Psalms (1)—
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Sacrifices: Psalms and the Rigveda
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Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the [four] horns of the altar. Thou art my God, and I will praise thee…. –Psalms 118.27-28 [for archaeological evidence that the horns were four, see van den Born 61]
– Rigveda4.58.3 |
By etymology, sacrifice is a making holy–a person or substance transformed radically,
indeed violently, as a connection between secular and sacred. Sacrifice is a “chaotic”
communication that requires destruction to be sent as if materal order must break
for the spiritual to enter. In the oral milieu, the normal context for communication
was the communal meal. Consequently, slaughter and consumption provided underlying
metaphors for converse with the divine–only metaphors, because the gods are to most
mortals invisible. The contact could assume any form imaginable. Descriptions of
sacrifices vary as to whether the deities eat with their devotees, or eat their devotees,
or are eaten by their devotees, or simply receive foodstuffs as marks of esteem.
These differences are large ones. They show how loose and “chaotic” sacrificial imagery
is. Since any tie to the literal has largely disappeared, images proliferate indefinitely,
not merely from a realistic two to a mythological four horns. Therefore, with Rigveda1.163.11,
all the hairs of the slain horse’s mane become “horns” as well as rays of the sun
(O’Flaherty 89).
Both Psalms and Rigvedacome from border regions: the former from Israel, (between
Mesopotamia and Egypt); the latter from near Taxila, where the invading Aryans adapted
their faith to Indic culture (Mallory 47). Being liminal, the regions were particularly
exposed to international influences, including changing attitudes toward sacrifice.
The Rigvedaand sacrifice are inextricable: “All the hymns of the Rig Veda
are ritual hymns in some sense, since all were sung as part of the Vedic ceremony
[of sacrifice], but some are self—consciously devoted to the meaning of the ritual.
Even here, pride of place is given to the verbal rather than to the physical aspect
of sacrifice, the origins of sacred speech (10.71) and the powers of sacred speech
(10.125) (Flaherty 30 and 59). Hymn 10.90.9 emphasizes the sacrifice per se.
Hymns 7.16.2, 7.26.1, 7.66.8, and 10.105.8 make success in it dependent on the hymns,
while 8.26.16 defines them as the “efficacy” of the sacrifice (Nicolaás 64).
The .Rgveda declares:
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From that original sacrifice, (Rigveda10.90.9; Nicolás 225). |
Samuel E. Balentine remarks in his Prayer in the Hebrew Bible, sacrifice was
for the Jerusalem temple “the principal avenue of communication [with the
Transcendent]” (Balentine 47). Psalms were either accompaniments of sacrifice (e.g.,
66:15 “I offer up fatlings”) or themselves comparable to sacrifices as in Psalm 141:2
“May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be
like the evening sacrifice.” James Kugel and Rowan Greer argue: “Psalms had played
a significant role at cultic sites in Israel long before the Babylonian conquest:
Moves toward the centralization of worship begun in the eighth century deprived provincial
sanctuaries of some of their cultic functions, perhaps leaving prayer and song in
a more central role; and the eventual reduction of these centers, either through
conquest or centralization, may have sent cultic singers thronging to the Jerusalem
sanctuary, causing psalmody there to assume a more prominent role” (Kugel and Greer
24).
The Vedic hymns presume that they and the sacrifice arose together spontaneously at some unspecified period long ago. The notion of such a vague beginning may derive from the very act of listening to scripture. Because of the separation between composition and recitation or reading, the hearers only know that the words must have had some origin, not when, where, or how. The .R gveda, is unusually frank about this uncertainty:
Poets [kavi] seeking in their heart with wisdom found the
bond of existence in non—existence.…Whence this creation has arisen–perhaps it formed
itself, or perhaps it did not–the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven,
only he knows–or perhaps he does not. (.Rgveda 10.129.4,7) (O’Flaherty 25).
All that is certain is that poets must have created or chanelled the Rigvedato be
part of the sacrifice. Language dominates the sacrifice and, in the Psalms, the sacrifice
has slipped so far into the background that commentators seldom notice it.
