[Image above is Psalm II in Hebrew]
Psalm II in the book was already confusing to me when we were assigned the reading for the weekend. Once we re-read it in class and broke it down slowing, I started to understand what it was saying. Being given this extremely old version of it made it even more confusing. The meaning from what we know today may have changed slightly from how American’s first read it.
To the people in America first being given the opportunity to read the psalms, this was probably very powerful. To us, today, this version is just very confusing. If I would have just started reading this psalm without first reading the version by Alter, I would have had no idea what was going on what so ever.
Many of the words from this first version aren’t really even used today in the English language such as, in the fifth line “vex them fuddenlie.” Until I found out that the f’s means s… I was totally lost. It’s interesting that words like vex, yee, begot, etc. are rarely if ever seen in the English language currently. How intriguing it is to think about how so many words become unnecessary in today’s ever expanding language.
Today, we know that when the psalm speaks of the King, we understand that to mean the actual King on earth that rules over a particular area. A large difference I noticed was that the ‘lord’ referred to in the old version of the psalm corresponds to the ‘LORD’ in Alter’s book. This version of LORD is much more powerful and noticeable than the lord written in the first version. The word ‘lord’ can also be mistaken for a lord (king) of the earth, since a lord is another word for king; the LORD is unmistakable. Also, the name God is written in the old version while (I don’t believe) God is at all written in the edition today.
As seen through out the beginning of Alter’s book, today lord or God is now written either LORD or YHWN. This is very interesting to me since YHWN is not actually pronounced. I never knew that when YHWN is written, instead you say Adonai. What an amazing learning for me in class to try and understand that that single word means you say something completely different; hard concept to have my brain comprehend at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning. :/
The difference between this first version and the version we are reading in class in astounding. To see how far these psalms have come to make them interpretable for people of today’s standards. Though it took me quite awhile to understand what in the hell I was supposed to be understanding and writing about for today’s post, trying to read this old edition out loud to myself so I could attempt to fully comprehend it was actually kind of fun.
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