You can never have too many Psalters.
This year I set out on a 10-year journey to commit all 150 Psalms to memory. As Psalm 77:10 reads in the Greek (LXX): Now have I made a beginning, this change hath been wrought by the right hand of the Most High.
I began preparations for this pilgrimage in the fall of last year. I had strong concerns I simply did not possess the requisite memory abilities to achieve my ambitious goal. I have always been dismal at remembering song lyrics, but I counted a glimmer of hope in my ability to recall movie quotes. I suspected some of my potential had been crippled by the progressive surrender of my faculties to the power and convenience of technology—a kind of iPhone and Google induced mnemonic atrophy.
I decided to test my capabilities by memorizing Psalm 1 since the words, “on His law will he meditate day and night,” sowed the very seed in my heart to begin this project. The process was slow and repetitive. I drilled and drilled the psalm. I hunted for musical versions and practiced with an Anglican chant setting I discovered. Progress came in chunks, specifically vv.1-2, 3-4, and 5-6. I wish I recorded how long it took me to memorize those scant 6 verses but, suffice it to say, it felt like months.
Through my stubborn perseverance, I discovered, or rather rediscovered the power of memorization laying dormant in me. Once I cemented Psalm 1, Psalms 4, 51, and 95 came much more quickly. I realized that through my new devotion to Morning and Evening Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer (begun in mid 2023) I had unconsciously memorized nearly half of the Daily Office. I was joyfully surprised and encouraged at awakening my capacity for memorization. It was as if I had reclaimed a lost aspect of my humanity and unlocked a doorway to a garden of cognitive and meditative potential. A fire was kindled within me to pursue this project with significant attention and fervor.
How then to begin such a journey? It can be as simple as picking up your Bible, opening to Psalm 1, and reading it 10 times a day. This is how I began my pilot of the project, but I quickly found myself wanting to know more about the psalm’s interpretation so I could better understand the words taking shape in my mind. This is a natural part of the process: When you give your attention to God’s word and become intimately familiar with a passage, you till the soil of your heart, sow seed, and God mysteriously brings growth. So be diligent to cooperate with the grace of His growth by faithfully watering this shoot. Fan into flame every spark sent from our Father of lights.
As I studied interpretations of Psalm 1, I became aware of subtle differences in translation, some significant for the sense of the text, but most were stylistic and affected my love for the text. Let me explain. I experimented with reciting several versions and found that certain wordings would embed themselves so firmly into my memory that they replaced the text I originally memorized. Some phrases were sticky. The Psalm 1 stored in my memory became a blend of at least three translations.
The qualities I experienced as sticky are peculiar to my tastes and sensibilities. Despite this subjective nature, certain literary works and styles are objectively proven by their enduring acclaim. The King James Version Bible is one such enduring work, and the Elizabethan mode is one such style. Much of the stickiest qualities I experienced are native to the Elizabethan style, such as non-SVO syntax or archaic pronouns and verbs, but others include consistent word choices and harmonized phrases across the Psalms.
Consider an example from Psalm 51:10–12, first from the KJV 1900.
Create in me a clean heart, O God;
And renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence;
And take not thy holy spirit from me.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation;
And uphold me with thy free spirit.
While modern English syntax normally flows in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order, the Elizabethan English poetically varies this order. If you are not familiar with this sentence structure, it commonly requires more than one reading to parse out who (Subject) is doing (Verb) what (Object). However, if you are familiar, the distinct syntactical flow presents a poetic emphasis normally unavailable in languages bereft of inflection.
The same passage in the Christian Standard Bible (CSB) shows how significant the return to SVO syntax can be. The petitions of the psalmist sound mundane by comparison, even though their content remains essentially unchanged.
God, create a clean heart for me
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not banish me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore the joy of your salvation to me,
and sustain me by giving me a willing spirit.
There is no question that the CSB is a more accessible translation here. The meaning of the verses requires little to no contemplation to comprehend. But herein lies the rub—it is precisely contemplation that I am after when looking to “meditate on His law day and night.” Do not misunderstand this as a criticism of the CSB or other accessible translations as valid Bible translations, but instead as an evaluation of their particular utility in meditative memorization of the Psalms. I often use translations like the CSB, NET, NIV, and NLT (to name but a few) to help understand the literal sense of the text, but seldom for precise renditions of the original languages or memorable style.
To demonstrate the archaic pronouns and verbal forms, let us look to one of the Gospel canticles, the Nunc Dimittis of Luke 2:29–32. Here is the KJV 1900 again:
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word:
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.
The second person singular pronoun, thou/thee/thy/thine, may be the most recognizable aspect of this era of English. It may also be the most misunderstood. Perhaps due to the sense of reverence the KJV language gives the Scriptures, “thou” is often thought to be a formal pronoun. Instead, it is the informal pronoun. Additionally, its various forms are the English equivalent of case inflections that tell you whether it is being used as a subject, direct object, or possessive.