That pagans read and interpreted Psalms in their own way hardly needs proof, but
the sands of Egypt have preserved some evidences of it, such as a syncretistic version
of Psalm 20 found in demotic characters (Alter 1987, 244). Familiar with sacrificial
themes in the .R gveda, Taxilan Hindus might expect some of the following interrelated
patterns in any hymn:
• empowering words, which, in calling forth the divine presence, provide protection and other supernatural benefits;
• transport of god(s)
to the human world or humans to that of the god(s)–visualized by means of the imagery
in the text
• a godly place of encounter consecrated or even in a psychological sense constructed through language
• the verbal encounter itself–explicitly or implicitly involving sacrifice.
In both scriptures, these four parts of hymnody may receive varying
arrangements and emphases, but they are constituents of the psalter experience: hearing
a poem of sacred communication–a meeting occurring by means of textual power and
promise.
Empowering Words
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I take refuge in the Word as the .Rig Veda.… –Yajur Veda 36.1 (Panikkar 341). |
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When demons attacked him in the form of warriors or beasts, [St.] Antony dispelled them … by chanting scripture, particularly the psalms (Kugel and Greer 194; Life of Antony 39—40). |
Dating back at least to the Rigveda, India also had traditions of the supernal origin and preternatural power of sacred song. Indeed, the very idea of a scriptural hymn–a series of superhumanly authorized words for contacting the spiritual–implies that the text embodies a transcendent empowering of those who devoutly use it. One grammatical form relatively common in the Psalms, for instance, is the precative perfect, desires for the future expressed as if they had occurred in the past: “Its origin is primarily to be explained in terms of the primitive man’s belief in the magic power of the word. The primitive man reasoned that, if he spoke of his wish as already fulfilled, its fulfilment was bound to follow” (Buttenweiser 24). In much Indian thought, those “established in truth” (satyaprati.s.t h—a y—a.m ) can cause their words to come true (e.g., Yoga Sutras 2.36)–a power sometimes also attributed to the saints of Jewish Hasidism. Although not always so magical, psalms are more than merely prayerful; they are sanctioned words of petition, language hoped to be instrumental in gaining one’s desires.
In this respect, they are closer than one might at first think to Indian mantra. Of the latter, the monk and scholar Agehananda Bharati writes, “A mantra is not a prayer; prayer is conveyed in what words the worshipper chooses.… Judeo—Christian tradition is conscious of psalms as petitions, while their instrumental dimension remains unconscious, vestiges of an earlier age that may be glimpsed by comparing Psalms to the Rigveda.
Verses or even whole hymns in the Rigveda are called “mantras.” This is the earliest extant and most formal meaning of the word, presumably the one that yielded all others (Bharati 103-04). By the period of literacy, however, “mantra” came to mean sacred syllables or combinations of them. As Bharati has shown, these syllables seem to derive from the names and attributes of gods (17-120). All the energy that Hinduism distributes throughout a pantheon of mantras, Judaism concentrates in one: the Tetragrammaton (YHWH).
Psalms use and meditate on this Name, so sacred that, eventually, it was only pronounced on the Day of Atonement when the high priest would speak it in the Holy of Holies. At that moment, all the people prostrated themselves on the ground (Blumenthal 75). After Christianity attributed the same honor to the name of Jesus as YHWH, the phrase “Jesus god of the Hebrews” found its way into at least one magical papyrus (Luck 16). Early n Judaism, the name was pronounced daily and clearly, but the priesthood showed increasing reluctance to use it, at one point employing singing to muffle the High Priest’s pronouncing it (Cohen 24-25). As the Isaiah scroll discovered at Qumran attests, some scribes even refused to write it, placing four dots in its place (Shanks 4). In the second century C.E., Pinchas ben Jair said: “In this age the prayer of the Israelites is not heard, because they do not know the shem hammephorash [Name pronounced]; but in the age to come God will reveal it to them” (Dodd 95). “The author of Targum Jonathan to Deuteronomy 32.3 neatly linked the taboo against uttering the Name to that encapsulated in the notion of sacred texts, by asserting that Moses, who did utter the Holy Name, only dared to do so after he had dedicated his mouth with eighty—five letters (which was the minimum quota of letters from a sacred text which had to be inscribed for the parchment on which it was written to defile the hands [i.e., to be taboo, or in modern terms, holy] ….” (Goodman in Bowman and Wolf 100).
