THE PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF PSALMS

INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF PSALMS

When I was four years old, I remember my grandmother for the first time with absolute clarity. I had received a copy of the Bible for my fourth birthday and reflected my parents’ enthusiasm for the Seventh-day Adventist church. I had it with me when we went to my grandmother’s and I showed it to her and asked her why she did not belong to the Adventist church. She took me aside and we sat down together. She took my Bible and opened it at the very centre and said, “I belong to the Baptist church, but what church you belong to is not what matters. I do not attend church at all. But every night and every morning I open the Bible to the middle, and I read from it. That is what you should do.” Thus was begun the informal religious instruction that she started to give me, and gave me up until the very year she died.

From then on, until I learned to read for myself, I would go to different neighbours, open the Bible at the middle and ask them to read to me. I thought at the time I was carrying out the mandate of the Adventist church to give Bible studies and I remember once or twice wondering why no one ever joined the church. After I learned to read, I learned by heart some of the passages my grandmother directed me to: the Psalms from the middle of the Bible and the Ten Commandments. I also learned the proof-texts or memory verses the Adventists provided, but as time went on I found Adventists were surprised that I could repeat long passages by heart, passages that had no particular significance, and thus little importance, to Adventists.

My grandmother was not a very active or aggressive teacher. She only offered information in response to a question. I have no precise idea what spiritual influence she had on her other grandchildren, but I’m sure that some of them experienced something similar to mine. Her influence was pervasive and in the end much stronger than what I got from church and religious school. I came into conflict with a teacher already in the fourth grade over the issue of original sin and the forgiveness of sins. I maintained that all people are born pure and holy and only by their actions separate themselves from the will of God, but that God is able and willing to wipe away the sin of those who repent and make restitution. Later in an Adventist high school or academy as it was called, when I was far from my grandmother’s influence, the Bible teacher, James Zachary, asked in class why Jesus had to die for our sins. No one answered and he called on me. I could not accept the vicarious sacrificial atonement for the sins of the world and the rest of the class period was a tirade of horror at my lack of spiritual perception. This man was, nevertheless, one of the greatest influences on my life, taking me three times a week to teach me Biblical languages without pay and without thanks. May God rest his loving, unselfish soul.

I went to college to study for the Adventist ministry. It was four years of quandary in which I constantly questioned the atonement of Christ on the cross and the Trinity, constantly emphasizing to all about me the importance of individual prayer and meditation of the Book of Psalms.

In the spring of 1979, I had an awakening and was directed to my grandmother to ask for instruction in her faith, the very personal one transmitted to her by her father, although she had maintained membership in a Baptist church for a good share of her life. I had already learned from her to read the Psalms and keep the ten commandments. At that time she pointed me to the Islamic Revolution in Iran as right and just, saying people ought to support it. She especially approved the disappearance of disco and rock music, alcohol and the sex industry.

It was only a few years later that I came to her for her opinion of the Qur’an, which I had picked up in a university bookshop and read from cover to cover in one sitting. I told her that I thought it was in harmony with the Bible. It was only then that she gave me a fuller knowledge of the tradition which she claimed to have inherited from her father. She only taught those who had discovered for themselves. She also taught me to revere the group of twelve Imams, to seek the four gates, the four hidden guides, and to read the four books, that is, the Bible and the Qur’an. I was thus introduced into the house of David and hosted by Hajji Bektash. She repeated her earliest instruction: it does not matter what church you belong to, there is an invisible tabernacle made of the Psalms and we have the privilege of being a doorkeeper in the house of God. We need not aspire to religious leadership. The highest office is to guard the shoes of those who go in to pray. The dervish is a dog at the gate, and has the right to wag his tail at those who keep God’s commandments and bare his teeth at those who do not and yet presume to enter. There is no thanks or reward for the task, but only kicks and cuffs and a rare kind word.

My grandmother lived that faith her whole life, beginning her career as a body-washer, then a cleaner in a hotel, and then as a cleaning woman for people about town. At the age of 18, she out-spokenly told a man living in the hotel, but secretly sleeping in the room of a lady living in the same establishment, “Just lay your hat on the bed. Don’t mess up your bed so I have to make it every day. Everybody already knows where you’re sleeping. Just lay your hat on the bed.” When she was eighty-three she walked about town with my wife, showing all the houses she had cleaned and telling in the inordinately loud voice of the aged what scandalous behaviour each of the inhabitants had engaged in fifty years before. I learned from her that the epitome of spiritual excellence is the testy shaking of a wrathful but impotent fist.

