Word: psalmists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...problems of old age have been be clouded by misconceptions since ancient times. The psalmist who hymned "The days of our years are threescore years and ten" knew nothing of modern vital statistics; the average life expectancy of an Israelite baby in David's kingdom was probably no more than 30 years. Not until the individual had weathered all the hazards of gestation, birth, childhood illnesses, diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia could he expect to reach threescore...
When Clive Staples Lewis, 59, England's top amateur theologian, reread the psalms, he was bothered by the cursing. In 109, for instance, the psalmist prays that an ungodly man may rule over his enemy and that Satan may stand at his right hand, that his enemy's ""prayers be turned into sin," that the enemy's days be few and his job be given to someone else, that when he is dead his orphans be beggars, that no one should pity him, and that God always remember against him the sins of his parents. Even more...
...Either man is the creature whom the Psalmist described as 'a little lower than the angels,' crowned with glory and honor, holding 'dominion over the works' of his Creator-or man is a soulless, animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the state for its own glorification. It is, therefore, a struggle which goes to the roots of the human spirit, and its shadow falls across the long sweep of man's destiny." With considerable pride the President ran through the gains in the struggle during 1954, e.g., the Western European Union agreements...
...schoolboys fondly recite Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or give me death," so Israeli schoolboys like to declaim the Psalmist's powerful text: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning...
...there any hope for the men of the Flight? Picard has no answer, except his own faith. Concluding, he tries to express for his century what Francis Thompson said for the 19th, George Herbert and John Donne for the 17th, and the Psalmist centuries before.* Writes Max Picard: "Whithersoever they may flee, there is God . . . Ever more desperately they flee, but God is already in every place, waiting for them to come...