The Thursday Psalm

Read it before you read anything I say about it.

We were in Melbourne, visiting friends, and travelling had put my reading out of its usual place in the day. Late in the afternoon, on the ferry home to Devonport, I sat with my wife in the lounge and caught up on the day’s reading.

Psalm 81 was the psalm set down for the day. I stopped at the heading.

According to The Gittith. I did not know the word. We had been talking recently about the different kinds of psalm, the words that sit above the first line, so I went to the glossary on this site to look it up. It was not there.

That is the whole of it. A man on a ferry, catching up on his reading, stopped by a word in a heading and going to his own glossary to find it missing.

Gittith is a dead end. It appears above three psalms — 8, 81 and 84 — and nobody knows what it means. It may come from gat, a winepress, and the Greek translators took it that way. It may be a tune or an instrument from Gath. It may be something else entirely. The lexicons say so plainly, which I did not expect; I had assumed the answer existed and I simply had not learnt it.

But looking for it, I found something else.

Psalm 81 is the psalm for Thursday.

Not Thursday this year, or Thursday in a lectionary somewhere. Every Thursday. It has been the Thursday psalm since the Temple, and it is still said on Thursday mornings in synagogues now. There are seven of them, one for each day of the week:

• Sunday — Psalm 24The earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof.
• Monday — Psalm 48Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God.
• Tuesday — Psalm 82God has taken his place in the divine council.
• Wednesday — Psalm 94O LORD, God of vengeance, shine forth.
• Thursday — Psalm 81Sing aloud to God our strength.
• Friday — Psalm 93The LORD reigns; he is robed in majesty.
• Sabbath — Psalm 92A psalm. A song for the Sabbath.

Seven psalms out of a hundred and fifty, fixed to the days, said every week.¹

Fifty-two times a year. And it does not reset — a Jewish man who says the morning prayers from his bar mitzvah to his old age will have said Psalm 81 something over three thousand times.

Not read it. Said it, out loud, standing in a room with other people, most of it from memory, on an ordinary Thursday with nothing else marking the day.

Reading them twice a year is not the same as knowing them.

I have a reading plan of my own. In recent years I have read all hundred and fifty psalms twice a year — every psalm, in order, nothing skipped. I have thought of that as thorough, and in one sense it is. Psalm 81 has come round in it more than once. It went past.

I have been a Christian since 1981. I could count on two hands the number of times I have read this psalm, and until that afternoon on the ferry I could not have told you a single thing about it.

I could have read over this Psalm and thought nothing about it. A Jewish person can’t.

Go back to the seven and read down them.

The earth belongs to God. He has put himself in a city. He stands among the judges and tells them they will die like men. How long shall the wicked exult. Would that my people would listen. The LORD reigns, and the floods have lifted up their voice. It is good to give thanks.

Three of the seven are about justice — who owns the world, who is failing to judge it rightly, and how long the wicked will get away with it. One is God’s grief that his own people will not hear him. Only the last is quiet.

They are not seven comfortable psalms. There is no Psalm 23 in the list.

Whoever set this down was not choosing favourites. They were deciding what a people ought to have in their mouths every week for the rest of their lives, and they chose a week that will not let a person forget that the world is out of order, or conclude from that that God has lost hold of it.

I have spent much of my working life inside the justice system. I know what it is to need both of those things said in the same week.

I am not going to start praying the seven. That is not what this is, and taking up someone else’s discipline because it impressed me would be a way of not hearing what it actually said.

What changed is smaller, and harder to admit.

I did not know this existed. Forty-five years of reading, a plan that gets me through the whole Psalter twice a year, a website with a glossary of Hebrew words on it — and I did not know that seven of these psalms have been said every week, by name, on the day, for two thousand years. The word I went looking for was not in my glossary. Neither was any of this.

So I have a question to ask myself, and I am not going to answer it here. If I could miss that, what else have I been reading past?

The tradition that has prayed these psalms longest knows things about them I was never taught. That is not a complaint about how I was raised, or about the church I have served in for forty-five years. It is simply where I have read from.

I have read them. I have not lived with them.