This Name of the LORD was traditionally considered a source of supernal power, e.g., in Psalm 54.1 (as the Anchor Bible renders it): “Save me, O God, by thy name….” Similarly, 89.24 proclaims, “through my Name shall he be victorious” and 20.7, “we through the Name of our God are strong” (Dahood 309). Invocation of that Name in the Psalms was itself a manifestation of the Holy. Mitchell Dahood notes that the repeated hypostatization or personification of the Divine Name is more than merely decorative language but arises from an old attitude toward language manifest also in Canaanite theology. In the ancient Middle East, names of gods were beings that themselves had names; thus, one Ugaritic text evokes “Athtart the Name of Baal” (Dahood 1968, 27n9, 127). The Samaritans believed that God’s Name YHWH was “the Angel of the Lord” and was named Kebala (Fossum 157).
In the Gnostic scripture “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” a divine emanation declares:
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I am the voice whose sound is manifold (in Robinson 298). |
In India, the actual names of gods occasionally became so sacred as not to be pronounced.
Thus, in the Chandogya Upanihad, Shamkara says “indha for [the deity]
Indra, because the gods like to be called by indirect names” (Bharati 117). Use of
alternatives to the Tegragrammaton are common in Psalms that are probably later than
the ones that employ it, most notably in 53, almost identical to 14 except for a
very few variations, among them substitution of Elohim for YHWH. Some Kabbalists
chanted the name of God with variant vowel sounds (Kaplan 87-92). And Kabbalah went
even further affirming, “Torah is really the name of God, repeated again and again”
(Kamenetz 190)–a name pursued through letter manipulation and other techniques. Thereby,
one may speak of a proliferation of sacred language in Hebrew, but, in terms of exoteric
expression of that hidden Name, orthodoxy placed extreme limits.
In India, mantras assumed a greater richness and complexity than any surviving phonetic magic from the ancient Middle East; thus Indian sacred language embodies directions the linguistic notions underlying Psalms might have taken except for monotheistic restraints. According to Rigveda1.147.4, seventy million primary and countless secondary mantras exist.
At one level, the idea of mantras as magic sounds resembles Kabbalistic assumptions about the Hebrew alphabet as preserving the supernatural phonemes with which God created the universe. D. N. Bose and H. L Haldar have defined Indian mantra as “sacred letters to be recited at the time of spiritual exercise” (132, 223). Being preliterate in origin, Indian mantras are, of course, not literally letters, but as divisions of speech less by denotation than sound, they are precursors of the alphabet. Mantras are bija, seed syllables (sounds that generate magic effects) or arrangements of them, the prestige of Sanskrit scripture extending to its very phonemes (Bharati 103). In its fascination with mysteriously arranged elements of language, the notion of Rigvedic poems as “mantras,” preternaturally ordered sonic elements, is analogous to the structural function of the Hebrew alphabet in some psalms.
According to Guthrie(191), Psalm 119 is the original end of the
psalter. As a linguistic summation of it, 119 praises the Torah in terms of the alphabet.
In the first stanza, every couplet begins with the first letter, and so on throughout
the twenty—two letters of Hebrew. Other acrostics include 37, 111, 112, 119. In Psalms
25 and 34, a line commencing with the letter pe occurs after the acrostic ones. Thus,
“Aleph, Lamed, and Pe [appear] at beginning, middle, and end [of the poem] … to refer
to the name of the first letter of the alphabet [i.e. Al*ph]” (Fitzgerald 1:243.)
(David Noel Freedman finds significant that the Bible of Nehemiah had twenty—three
books, numbering the same as these twenty—three letter acrostics.) During a later
period, the canon had twenty—four books, the number of letters in the Greek alphabet,
perhaps reflecting Hellenistic influence on Judaism. (Alexandrian grammarians divided
the Homeric epics into one book for each letter of the Greek alphabet, used as numbers
for those sections.) Josephus, faced with that twenty—four part canon, argued that
scripture should consist of exactly twenty—two books to equal the number of letters
in the Hebrew alphabet. (Freedman 39).
