Taking a cue in my last post from early Christian apologetics, I suggested that if we wish to articulate and defend a doctrine of creation ex nihilo in contemporary theology, we would do well to offer a thick description of Yahweh’s divine monarchia (his sole rule or sovereignty). Rather than basing our affirmation of ex nihilo on Genesis 1:1 alone, we need to be broadly attentive to the Old Testament’s witness to Yahweh’s exercise of absolute mastery over his cosmos.
Accordingly, in this and several subsequent essays, I want to examine the theme of divine mastery over creation as the topic is presented in a narrow section of the Hebrew Psalter. I will be interested primarily in what the psalmists have to say about the creation’s contingency on the divine will in coming to be, and about divine mastery over the world once made. In order to set a quasi-manageable limit to my investigation, I will restrict my discussion to Psalms 90-106, the fourth “book” within the Psalter.
A few words about my order of procedure—and about an occasional conversation partner—are needed here are the outset. First, my order of exposition doesn’t proceed linearly, starting with Psalm 90 and proceeding in sequence to 106. I am going to claim that there are some large-scale theological goals that govern the macro-ordering of this “book” of the Psalter—though I’m not going to tell you just yet what I think that macro-ordering is. Few readers recognize that this sequence of the Psalter constitutes a “book” that has unifying themes, but I hope it might help to make my point more convincing by starting with a sub-section that is commonly recognized as thematically unified—and then working my way outward from there. Accordingly, I start not with Psalm 90, but with Psalms 93-100, psalms concerning Yahweh’s divine Kingship.
Second, any attempt to set forth a doctrine of creation using Old Testament texts quickly runs into difficulties (or at least questions) posed by a certain scholarly obsession within the OT guild. According to the accounts told by some of Israel’s neighbors, the “creation” of the world occurred when a god triumphed in battle over a watery nemesis (usually either the Sea itself, personified, or a Dragon that lived in the Sea).
The most famous account of this kind is the Babylonian Enuma elish, which described the victory of the god Marduk over Tiamat, the personification of the primal salt-waters. Stories like this generally presupposed both the pre-existence of the god who triumphed and of his enemy, the watery “chaos.” Since, according to the Enuma elish, the inhabited world was formed out of the corpse of Marduk’s defeated enemy, there is no “creation ex nihilo” in any strict sense in this or similar cosmologies. (The theme of God—or a god—defeating his watery/chaotic enemy frequently goes by the German title Chaoskampf.)
OT scholars have long claimed to detect appropriations of this Ancient Near Eastern mythology in Israel’s own accounts: thus, references to Yahweh’s triumph or exaltation over waters are taken as evidence that Israel too assumed a pre-existent “chaos.” (One particularly notable instance of this scholarship is Jon Levinson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil. Although I do not agree with a number of his conclusions, Levinson is a worthwhile read.) This is certainly not the place to respond to these claims in detail—however, given that I’m looking for what the psalmists thought about Yahweh’s relation to the created order, the claims of this OT scholarship will have to be a conversation partner in what follows.
Finally, since even the ten psalms that make up the sequence of Psalms 93-100 contain more material about creation than I can address in a single post, the remainder of this post will deal only with Psalms 93 and 95. Later posts will take up the sequence 93-100 considered together, and then Psalms 90-106, considered as a coordinated “book.”
Psalms of Yahweh’s Kingship (part 1 of 3): Psalms 93 and 95
The leitmotiv of the Psalm 93 is firmness: God has created a stable world that does not totter (v. 1), his own throne is stable (v. 2), and his testimonies are very reliable (v. 5). Given closely associated declarations of stability in vv. 1-2, it seems natural to infer that the stability of the divine throne is the guarantee of the stability of the habitable world. For many interpreters in the last hundred years, the immediately ensuing reference to the chaotic waters in vv. 3-4 is then taken to allude to the Chaoskampf myth, alluded to above:
2 Your throne stands firm from of old;
from eternity You have existed.
