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Supplication in the Psalms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Joseph Bourke O.P.
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Far the largest category in the psalter are the ‘Individual Laments’, the psalms in which an individual Israelite—as opposed to the whole community—complains to Yahweh of some distress, and pleads to be rescued from it. In the very nature of the case the attitude here must be more self-conscious than in the hymns of praise. He who praises strives to lose himself in his awareness of Yahweh; he who supplicates strives to find himself in Yahweh’s awareness of him. Before it was a question of man reaching up to Yahweh; now it is a question of Yahweh bending down to man. Yet still the focus of attention is fundamentally the same. Still Yahweh is there among his people, united to each single member by the covenant-bond. Still the soul of the suppliant Israelite is dominated by the overwhelming consciousness of Yahweh listening, and Yahweh there.

What is in the mind of that suppliant, standing in the presence of his God, praying not quietly in his heart but at the top of his voice, with every resource of human eloquence, with wild gestures and with tears?

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 39 , Issue 454 , January 1958 , pp. 16 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © 1958 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See the author’s article, ‘The Response to Holiness’ in BLACKFRIARS for October 1957.

2 This is more than mere simile. According to many authorities the semitic root for the verb ‘to live’ contained originally this idea of muscular contraction, while conversely the root word for ‘to die’ meant literally ‘to expand’, ‘to relax’.