Psalm 76 was my reading this morning. I read it, and it sat there.
It isn't a bad psalm. God is majestic, the weapons are broken, the enemy sleeps. But nothing in it reached out and took hold of me. It felt like one of those songs we used to sing in church — popular in its day, sung every so often now, and when we do it's nice enough. Not stirring. A golden oldie.
So I went looking for a hook, and I couldn't find one in the psalm. I found one above it.
To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. A Psalm of Asaph. A Song.
I have been reading past that line all my life. If I thought anything about it, I thought it was housekeeping — the small print, and the small print was for somebody else. To the choirmaster. With stringed instruments. According to Lilies. Stage directions. Notes for the band. I was in the pew, not up the front, so none of it was addressed to me.
Then I saw the words set out together — mizmor, shir, maskil, miktam, tephillah, tehillah — and it stopped being trim and became a list of kinds. Six different sorts of thing, each with its own name, and each name saying something about how to take it.
Maskil is the one that caught me. It comes from a word for insight and skill, and it means something like this one is for thinking about. Thirteen psalms carry it. Which means that thirteen times I have been handed a note saying slow down — and read straight through at the same pace as everything else.
And tehillah, which means praise. Exactly one psalm in the whole book carries it. Yet when Hebrew names the book, it doesn't call it Songs, or Prayers. It calls it Tehillim — Praises. Somebody read all hundred and fifty, complaints and arguments and the dark ones included, and decided the name for the pile was Praises.
The line above the psalm was never notes for the band. It was a note for me, and I had spent a lifetime deciding it belonged to someone else.
I had a reading of those lines — musical, technical, for the people with the instruments — and it was wrong. Being wrong about it cost me nothing dramatic. It just meant that for years I opened each psalm the same way, at the same speed, asking every one of them to do the same job.
Psalm 76 still isn't a prayer, and I don't think it will ever move me the way Psalm 77 does. It is a song about a morning when Jerusalem woke up and the siege was gone, sung by people who were there, and I wasn't. But it has stopped being a dull psalm and become a psalm I was reading wrongly, which is a different problem and a better one.
Tomorrow I'll read the line first.
Companion article: Reading the Label — the working-out, and what each of the six labels asks of a reader.