3 The floods lift up, O Yahweh,
The floods lift their thunder,
the floods are lifting up their crushing waves.
4 Above the thunder of mighty waters
(the breakers of the sea are [indeed] majestic!)
you are majestic in the height, O Yahweh.
Wherever the psalmist got this imagery from, the psalm itself makes no explicit reference to a primeval battle in which Yahweh won or actualized his kingship by victory over personified chaotic waters. In fact, far from being neutralized (as in Enuma elish or in the Ugaritic parallels), the waters seem to threaten still. Karl Löning and Erich Zenger rightly note that the psalm departs from Canaanite and Mesopotamian uses of the Chaoskampf precisely here: “It is precisely [vv. 3-5] that distinguishes YHWH’s rule from the kingdom of the gods that was usual in the ancient Near Eastern world of ideas. While there the kingship was achieved in the struggle with chaos, so that the victory over chaos is a prerequisite of royal rule, YHWH’s creative battle against chaos is the result of YHWH’s royal rule, which is from the very beginning.”
Thus, Psalm 93 establishes a key-note for the sequence of enthronement psalms which follow: Yahweh is and has always been king; he made the world, though there are forces of opposition within it (whose origin is not explained); and, despite the threatening waters, Yahweh remains triumphant.
Psalm 95 displays an obvious sense division at v. 7b: vv. 1-7a envision a dramatic setting in temple worship (Yahweh’s “house”), and summon the worshippers (vv. 1-2 and 6) to acclaim the divine King, who is Creator both of the cosmos (v. 4-5) and of Israel (v. 7); vv. 7b-11 turn to address the community with a “prophetic” voice of admonition.
The psalm shows affinities with Deuteronomy (and, one might add, with Isaiah—though, for reasons that will become evident in my later installments in this series, the connections with the “Mosaic” voice of Deuteronomy are especially relevant here), such as the following: the God who made the world also made Israel (vv. 5-6; cf. Deuteronomy 32:6); emphasis on “today” (v. 7b; cf. Deuteronomy 4:40, 5:3, 6:6, 7:11, etc.); and “rest” as possession of the land (v. 11; cf. Deuteronomy 12:9). Moreover, the warning address to the congregation begun in v. 7b—appealing to an episode from Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness—raises a “prophetic” voice in this psalm that we might well characterize as “Mosaic.” (Again, I will develop this claim later on.)
Within its canonical placing, Psalm 95 develops the declaration “Yahweh is King,” introduced earlier in Psalm 93. The realm of Yahweh’s rule is systematically developed: he is “great God” and “great King” above all gods (v. 3), and his rule encompasses the whole of the lower realm, extending vertically from the “depths of the earth” to the “heights of the mountains” (v. 4), and horizontally from the sea to the dry land (v. 5). Verse 5 stresses that Yahweh is the creator of both major divisions of terrestrial geography:
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and the dry land, which his hands have formed.
All the earth is Yahweh’s—but the motif of creation as “his, because he made it” is here expressed specifically in relation to “the Sea.” In this psalmist’s view, the sea is simply one more thing that God made—and no conflictual account of creation is entertained, according to which the sea would not have been “made” but rather “subdued” or confined. The concluding move of the Psalm’s rehearsal of Yahweh’s creative acts is to focus on the covenant with Israel:
6 O come, let us worship and bow down,
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
7 For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
The imagery of a shepherd and his flock continues the theme of divine kingship (cf. Isaiah 40:11, Psalms 80:1 and 100:3).
Taken together, these two Psalms introduce the theme of the ensuing chorus: the scope is cosmic (93:1), but also legal and liturgical (93:5). Yahweh’s exaltation is not per se the negation of unruly elements in the cosmos (93:3-4), but it does circumscribe them by an ultimate stability (93:1). Again, the scope is cosmic (95:95:3-5), yet centered around his dealings with Israel (95:6-11). The cosmos is, and is stable, so that the divine Shepherd-King may pasture his flock there.
Stephen Long is a PhD candidate in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity at the University of Notre Dame.