Only once did I become the focus of her anger, and that was on my last visit. I made the careless remark that decent people do not chew tobacco. That is a relevant issue in Appalachia still. My grandmother said to me, “Now you listen here. I don’t ever want to hear you say that again. My father chewed tobacco, and he was a decent man.” Be that as it may, she herself never touched tobacco and as far as I know all of her descendants are also free if it.

In her old age my grandmother never went to bed. The hearth of her father, about which circle prayer used to take place, had become a coffee table upon which the Bible stood. She read the book of Psalms through every night, dozing between-times. Before she died she said that there was a gem in the middle of the Bible, and asked me if I had found it yet. I said I was not sure. She grimaced and said, “When you find it, you’ll know it.”

In 1988, after the death of my grandmother, a Turkish guest was present in one of our Friday evening devotions. I happened to mention that we were followers of Hajji Bektash and he became very excited, and said that he and his family were also. I was not ignorant of a tenuous or possible historical connection, at least in sharing veneration for the saint of that name, but after talking with him more I was surprised at how much we had in common. Since then I have had cordial contacts not only with Alevis but with Sunni admirers of Hajji Bektash as well in Turkey. I felt a deep kinship, not only on the personal level, but in the fact that they too maintained a quasi-secret, uninstitutionalized order stationed between the official faith, which is Hanafi Sunni Islam and personal practice. For us, the Baptist church or some other was the official faith, to which we related exactly as Alevis and Bektashis in Turkey do to official Islam: sometimes participating fully, sometimes being seen as heretics, and sometimes keeping an official membership but largely ignoring the institution to go our own way.

The reading of the Psalms as a dervish practice is hardly unique to my grandmother, wherever she got the tradition. There are reports of one or two groups in the southeast of Turkey who use their own translation of the Psalms as liturgy, but I have never had any contact with them. The Alevis, Bektashis, Chelebis, Qizilbash, and Sari groups I have visited all spoke of the Four Books, many of them read them, and some actually referred to Biblical as well as Qur’anic passages in evidence of their beliefs and practices. Miracle-working using the Hebrew text of the Psalms has at some periods at least been almost standard fare among Middle Eastern practitioners.

None of these can be directly related to the tradition my grandmother transmitted, and I have never made the claim that any did. It is clear that her family had contact with both the Eckerlins and other Seventh Day Baptists as far back as the 1700s, who were in correspondence with Edward Elwall, who was clearly a dervish from a Turkish order. Whether or not there is thereby a connection with my grandmother can never be known, but I also have a connection with the Elwallian line through Albourne Peat of the Sabbatarian Baptist Society in London, under whose wings I worked intermittently throughout the 1980s almost until his death. The ministers of that society are known to have preserved the liturgy of the Psalms, at least in the case of Albourne Peat’s predecessors MacGeachy and Jones, who both used the Psalms personally in Hebrew, although the singing of anthems in the church was in English. MacGeachy also read the Qur’an in Arabic, and it was on a visit to his resting-place in York that I was introduced to the spiritual depth of that book.

The transmission from my grandmother was, as I have always claimed, a practice that could well have been based on nothing more than Native American tradition and a Baptist reading of the Bible, except for a very few references to Islam: a garbled list of names including the twelve Imams and Hajji Bektash, and that a prophet by the name of Muhammad had brought a true book called the Qur’an. Insofar as I know, she never read it.

The Psalms here are mostly translated or versified in eight-syllable lines like the rest of The New Jubilees Version, and can be sung to the same tunes, that is, folk tunes of many traditions such as Finnish Kalevala and Turkish Alevi or Bektashi, as well as Christian Long Meter. But some Psalms are set in eleven-syllable lines. This is also a common Bektashi-Alevi metrical form, and the intention was for the Psalms to be sung accordingly. However, there are also hymn-tunes set to the same meter: 11.11.11.11.

