Forbes - 1888 - a review

When I am reading, various questions pop into my thinking. I refrained from noting my potential misconceptions in editorial notes, but there are several ways that bother me in which Forbes reads psalms.

Right at the beginning of the treatise as a whole, Forbes implies that,

the Holy Spirit ever accommodated His revelations to the state of enlightenment and progress, both of those whom He inspired and whom He addressed.

And further he speaks of the meaning of the words of the psalms to the author

 ... and to the more intelligent of those to whom they were first addressed; so that whatever further meaning the Spirit may have wrapped up in the words, must still be in exact conformity, and not in contradiction to this, — merely a higher development of the same truth, not one altogether diverse, and of which the first recipients could have had no idea.

I find that 'progress' is a deceptive assumption.

He continues in this line of reasoning:

It must be borne in mind that the writers of the Old Testament were the most advanced and spiritually-minded men of their time, and on that account selected by the Spirit of God for making those fresh revelations of His purposes and will which were gradually to sink into the minds and hearts of His people, and to prepare them for further light. Their intelligence, therefore, and not the general state of opinion of their age, should be our criterion in judging of their writings.

As for intelligence and development, scientific advancement is clear. Our development is in weaponry. The idea of spiritual 'advancement' is untestable and would completely deny the validity of the ancient literature. In any case, doesn't the NT say something about God choosing what is weak in this world to shame the strong? And why would Proverbs address the dullards if there was nothing for them to learn?

The Bible is not for the intelligentsia. The Holy Spirit spoke through holy people according to 2 Peter, and the term holy Peter did not define. The Bible is for the poor and the marginalized, for the victims of privilege, for the ignorant, for us all who need to learn - poetry, awe, gifts, history, legend, and so on. Is there any idea of human progress or the superior advancement of one human compared to another in the Bible? 

These first paragraphs are the weakest in the book and perhaps I should just forget that they are there. After all, I am studying the history of interpretation - and his thesis of the coherence of the Psalter is a good one. So I look to more detail. I of course will disagree with some details, especially aspects of the translation he is using.

In Psalms 90, the first psalm Forbes begins his discussion with - he uses dust as a gloss for dca. His records of previous English translations would allow both dust and destruction. Both are wrong for the sense and for the root which is better rendered with crush, or its metaphoric extension, contrition. In the commonly available online translations, CJB is the only translation that comes close.

Dust does not agree with the use of dust in Genesis - it's not the same Hebrew word - see ypr in the concordance. The KJV uses destruction, even less appropriate since it translates for consequence rather than for what is written. And contrition or being crushed does not necessarily lead to destruction. Besides, there are other roots that KJV uses for destruction (at least 3 others at even a quick glance!). See wkt for the main one. And the overlap is wrong-headed. With very few exceptions: a different root in the guest or source language requires a different gloss in the host or target language.

Unfortunately, Forbes, like many others, reasons from the use of dust, and as such any conclusion he draws is suspect. There are translations and explanations today in the commonly available online Bible sites that reason about dust in this verse to connect it to Genesis. This is simply an English short circuit, bad translation, and bad theology. Yes, you need a little intelligence to read. Dullards have dulled their gifts and find themselves unable to turn. Imagine, whole lifetimes wasted with misunderstanding.

Forbes is heavy on doom. There is plenty of evidence that humanity perpetually heads for doom, the consequences of the worship of Mammon and convenience and other gods. In doom or out of it, we are held by the faithfulness of another reality, a reality that is thoroughly useful in the temporal reality we find ourselves a part of. 

These two psalms of Moses 90-91 cannot be seen with an attitude of 'dismal'. I did a prior post on this psalm re Forbes here. I can see that I haven't veered from my first impression much. Forbes completely misses the positive in the new repeating word in this psalm: klp. This word is answered by a repetition in Psalms 102. It is used 5 times in the psalter. Four of those times are in these two psalms.

His reading of verse 3, for instance is this 

"Thou turnest frail man to dust, And saidst, Return, ye children of men." [And a little later he interprets this as] “Return, ye children of men” (to the dust from whence ye were taken).

