An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 118: Meditations about Meditations (Psalms 111-115)

Psalms 111-115
Meditations about Meditations.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Psalms 111

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments: his praise endureth for ever.”

This is a short psalm, and one that succinctly tells the listener why God is great and why you should worship Him, even if, to my mind, the arguments are perhaps a bit circular. The last verse, the one quoted above, caught my eye though. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom makes a good saying, and it’s almost Islamic in its sentiment – that a person can never know true wisdom until they accept the presence of a power above themselves.

Actually, you could take that further. It’s not that many steps removed from Buddhist meditation, the concept of the loss of self leading to enlightenment. I found an interesting snippet on the religions section of the BBC website, that Muslim prayer is not a supplication to God, not like many of the sentiments expressed in the psalms here asking God to help the person praying (or someone on their behalf). Rather, the set pattern of words and movement involved, the requirement to do so at set times no matter what else one is doing; the serve as reminders of the lack of importance of the self in comparison to God. Again, there is not much of a difference between that and, say, the set prayer times of Christian monks. Nor is there a vast separation from the likes of yoga.

It seems that there are two levels of understanding to religious thought – the simplistic version with the wish-granting sky-monster, and the deeper concept of a broader consciousness outside of the self. Now, I’m still leaning towards the sensation of enlightenment, or knowledge of God, or however you wish to define it, as having a biochemical source (I can still recall the weird dislocation I felt during fever dreams in my regular bouts of otitis media as a child, the sense of everything being simultaneously tiny and huge). This does not diminish the significance that worshippers attach to such a sense; in fact I find it a fascinating concept.

Psalms 112

“Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness: he is gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous.”

Another short psalm, this one deals less so with God and more with the worshipper, discussing rewards that will accrue from a righteous life, but also what this entails. “A good man sheweth favour, and lendeth: he will guide his affairs with discretion”, for example. I quite like the sentiment that the righteous should not “fear evil tidings” or be afraid if he trusts in God. I guess this is a little comforter prayer.

Psalms 113

“From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the LORD'S name is to be praised.”

Another short psalm, seems to be a rash of them and the size and metre is quite similar for these last three. This one is another set of reasons to worship God, but unlike Psalm 111 this one is pitched at quite a human level. Not only are the poor and downtrodden lifted up, but barren women are made fertile. Lacking many of the metaphysical overtones of Psalm 111 there’s less to discuss, although note the similarity to the quoted verse and the Cenotaph prayer – “At the going down of the sun, and its rising, we will remember them”.

Psalms 114

“The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs.”

Another tiny psalm. This one specifically seems to deal with, not the parting of the Red Sea but of the River Jordan when the Israelites fled Egypt. And also what sounds like an earthquake, but also the production of a spring from the rocks. Other psalms that have recounted miracles during the Exodus have tended to list the entire run, so it’s unusual to find a very specific event. There’s a thematic pairing here; the waters run dry, and the rocks produce water. Expect help from unexpected sources, perhaps?

Psalms 115

“They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not:”

After a run of tiny psalms we get a slightly lengthier one, which makes good use of rhetoric devices. It starts by condemning the idols of heathens with examples of why they are inferior (see quote above for example, the psalm runs on this theme for several verses). Returning to my thoughts for Psalm 111, on the various levels of understanding of God, I think the anti-idolatry stance given here indicates another step of remove. The danger with idols, so the reasoning goes, is that the worshippers see the statue as actually being the god, rather than a representation. Some probably do, or rather this in itself is a simplification – the god is incarnated in its idol when a worshipper prays to it, but the idol is not considered to be the god. Possibly, with the various references to sacred groves, the Israelites were facing an animistic religion where, perhaps, certain trees or landscape features were viewed as the dwelling places of gods but even then I think that the concept that the tree is the god, or the rocky outcrop is the god is still an over-simplification. Still, if you want to condemn a practice, simplifying it and misunderstanding it is a good place to start.

The rest of the psalm deals with the benefits of worshipping a “proper” God, and again there is some nice rhetoric work with the repetition of “he is their help and shield” as a chorus-like structure. Interesting here is the line that “the dead praise not the Lord”, which shows that at the time this was written there was no concept of “life everlasting” or “eternal glory” after death. “Heaven” in this psalm is used solely to mean the domain of God, in the lands above, as opposed to the earth, domain of man. There is no sense, here, of it also being a kind of afterlife.