The Psalms are presented here divided into stanzas based on complete thought sections. These are marked by alternating bold and normal type faces, except in Psalms 1-4 and 42, where some bold-facing distinguishes the text of the Psalm from some eight-syllable commentary. Breaking the Psalm into stanzas makes it readily possible to use tunes of various lengths. The four-line quatrain can take any of the hundreds of Long Metre tunes. A couplet of just two lines can be sung to Long Metre by repeating both lines. A three-line stanza can be sung to the tune Holy Sepulchre, or to a Long Meter tune with the repetition of the last line. A stanza of five lines in eight syllables can be sung to the tune Rolland, or to any Long Metre tune by repeating a section of the music. Often the music of the third or four line can be comfortably repeated. An eight-syllable line in a stanza of six lines can be sung to dozens of tunes, but among the more accessible are Old 113th and Old 117th. The well-known St. Catherine is a handy tune for a six-line stanza. A seven-line stanza can be sung to the tune Atwood. An eight-line stanza can best be sung to the tune O Grosser Gott. A ten-line stanza can be sung to the tune Wir Glauben All.

The choice of tunes for eleven-syllable lines is far more limited, although that is not at all true if one uses Turkish Bektashi tunes. The use of Turkish tunes is not advisable unless one has Turkish background. First of all, Turkish tunes are difficult. Secondly, they tend to be distracting, and feed the fascination with the exotic. But there are dozens of good hymn tunes for eleven-syllable quatrains, among them being Adoro devote and Corpus Domini. The Welsh tune St. Denio is also wonderful for eleven-syllable quatrains. Eleven-syllable lines set in five-line stanzas have very few good tunes, but Haydn’s St. Alban is the best. There do not seem to be any six-line stanza tunes available that can be used with the Psalms. All of them are filled with 19th-century bathos or even worse melodies from later. They should be avoided at all costs.
The division of the Psalms into stanzas of varying lengths provides for better concentration than metrical tunes generally do. Alternating between singing and reading is extremely helpful for concentration. The use of a Psalm in which, for example, all of the quatrains are sung and the rest is read is very effective. Singing and reading alternately can be very effective. Some Psalms are finely recited by reading the Psalm throughout, and singing the final stanza.

Finally, two successive stanzas may be combined, for example to sing a six-line stanza together with the following couplet to the tune of O Grosser Gott, which is normally sung to an eight-line stanza. Three- and four-line stanzas can be combined and sung to Atwood. But in fact, a single Long Metre or four-line 11-syllable tune can be used throughout by repeating lines of text to fill out the tune, or by repeating lines of melody to extend to the end of the text stanza.

Rather frequently there is a feminine rhyme at the end of an eight-syllable line, that is a rhyme of two-syllables. In such cases, there are nine syllables in the line, which means that the last two syllables of the line must be sung on the last note of the line. This is common practice in metrical Psalms, but is disturbing to some people today. Such stanzas can be read rather than sung, if the reader is irritated by the extra syllable.

The book of Psalms presents the 2527 verses or steps of divine guidance. The first book of Psalms provides meditations for each of the days of forty days of spiritual retreat. Psalms 9 and 10 form one acrostic whole and may be counted as one. So the forty-one Psalms can be read as forty.

The following commentary on the Psalms has grown out of my long spiritual connection with not only the faith transmitted to me, but my own contemplation and experience. It has been written, more than any other part of The Beloved and I, under the vivid impression of the presence and guidance of the Master of the Age, Muhammad al-Mahdi, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him.

This is the teaching that is sent
On the adepts within the tent
Of David at the loving hand
Of Hajji Bektash and his band
Of forty. Peace and blessings be
On all the prophets of the free,
On Adam, Noah, Abraham,
Moses, David, Jesus, the Lamb
Muhammad as though on the best
Who came at last and to invest
The divine guides, Ali, Hasan,
Husein, Ali again by plan,
Muhammad, Sadiq, Musa and
Ali Ridha among the band,
Taqi, Naqi, and Askeri
At last Muhammad Al-Mahdi.
There are two thousand steps to take,
Five hundred twenty-seven’s sake,
And then the soul is pure and free
And entered on eternity.

AUTHOR: THOMAS G. MCELWAIN

Copyright © 2007 Adams & McElwain Publishers and Thomas McElwain First Published in two volumes, The Beloved and I 2005, and Led of the Beloved, 2006. Second Edition, 2010 Third and revised edition, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this verse commentary on the sacred Scriptures may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from publisher.

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