What! No, Dr Forbes LLD. Having misread contrition and missed the frame of renewal, you completely miss the notion of turn. Verse 3 is a patient and loving God turning the mortal to contrition so that the mortal can hear 'turn' - i.e. Turn to me and be healed. It is an impermeable misreading of the text that you suggest - a reading that you perhaps never turned from.

When people have this kind of dismal approach to God, and systems to support it, then they have a hard time with contrition and turning away from their systems of thought toward alternative readings. My reading of this verse is this:

You turn a mortal to contrition,
and you say, Turn children of humanity.

Verse 13, recognizing our mysterious dependence, answers this use of turn / return (same Hebrew root wvb.)

Having so misunderstood the psalm, it is no wonder that the mechanical strophes are not grounds for joy. His strophes for Psalms 90 are 5-7-5 (verses). If you look at verse 6 you will see it is attached to verse 5 by its opening on the third note of the scale instead of the tonic. In my first book on the psalms, I committed myself on paper to a structure (6-5-6). In the SimHebrew Bible I have not expressed the strophes at all. I think 6-6-5 is better on the surface of the sense. Tate has 1-2-1-2-2-2-2-3-2. So he is consistent with 6-6-5 but much smaller units.

Now - a second issue - about time. Does the Bible speak of a future life? Future life is a common usage phrase for Forbes. It is a concept that depends on a primitive idea of the nature of time. It is not a Biblical phrase. There is no word for future. The Bible never uses it to intimate the eternal. There are plenty of words for presence and for facing - turn is such a simple concept when you think of a creature turning to face its creator.

Turn by all means. It's a good deal. There is finitude to my life, a beginning and an ending, but in turning to the source of life, I find that the concepts of everlasting and eternal take on a sense that I need not define and the Bible equally does not define.

Just look at how much mystery we humans uncover in science, from the forces behind the sun to the mystery of seeing infrared light from galaxies billions of years old, from the recognition of gravity as curvature of space to the limited speed of light and the knowledge that time stops. These too point to engagement with the present in mercy and truth. So also do the indefinable terms of our shared lives, beauty, quality, holiness, goodness, truth, mercy, and many others. How much more abundance do you need? Why do you prefer ignorance? I had a friend who thought that being educated would undermine his faith. Such so-called faith is not faith or faithfulness in any sense.

I have already complained of Forbes' need to rehearse his whole theory of Messiah in the Old Testament, a subject he raises several times wrongly to explain the psalms. I have to come back to this because there is a Messianic hope, but it is not a hope for a super-powerful, super-human despot. That is the human problem. We always get the parameters of power wrong.

On a purely observational level, I note that the author uses indentation in formatting psalms. It is somewhat arbitrary as is the case with all subjective diagramming. He also uses line-feeds based on the English translations which sometimes agree with the Masoretic musical notation.

One of his departures from the Masoretic tradition is Psalms 20:10 (9 in his numbering)

"Thus the Messianic King meets us at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the Amen Books, and the Hebrew word melech = “king,” or malach = “is king,” never again appears in the Psalter applied to the Messianic King; henceforth the King is Jehovah."

In ver. 9 the Authorized and Revised Versions err in following the Masoretic punctuation; both rhythm and sense require to render —

O Jehovah — save — the king!
He will answer us — in the day — we call.

The lines are trimeters; and the subject of the Psalm is a prayer for the salvation of the king.

Perhaps I should, but I don't look for specific meter in the cola of Hebrew poetry. The music is adequate for the word stresses and rhythms. But this particular verse is a parallelism that is missed without what he calls an incorrect rendering of the AV and RV:

Yahweh save,
let the king answer us in the day of our call.

Two questions occur to me from this. How do we distinguish "Yahweh as King" from the kings of Judah and Israel in the Psalter? Also to what extent are the psalters of the last 400 years required to reflect the doctrine of the divine right of the monarchs? The royalists have a point in an established monarchic system where the monarch represents the whole body of the subject people, but not many would understand this today.

Historically, there are also mundane issues that give some pleasure like the difficulties of typesetting. In one place Forbes has “Ended [or fulfilled] are the prayers of Jesse the son of David.” This is a remarkable transposition not duplicated in any other place where the verse is noted. Does this speak of a greater separation of typesetting from author than I might have imagined? Certainly the final editor would have missed this in the galleys.