One Hundred Psalms

I have now carefully read and worked through 100 psalms, blogging on each individually. (72 of those blogs have been published in the blog; the remainder will be published this summer.) I continue to be amazed with the wide diversity of these songs, varying of ecstatic praise and joy to anger, despair and hopelessness.

Psalm 88 is a cry of despair. The only hint of any type of encouragement or hope is simply that the long rant of hopelessness is addressed to YHWH.  Even at the final verse is a statement of grief. In Psalm 84 a lonely traveler is homesick for Jerusalem and the temple. The singer, possibly a refugee in Babylon, imagines a sparrow (verse 3), flittering among the rafters of the temple, building a nest, building a home in the temple and he deeply wishes he could be back there, building his own nest. If the refugee is a prisoner traveling towards Babylon, history tells us that he will never see Jerusalem again and that the temple has been torn down. Indeed, in Psalm 79, a psalmist walks among the rubble and bodies left at the temple destruction. On the other hand, Psalms 93, 95-100, form a seven-set of worship hymns, joyously calling people to sing (and dance?) in worship of YHWH.