In overall organization, numerology characterizes both Psalms and the Rigveda. The
latter consists of eight Astakas (Octads), each with eight chapters, yielding the
same magic number (sixty four) that divides the I Ching. As evidenced by a
Qumran fragment “dating to the turn of the Christian era,” the Hebrew Psalter at
least that early attained a five-part arrangement modeled on the Pentateuch–a way
of declaring itself to be not a random collection of folksongs but divinely ordered
composition (Dahood 1965, xxxi;. Ceresko 225). In both Psalms and the .R gveda, a
tension exists between the magic number behind the collection and the sprawling heterogeneousness
of it. According to findings at Qumran, for some Jewish sects “the Psalter was open—ended
well into the first century C.E.” (SANDERS 1987, 12).
Contrasted with the number mysticism to which Dante’s Divina Commedia rigorously
adheres in its organization, Psalms and the Rigveda seem to have imposed the arrangement
on earlier materials. Indeed, the Rigveda has an alternate organization of ten Mandalas
(of extent as unequal as the Ashtakas (Saraswati x-xi.
This does not mean that the imposed organizations are unimportant.
Rather, they testify to a common assumption that scriptures must be microcosms of
a seemingly “chaotic” world within which a hidden, mysterious order may be discovered.
Thus, the supernal qualities of hymns may derive both from their oral (mantric) enunciation
or literary (numerological) arrangement. Self—reflexively, both the Rigveda and Psalms
repeatedly allude to the idea that underlies them: communication between the human
and divine, but it is in the former work oral, in the latter written. For instance,
six of the psalms are designated miktam, “an inscription on a stone slab.”
(Dahood 41). Writing plays a significant role in imagery, as in 56.9:
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Write down my lament yourself, (Dahood 1968, 40). |
These lines allude to the pervasive motif of a divine book, as in 139.16: “in thy
book all my members were written” or 69.28 “Let them be blotted out of the book of
the living, and not be written with the righteous.” “The … idea of a book of destinies
or fates in which the allotted days and assigned end of human history are written
down was known, as art and textual evidence shows, in ancient Babylonia, Egypt, Greece,
Rome….” Graham 1987, 50. If we were trying to establish a simple equivalence between
degree of literacy and reluctance to perform sacrifices, this contrast between the
two works would be most relevant.
There is, however, no absolute division between the works’ genre. The Rigveda consists of Mandalas, microcosmic emblems of the universe, not entirely disimilar to the idea of a Divine Book. Moreover, also like a book, the Rigveda, through its imagery, is both seen and heard. It consists of sacred verses (R c) which signify both shining and singing (Muller 66). Furthermore, manuscript writing is not in all ways as far from orality as printing. Take for instance, Psalm 87.4, 6: “I shall inscribe Rahab and Babylon among those who acknowledge me;… Yahweh will write down in the register of the peoples, “this one was born there [in Zion]” (Dahood 1968 298.). In other words, when all the peoples of the world revere God, He will change his census record to show that they all were born in Jerusalem. Unlike a printed text, his manuscript register is easily revised, like the spoken word that can be instantly retracted. This mutability is essential to Psalms, a principal theme of which is divine forgiveness, impossible if God’s book of past, present, and future is static. Comparably, the Rigveda concerns sacrifices that “purify” (e.g. pun—i tana in 1.1.15.2), the cleansing liquid that accomplishes this implicitly likened to language with the metaphor of flowing speech (e.g. dhen—a in 1.1.2.3) (Pandit 21).
How very different religion might have been if it had begun in a Calvinist, post—Gutenbergian period, with the divine plan for the universe seeming as immutable as print. Rather, the ages of orality and even to some extent of manuscripts seemed more susceptible to divine revision and magical changes. For the .R gveda, truth is .r ta, reality constituted by the power of hymn and accompanying sacrificial ritual. .R ta is personified as the deity Mitra, a name related to mithra (contract)–truth as an agreement, a verbal covenant between divine and human like that which underlies the Hebrew scriptures. In later Indian religion and philosophy, truth gradually becomes dharma, timeless principles.
Like the Rigveda, psalms present “truth” largely in terms of‘aman (believe), e.g., ‘emeth (true, faithful) and ‘emuwnah (truth, faithfulness). The inherent idea is of truth arising from faithfulness between man and God. We still speak of being “true” in this sense of loyal (i.e., true to a cause), but the supposedly timeless, objective principles of scientific “truth” have largely replaced the assumption that Truth is a covenant that shifts as human derilictions violate it. In the Rigveda and Psalms, however, since that covenantal Truth was the only one imagined, the True, the Real–Reality itself seemed imperiled by sin.
