Psalms Through the Centuries, Volume 3. Susan Gillingham

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">       Hath built her brooding nest…

Artistic representation has also been very much influenced by the liturgical prominence of this psalm. One of the most interesting occurrences is in synagogue architecture. In the thirteenth-century synagogue of Cordoba the walls are covered with Mudéjar stuccowork and psalm quotations, originally written in beige on a blue background, in square Hebrew characters. Ps. 84:1–3 dominates the south wall, and Pss. 13:5–6 and 26:8 follow it. Similarly the fourteenth-century synagogue, El Tránsito, in Toledo, also using Mudéjar stuccowork with fruits, flowers and geometric designs, has walls which teem with verses from the psalms, but only Psalm 84 and 100 are in complete form, dominating the east wall. In each case this fits so well with the Jewish interpretation that the psalm is about longing for the Temple in exile.²⁰¹ A similar interpretation is found in the *Parma Psalter (fol. 119v) which shows a human figure set between the first word and the rest of the line, pointing to the buildings in the margin: these are of palaces with slender towers (the one on the right enclosed by a wall) and doors with golden arches, illustrating verses 1, 2 and 4: see Plate 4.²⁰²

Other representations take up two prominent tropes. One is of the sparrow and turtle dove (or swallow) in verse 3. For example the *St Albans Psalter depicts in the capital Q (‘Quam dilecta tabernacula…) two trees with birds nesting in their branches; in the two nests at the top a larger bird feeds and a smaller one watches, whilst at the bottom two parent birds are feeding their young.²⁰³ A second repeated image is ‘the valley of tears’ (verse 6). A painting on this theme by Gustave Doré (1882–1883) is at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg. This ‘Valley of Tears’ depicts the suffering and sorrow of Christ, carrying his cross, with a play of darkness and light.²⁰⁴

      To conclude, it is undoubtedly the liturgical use of this psalm (whether composed for worship or in memory of it) which has influenced the vast number of responses, especially in music, poetry and art. So despite the different views by Jews and Christians about the identity of ‘the house of God’, it is a psalm which has been appropriated, without much acrimony, by both traditions alike.

      Psalm 85: Praying for National Deliverance

      Psalm 85 does not mention the Temple, but like Psalm 84 its experience of dissonance is the same, and the prayer to God to ‘listen’ and ‘look’ in 84:8–9 is also found in 85:8–9. So too the reference to the glory of God (kabod) in 84:11 is found again in 85:9, and the motif of God ‘giving his favour’ in 84:11 is found in 85:12 As noted in the introduction to this *Korahite collection, its theme of communal loss gives it a clear correspondence with Psalm 44 in the first Korahite group.

      Like Psalm 84, there is no reference to the Temple having been destroyed, as in some of the *Asaphite psalms. The two strophes (1–7 and 8–13) form a prayer and an expression of confidence in God’s answer, with the play on the literal and metaphorical use of the word shub (‘return’ or ‘restore’) in verses 1, 4 and 6. Given the prominence of penitential liturgy after the exile, it is quite possible that the psalm was also used as a prayer of repentance.

Whilst *ibn Ezra reads this psalm as a Jewish prayer for redemption after the Babylonian exile, *Rashi somewhat predictably reads it as a prayer for redemption during the Jews’ continuing exile.²⁰⁵ The Christian approach, however, is to read the prayers for restoration in a spiritual, not literal way: *Bede, for example, in his abbreviated Psalter, reads verse 5 as ‘Turn us, God our Jesus, and relax your anger against us’.²⁰⁶ Furthermore, the emphasis on ‘return’ is now also about praying for the Jews’ conversion to Christ.²⁰⁷

      One important verse in Christian exegesis is 85:11 (‘Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky’). By the time of *Augustine this was seen as a prophecy about the Virgin Mary and the Incarnation. Augustine writes:

Truth hath sprung out of the earth: Christ is born of a woman. The Son of God hath come forth of the flesh. What is truth? The Son of God. What is the earth? Flesh…But the Truth which sprang out of the earth was before the earth, and by It the heaven and the earth were made: but in order that righteousness might look down from heaven, that is, in order that men might be justified by Divine grace, Truth was born of the Virgin Mary…²⁰⁸

      This in turn influenced the developing liturgical use of this psalm: it was used in Christmas Day liturgies in ancient Roman Rites, and is still a psalm for Christmas Day as prescribed in the *BCP.

Another important verse is 85:10. This reads: ‘Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other’. This verse is used in Langland’s allegory of the Four Daughters of God In *Piers Plowman, Passus XVIII.²⁰⁹ Psalm 85:2 (‘You forgave the iniquity of your people’) is used first, as it witnesses to the possibility of the forgiveness of sins. The setting is an evocative description of the passion and death of Christ. ‘Will the Dreamer’ then observes the dispute between (the female personifications of) Mercy, Peace, Truth and Righteousness, ‘the four daughters of God’, whose four qualities come from 85:10. Truth and Mercy are in Hell: Mercy (‘steadfast love’) suggests that the patriarchs and prophets can be redeemed from Hell, but Truth (‘faithfulness’) insists that no one could be released from ‘that inferno’. Peace arrives to agree with Mercy, whilst Justice (‘righteousness’) takes up Truth’s point: all those condemned to eternal punishment cannot be saved. Righteousness and Truth read the Bible literally, without compassion, resembling the old covenant, whilst Mercy and Peace read the Bible more figuratively and imaginatively. The crucifixion, however, supports the former view: it brought about forgiveness of sins and release from death for all who have the humility to respond to it. Christ finally appears at the end of Passus XVIII and cites a verse from Ps. 51:4: true penitence reaps its rewards.

The use of Ps. 85:10 to describe the ‘Four Daughters of God’ was not original to Langland; it was developed from a much earlier Jewish tradition of four virtues by the throne of God, inspired by the visions of Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1 and the tradition of the four angels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel) for example in 1 Enoch 9 and 10.²¹⁰ This motif was taken up in the Middle Ages by Christian thinkers such as the Cistercian Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux and *Hugh of St Victor. An eleventh-century church vestment preserved in the Diözesanmuseum at Bamberg has the most unusual representations of 85:10 on its shoulder pieces: here the two pairs are cited alongside the two lists of six of the twelve tribes of Israel.²¹¹ Several later medieval miniatures develop this motif: one, from the fifteenth-century *Missel de Paris, from the school of Jean Fouquet, is of the Trinity, surrounded by three angels, and below them, personifications of Mercy and Truth and Righteousness embracing Peace.²¹² The ‘Four Daughters’ are also found in a fifteenth-century morality play, The Castle of Perseverance (where Mercy is in white, Justice red, Truth ‘sad green’, and Peace, black) which centres around the hero Humanum Genus, representing all humankind, eventually being admitted to heaven.²¹³

      Images of this verse are also often found in thirteen and fourteenth-century hand-produced Books of Hours, usually in the Annunciation section, alongside verse 11, now clearly read as about the Virgin Mary and the Incarnation. There are many representations of verses 10–11 in art; William *Blake’s is probably the best known. The title of his painting (completed in 1803) is ‘Mercy and Truth are met together, Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other’. There are in fact only two figures embracing, under God the Father and his twelve angels of light: these are of an adult Christ and Mary. This image is represented here as Plate 5.

This interpretation of verse 11 (‘faithfulness will spring up from the ground’) also accounts for the frequent use of the figure of the Virgin Mary in illustrations of this psalm. The *Stuttgart Psalter (fol. 100v) has two images: the upper one recalls the Visitation (verse 4, with its ‘restoration’ theme) and the lower one is СКАЧАТЬ