Archaisms like this are strongly polarizing. I do not intend to make an authoritative claim about its fittingness in Christian Scripture or liturgy, only to comment on its stickiness for memorization and only according to my experience. All those thee’s and thine’s were the first thing to overwrite the texts I memorized. The archaic pronouns burst forth of their own accord during recitation, much to my surprise. I suspect that high esteem for the Elizabethan period disposes me to them, but I believe it goes beyond that. There is something truly euphonious about thou/thee/thine. If you consider the sound of you/your, it has a guttural vowel quality to it that while not necessarily cacophonous, it lacks the pleasing “th” consonant sound that breaks up the vowels. When thy is followed by a word beginning with a vowel, thine is used (likewise with my/mine). Again, it breaks up the vowels in a pleasing way that facilitates both pronouncing and hearing the words articulately.
Falling in love with the Elizabethan style native to Shakespeare, Cranmer, Coverdale, Spenser, and others comes with a catch. I am supremely aware of the fact that the Scripture of our New Testament was written in the vulgar Greek that we know today as Common Greek (κοινη/koine) and not in the high dialects we collectively refer to as Classical Greek. I am conscientiously following the opposite of this New Testament pattern, and that gives me pause. I fear the temptation to pretension and conceit that comes with the knowledge and usage of a high form of speech. This temptation heightens with the natural entropic descent of vernacular speech into vulgarity. In other words, the more our English is corrupted, the more pretentious it seems to recover archaic style.
I believe the tension between broadly accessible language and high linguistic beauty is universal. I do not have a profound or novel solution to resolve this tension apart from embracing both genuinely. Christians understand the nature of the cross as a timeless solution to the problem of horizontality and verticality. We traditionally focus on this as a symbol of the convergence of our horizontal relationship with our neighbor and our vertical relationship with God, however, a truth as deep as the cross is polyvalent. In this light, I embrace the vertical ascent I experience through the beauty and poetry of “high speech,” an oft laborious climb up the mountain of God that rewards the laborer with revelatory vistas. But after making an ascent, one must return to the everyday plains and share the fruits of contemplation. Scripture consumed through memorization must be digested before it can be related in accessible speech. The love begotten in communion with God on the mountain is made active by translating His words into a ladder that enables God-fearers to begin their own ascent from whatever altitude in which they find themselves. And if they are so disposed, it may be that in sharing a taste of the high language, it will elevate their gaze and inspire them to hold fast their faith and continue the ascent.
Through this cruciform consideration, I have decided to focus memorization on a vertical translation of the Psalms as well as routine reading through a horizontal translation. For the vertical axis, I have selected the Holy Transfiguration Monastery’s Psalter According to the Seventy. This translation comes from a Russian Orthodox monastery in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. As such, I often hear this translation referred to as the Boston Psalter or the HTM Psalter. This translation was built on the work of two independent translations, those of Fr. Lazarus Moore of India and Fr. Michael Gelsinger of New York. It was translated from the Greek Septuagint, itself an ancient translation of the Old Testament, and not the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) common to most Bibles.
An explanation of those two textual traditions is very worthwhile, but out of scope for this discussion. Suffice it to say that in the era of the early church, the Greek Septuagint was the most accessible translation available for the ancient world because the Greek language was a lingua franca in the ancient world. Septuagint is a Latin word for seventy, often abbreviated using the Roman numerals “LXX”, alluding to the story of the original 70 (or possibly 72) Hebrew translators summoned to Alexandria to produce a Greek translation of the first five books of Moses. While you may not have heard of the LXX before, its influence is present throughout the New Testament where its authors often follow the Greek LXX and not the Hebrew MT.
The HTM Psalter is written in the style of the King James version of the Bible. The publishers believe this style contributes to solemnity, beauty, and liturgical use. In the Translator’s Introduction at the beginning, it states of the KJV English that, “it is a more ancient and purer form of the language.” While this translation bears much of the hallmark beauty of that style, it never feels ostentatious or excessively old timey. The raw, visceral emotions of the Psalms do not get airbrushed by flowery language. The subtle differences in the Greek LXX source text also contribute to a more straightforward reading of the Psalms that resonates more strongly with me.
The textual differences between the LXX and MT sources do not change the overall sense presented in each of the psalms. Psalms of lamentation remain a lament. Psalms of praise remain praiseful. Those psalms which are widely recognized to be prophetic retain their prophetic quality, though the Christological emphasis is often greater than in the MT. The superscriptions of each psalm do often differ, and scholars have long leveraged both textual streams for a fuller picture about the nature of each psalm. Without doubt, the most jarring difference is the enumeration of the Psalms. Because of a couple different choices regarding where one psalm ends and another begins, much of the Greek psalter is numbered one psalm behind the widespread numbering according to the Hebrews—the numbering used in all Protestant Bibles. This may seem very disconcerting, but the Roman Catholic tradition is very familiar with this problem given that the Latin Vulgate follows the Greek numbering as well.
