to his God continually.

Psalm 32 is in form and content quite similar to the teaching or wisdom psalms. Here, however, the teaching is based on a personal experience of deliverance from sickness, and the teaching is itself a testimony of gratitude for recovery. In his distress this psalmist made confession of his sin. Yahwe forgave and healed him. Jonah 2:3-10 is likewise a psalm of thanksgiving. The afflicted one at the point of death made his prayer and his vow. That prayer came to Yahwe in his sanctuary and he was saved. Accordingly he offered to Yahwe the sacrifice of thanksgiving.

Psalms 138 and 66 do not state the nature of the deliverance for which they give thanks, but the author of 66 follows time honored custom by offering an actual animal sacrifice at the sanctuary in fulfillment of his vow. Psalms 18 and 118 express the gratitude of two national leaders for deliverance from great peril.

The difficulty of deciding with certainty to which group a number of psalms belong is illustrated by Psalm 21. Verses 2 and 8 are addressed to Yahwe and express the king’s devotion to his God, while verses 3-7 describe the goodness of Yahwe to the king. Yahwe had bestowed upon him the crown, had given him length of days, and had maintained him in security and honor upon his throne. Verses 9-13 are addressed to the king, probably by the priest, and promise the king complete victory over his enemies. The concluding verse 14 addressed to Yahwe:

This verse has the form of a petition, but its formal language amounts to an ascription of praise. The psalm then does not in the main utter a petition, nor express faith in Deity, but is rather an expression of thanksgiving and may well have been originally used in the celebration of an anniversary of the king’s ascension to the throne.

The classic individual psalm of thanksgiving in the Psalter is 103. Though it is here an individual who calls upon his soul to bless Yahwe, yet there is little that is personal about the psalm, for the psalmist identifies himself with his fellow Israelites and for that matter with universal humanity. Also there is little to distinguish this psalm of thanksgiving from the hymn of praise. The psalmist does not refer in verses 3-5, nor anywhere else, to any single individual personal concrete experience of Jehovah’s salvation, and the psalm is not in that sense a psalm of testimony. Yet exhortation to “forget not all His benefits,” the mention at the very outset of the psalm of the healing of diseases; linking of this healing with the forgiveness of sin as in the psalms of lamentation; the enumeration of Yahwe’s gracious favors to man; all these are calculated to call forth gratitude, and it is actually as a psalm of thanksgiving that the readers of the Bible have always regarded it. Notable in the psalm is the conception of the all but limitless mercy of God; the comparison of God’s compassion to that of an earthly father’s, the emphasis upon the eternity of God in contrast to the frail mortality of man and the fact that God’s mercy is extended to successive generations of men.

The transition to the national psalms of thanksgiving is splendidly made by Psalm 107. This might perhaps be called a liturgical psalm of thanksgiving. Verses 1-3 are clearly introductory. There is the general call to thanksgiving in verse 1:

Then in verses 2 and 3 the call is directed especially to the representatives of the Diaspora who by divine mercy have returned from all lands to Zion. The service of thanksgiving proper falls into four parts. The author has selected the four most wonderful deliverances of which he has knowledge; the deliverance of travelers hopelessly lost in the great desert; the deliverance of men who for their rebellion against God had been fettered and cast into prison; the deliverance of the sick who for their iniquities had been brought to the gates of death; the deliverance of sailors from a terrible storm on the much-dreaded sea. We may suppose that processions representing each of these groups came forward in the temple, while their stories were being told—possibly by a soloist—after which the chorus summoned them to give thanks, adding to the refrain a couplet suitable to each group. The psalm concludes with a hymn of praise to the God who manifests his power both over nature and over the affairs of men.

The National Psalms of Thanksgiving in the Psalter are fewer in number than the individual and further removed from the original type. This may be because national escapes from peril are rarer and more difficult to celebrate; and as they become more remote in time, the few psalms of thanksgiving that have been written to celebrate those deliverances have less and less interest for the public, and correspondingly less suitability for public worship, and so are lost. In the Psalter we have in addition to Psalm 107, Psalms 124, 136, 114, 124, and 65. Of these Psalm 124 is the only one which could be supposed to have been composed to celebrate a recent deliverance. On the one hand the language is general and the figures of speech are familiar, but on the other hand there is a spontaneity, simplicity and power of expression that suggest a recent experience of escape from great peril. This is especially true of verse 7.

Likewise delightful for its originality of literary form is Psalm 114. It celebrates in poetic and dramatic language the triumphant crossing of the Red Sea and the Jordan. Obviously it is looking back at these events through the media of legend and myth, and verse 2 makes it clear that the poem can not be earlier than the division of the kingdom. Nevertheless the author is so thrilled by the stories that have come down to him that his poem possesses amazing spontaneity and power.

In contrast with the two preceding poems, Psalms 136 and 105 are highly stereotyped. Every second line in 136 is the refrain: “For his mercy endureth forever” and the psalm was therefor probably written for public rendition. Both psalms deal with the theme so dear to the Hebrew heart, Yahwe’s gift to the fathers of the land of Canaan, and both retell something of the biblical story of the patriarchs, the deliverance from Egypt, and the conquest.

Psalm 65 seems to be essentially a psalm of harvest thanksgiving. It accompanies the payment of vows (verse 2). Verses 2-5 are introductory, announcing the presence of the worshipers at the sanctuary. Verses 6-9 express faith in the God of land and sea, while verses 10-14 accredit to him the increase of the fields and the flocks. The psalms of testimony and thanksgiving pass over naturally into the hymns of praise, but as the hymns form the chief object of this study their treatment is postponed until the next chapter.

Psalms of Faith

Out of the experience of affliction as expressed in the psalms of lamentation and petition, and out of the further experience of deliverance as expressed in the psalms of testimony and