Just a quick note to my dear online friends: I will be on vacation and away from the office from July 19 to August 5. During this time I will not be able to receive, moderate, or post any comments to my blog. So, if you do post, please don’t wonder why your comments are not appearing immediately. I am not ignoring your comments, but walking the beaches of Oregon and reading commentaries on the Psalter and making notes in the margins of my Bible. God willing, I will post everything you send upon my return.
Have a wonderful vacation, Father!
Thank you!
Dear Fr. Farley, I just clicked on “Follow” below before I sent you my message, so I believe it was erased. I’ll rewrite my message in the event that it did not reach you. I found your blog very interesting and wanted to ask you what commentaries on the Psalter you found most insightful as you walked the beaches in Oregon on your vacation? What translations of the Psalms do you find most beautiful? I would like to read the Psalms more deeply–to support my faith and also to understand them as poems. The only book I have at the moment is C.S. Lewis’ Reflections On the Psalms, and I would like to develop his insights. Many thanks for any suggestions you can give me.
Thank you for rewriting your message; I indeed did not receive your original one. I enjoy Lewis’ Reflections on the Psalms, though I think he entirely misses the point on the imprecations in the Psalter. During my time in Oregon (when I had access to only the few books I lugged down there) I used two main volumes, chosen because they were so different from each other: the excellent and scholarly The Book of Psalms, by A.F. Kirkpatrick, Cambridge, 1903, which I supplemented by the modern and rather liberal Psalms, vol. 1-3, by John Goldingay, by Baker Academic, 2007. Neither of these wrote much regarding the prophetic or typological aspect of the Psalms (especially Goldingay, who gave no indication that such existed), and so a patristic voice is needed as well. I also may mention Bishop Horne’s devotional commentary, though it is hard to get a hold of, being written in 1845. (It contains a fascinating introduction by the famous Edward Irving.) For my reading I use the NASB or the RSV, though I confess to liking also the Jerusalem Bible with its use of the name “Yahweh”, almost like a kind of guilty pleasure.
Thank you, Father. The Bible I read is the Jerusalem Bible and I look forward to comparing its translations of the Psalms with NASB and RSV.
I hope that you are preparing a book on the Psalms–I am eager to read whatever you might write about them (there seems to be very little available to read about what Milton thought the greatest poems ever written, although your focus will be more theological.) I also want to read your other books.
Thank you for your insights. I’m going to re-read and re-think what Lewis
has written about the imprecations. I suspect you are correct.