Not the impersonal precision with which “signs” represent their “objects,” but the personal relationship between man and God dominates biblical truth. Psalm 119.151 parallels truth with proximity to God: “Thou [art] near, O LORD; and all thy commandments [are] truth.” The commandments form part of the covenant connecting YHWH with His people. Typically, Psalm 43.3 says, “O send out thy light and thy truth: let them lead me; let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles.” The poem personifies “light” and “truth,” metonymies for the holy text.
Even scientific “truth” may bring power, but the divine Word is a living presence like a guardian, patron, or friend. In the Rigveda, it is often the goddess V—a c (language). Hymn 10.125.3—6 praises her as the means of action, the very being in which humanity dwells. The idea is perhaps reminiscent of the recent notion about language as our prisonhouse, regulating all our experiences. Yet V—a c is a person and the Rigveda presumes linguistic experience to be radically personal: “A man that abandons a friend who has learned with him no longer has a share in speech. What he does hear he hears in vain, for he does not know the path of good action.” (10.71.6; O’Flaherty 61). Particularly when the modern or postmodern “prisonhouse” implies solitary confinement, it has as its paradigm private and silent reading.
The Rigveda imagines instead public recital, a community learning
together. So integral to education is this group that fragmentation of it deprives
what is learned of meaning. In some ways, this acute awareness of the social dimensions
of communications is far from naive, but, in its personifying speech, it sounds animistic,
magical, or at least alien to modernist presumtions that language can depict the
world objectively. According to ancient aurality, voices always underly words, bringing
with them a social context, albeit one combining beings from both Heaven and earth.
In Judaic tradition chief of these voices is Hokhma, the goddesslike personification
of wisdom. She appears most vividly in Ecclesiasticus 24.3: “I came forth from the
mouth of the Most High, And like a mist covered the earth.”
Proverbs 8-9 already depicted her as “pervad[ing] every corner of the cosmos, … [and holding] all things … together”–like V—a c (Guthrie 186). But if Reality is shaped by a language that reflects the vicisitudes of living personality, only at some very deep level is the cosmos unified. Behind V—a c subsists Brahman, behind Hokhma YHWH. But the very act of imagining these female superbeings as intermediaries suggests a divided universe.
The religious images constitute no single, consistent monomyth but are combined in diverse poetic ways. In Ecclesiasticus 24.8—11, Hokhma is a tree of life bearing fruit for the people of Jerusalem. Also in Psalm 1.3, a simile has as an immortal tree the transformed body of the people who read the Torah day and night. In Psalm 19, “There is no speech nor language” that lacks Heaven’s praise of God. In some unstated manner, this hymnody is related to the Torah, deemed the source of wisdom and life. The Gnostic “Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth” gives its own literate version of the relationship of hymn and scripture: “What is proper is your praise that you will sing to God so that it might be written in this imperishable book” (in Robinson 325). The purpose of the praise is creating a book, which will record YHWH’s hidden name:
| a —o ee —o —e—e—e —o—o—o iii —o—o—o—o ooooo —o—o—o—o—o uuuuuu —o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o —o—o |
It is an exploration of mantric sound worthy of India.
In the Rigveda, Vac assumes various forms such as a cow (1.164.40) and many other personalized entities are related to sacred language (e.g., B.rhaspati, patron of inspired poets) (O’Flaherty 62n1). Allegedly aware of only one fourth of language, humanity gives to that portion the names of gods: “They call it Indra, Mitra, Varun a, Agni and Garutm— an (Sun), the heavenly bird. Of the One the singers chant in many ways; They call it Agni, Yama, Ma tari´s van.” (1.164.46; Nicolás 205). This pluralism is perhaps inherent in language itself: “It is by their words that the poets/ Pronounced to be manifold what is Only One.” (1.164.46; Nicolás 139). Such pluralism forms a correlary of inspired language. Magic assumes one word for each thing, its true name, but that nomenclature is hidden in proliferating synonyms. Although sacred language exceeds the ordinary control of humanity, scriptures employ it. The “wise singers” of the Rigveda know all levels of language (1.164.45) and Yahweh inspires the psalms of David. The empowering language of inspired hymns brings one into the very Presence of the DIvine.
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