The Greek of the LXX is distinct from its period because it incorporates much of the Hebrew idioms present in the original text. However, there are many places where such idioms were interpreted to accommodate intelligibility. These interpretive variants serve a tremendously important function to Biblical scholarship because they form a bridge through history from the original authors of the Hebrew text to us in the modern era via the translators of the third century BC.
One Hebraism I find confusing occurs in Psalm 70:3 (ESV):
Let them turn back because of their shame who say, “Aha, Aha!”
This phrase, “aha,” occurs in four verses of the Psalms (Ps 35:21,25; 40:15; 70:3) and always carries a sense of mockery from the ungodly. When I reflect on those passages, I can understand the sense of mockery, but I initially expect the word to be an exclamation of realization—the kind we even call an aha moment. Think of the famous epiphany of Archimedes when he cried, “Eureka!” This misunderstanding is hard for me to disassociate. Hear instead how the HTM renders this passage:
Let them be turned back straightway in shame that say unto me: Well done! Well done!
This change naturally lends itself to a tone of sarcasm. The original meaning thus remains unchanged and becomes more intuitive to my modern ears. Variations like this expand my understanding of the Psalms, and not from academic commentators, but from the textual tradition of the Church itself. It is my joy to bring this oft unheard witness to conversations on the Psalms amongst Christians.
The HTM bears a strong harmony of phrases and passages throughout the Psalms. If this harmony is not native to the Greek LXX itself, then the translators and editors of the psalter have labored long with an eye towards this kind of consistency which is a boon to memorization.
One such consistent phrase is found in the Songs of Ascent of Psalms 120–134. The first two verses of Psalm 129 begin with a call and response antiphon, which read like this in the 2019 New Coverdale Psalms:
“Many a time have they fought against me from my youth on,” may Israel now say; “Indeed, many a time have they afflicted me from my youth on, but they have not prevailed against me.”
Note how fought in the first verse is substituted with afflicted in the second. The HTM reads thus:
Many a time have they warred against me from my youth, let Israel now say, many a time have they warred against me from my youth, and yet they have not prevailed against me.
This harmony between the first two verses appears in the LXX text. Where this gets even more interesting is in the last verse of Psalm 120 where the HTM says, With them that hate peace I was peaceable, when I spake unto them, they warred against me without a cause. The phrase “warred against me” is repeated between these two psalms, lending them a memorable harmony. The 2019 New Coverdale reads, I labor for peace, but when I speak to them of it, they make themselves ready for battle. Here we find our third distinct phrase out of those three verses. The New Coverdale Psalms appear to veer from the Hebrew, which keep Psalm 129:1–2 in harmony, but the point remains. These and various other phrases make up the vernacular of the HTM and are used like building blocks for the language of the Psalms. These building blocks can likewise edify our memorization.
While the Psalter of the Holy Transfiguration Monastery occupies the vertical axis, I have chosen the 2019 New Coverdale Psalms to uphold the horizontal axis. This translation of the Psalms was published in the ACNA’s 2019 Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) is an integral part of the anglophone tradition of prayer and liturgy. Together these two selections cover vast historical and geographical territory as witnesses to the Eastern and Western Christian traditions.
This 2019 rendition stands on the shoulders of the seminal 1662 edition of the BCP which published the Psalms from Myles Coverdale’s translation of the Bible in 1535. His translation included William Tyndale’s work but had to supplement the remaining untranslated books with his own translations rendered not from the original Greek and Hebrew texts but from the Latin Vulgate and German translations (including Luther’s German Bible). The Psalter thus printed in 1662 bears the beauty of the Elizabethan English form and has a unique set of readings that incorporate the Latin Vulgate.
The 2019 Psalter modernizes the language of the 1662 edition for contemporary liturgical use, and it does this superbly well. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading through it in the monthly cycle of the Daily Office, and I appreciate how the verses retain a measure of the charm and grace of the Elizabethan poetry while not taxing comprehension. These are the fruits of the labor of many hands, including notable Anglican literary titans, T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis.
By selecting two translations, I am not proposing to memorize both in tandem. I will focus my attention memorizing the LXX Psalter since it resonates most strongly with me. However, I intend to continue reading the New Coverdale Psalms as a part of the Daily Office. This twofold approach also has a cruciform shape—the vertical practice of memorization and meditation and the horizontal practice of monthly recitation.
It is possible, perhaps even likely, that I will corrupt my efforts to memorize one translation by regularly reading through another. I embrace this possibility because recall of these Psalms is not an incantation, but a sacramental means to communion with the triune God. The words of any reasonable translation mediate to us divine truth, in which we encounter God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Wherever you are in your pilgrimage, I hope this inspires you to take up the Psalms like a warrior takes up his sword, and to select that sword with care and attention to detail so you may wield it effectively. I pray your recitation and memorization trains your hands for battle so that in the day of testing you might slay the dragon of the passions.
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.