Word: psalter
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That masterly compendium of Anglicanism's faith and worship, the Book of Common Prayer, has long been one of the glories of the English language. Last week Queen Elizabeth II gave her royal assent to use of a new Psalter in church worship-one step in the first major revision of the Prayer Book in 300 years...
Into Carolingian manuscripts crept the idea of narrative illustration rather than static devotional icons, the better to teach the word of God. The famous Utrecht Psalter abandoned elaborate gilding to accompany the Gospels with cursive, pen-and-ink cartooning. By the time the Carolingian Renaissance subsided in the late 10th century, art was no longer the same as religion, only its handmaiden. As the Libri Carolini put it in the late 8th century: "The sacrament is nourishment for the soul. Pictures are food only for the eyes." So the Carolingian renaissance opened the way for the later, greater Renaissance...
...Testament contains 150 psalms that both Christians and Jews accept as divinely inspired. But the unknown compilers of the Psalter had hundreds of songs, most of them long ago lost, to choose from. Last week the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem released the first translation of a newly discovered Hebrew poem that at one time may have been included among the canonical psalms...
...psalm comes from the most important of recent Dead Sea Scroll discoveries: a blackened, decaying goatskin Psalter that was dug up near Wadi Qumran by a Bedouin in 1956. After long and careful treatment, the scroll was unrolled by James A. Sanders, professor of Old Testament at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. "All it required." said Dr. Sanders, who took ten days for the delicate job, "was a penknife, a humidifier and guts." Written down between A.D. 30 and 50, the Psalter scroll was presumably used for worship by the Essenes-a community of Jewish ascetics who were wiped...
...provocatively chatty Reflections on the Psalms (Harcourt, Brace; $3.75), the wise and witty Oxford don argues that such embarrassments should not simply be ignored. Remembering that all Holy Scripture is "written for our learning" and that "Our Lord's mind and language were clearly steeped in the Psalter," Lewis prefers to make "some use" of the curses. One of their uses, he found, is to call attention to the same hatreds in modern man's own heart-"we are, after all, blood brothers to these ferocious, self-pitying, barbaric men." Another use: they serve as a reminder that...