoices in their independence and ability and resolution to take their decisions into their own hands. Even that doesn’t completely balance the different shades of emotion that we all hear in an instant as soon as this song comes on…

Similarly, moving from Taylor Swift to Ed Sheeran:

You are excellent and I am confident of our enduring love.

And darling, I will be loving you ‘til we’re seventy.

There is something different that a basic illustration can achieve compared to a sincere statement. Added to that, some level of poetic symmetry (I, you) and phonetic similarity (darling, loving; will, ‘til) conveys the simplicity, happiness and security of the feelings being conveyed.

Or to go to yet another famous song of the last few years:

I am actually better equipped to buy gifts for myself than you.

I can buy myself flowers, Write my name in the sand…

As the singer rejoices in her independence, we hear her mood so clearly and can instantly empathise with her emotions.

Emotional insights

Songs convey emotions. They do so with succinctness: they often get across within seconds what a huge sweep of narrative would take much longer to do. And they also do so for a sustained period: they can maintain this mood for minutes without boring the audience with a need to move on to something new.

We would expect, then that God would choose to use psalms to help us to understand different emotions. What was that guy really going through? What does it really feel like to experience some big spiritual concept like forgiveness or persecution or repentance? Narrative might describe these events from the outside, but song is more likely to express them from within: to help us empathise more clearly.

Song has many of the generic benefits of poetry, in that it evokes the imagination with its appeal to illustrations. But song can benefit us especially when we need to see some particular person’s inner world, rather than just illustratively understanding a concept of event.

Not “praying” but “singing” the Psalms

This might help us with the huge historical discussion about how we can “pray” the Psalms. Rather than “pray” all the psalms, may I suggest that a better aim would be to “sing” all the psalms?

Firstly, Psalms are not all prayers. Psalm 37, as just one example, is simply not addressed to God, so should not be considered a prayer. Some Psalms are specifically called “prayers” but most are not, and even those that are (for example Psalm 17) do not especially obviously invite us to pray them.

Secondly, songs tell us really well about other people’s emotional experiences, not necessarily our own. Even when we are in a very happy relationship, we can sing along with Taylor Swift and momentarily know exactly what it feels like to gloat over a disrespectful ex. Even when we are unhappily single, we can momentarily feel the security of Ed Sheeran’s love for subject of his song.

Yes, we sometimes resonate with songs particularly well. We will want to sing about buying ourselves flowers particularly if we are feeling hurt by a break-up. Similarly, some Psalms will resonate with us much more that others at different points.

But isn’t the wonder of Psalms how they can take us to different places than we would naturally go on our own? Through the Psalms, we can feel things that we would never normally feel. And we can get to know inner worlds that would otherwise be alien to us.

What’s the benefit of getting to know the inner worlds of other people? It would have to depend on who those people were. But that would need another post…

 

 

 

Addendum on notation: Incidentally, it is interesting that God has preserved for us the fact that these songs were sung, but has not told us how they were originally sung, by Moses, David, Asaph or the other psalmists. Even that shows God’s wisdom in what he chooses to, and chooses not to communicate. If you have ever listened to music from a culture that you are completely unfamiliar with, you will know that different cultures express the same sorts of emotions using wildly different musical techniques. Believers in each generation and in each culture will benefit from reading psalms very carefully to discern their emotional content, and then making culturally appropriate choices about how to set these words to music which matches that content.

Addendum on musical examples: Some might question this post’s use of songs written very recently. Perhaps the functions of songs in the twenty-first century differ to songs thousands of years ago. I have chosen not to go into too much musicological detail in order to make this post more accessible to a wider range of people, however I could have made a similar case with a much broader historical and cultural evidence base. For example, much folk music can also be described as functionally helping the hearer to empathise with the emotions presented singer of the words.