'Ring' Just Doesn’t Cut It
A fresh look Recovering the passionate Hebrew cry at the heart of Psalm 94at the 'Invitatory Psalm 94 (95)
One can, for some very good reasons, get very possessive over the particular words in the liturgy and words used to translate the Bible.
From the age of eight I have been singing the Venite, known to Catholics as Psalm 94 (and to Anglicans as Psalm 95.)
Thrilled as I was to become a Catholic, I daily face irritation at the Grail translation of Psalm 94. (95)
For the whole of my life I’ve been saying, consciously and unconsciously:
Come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving
and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.
The Catholic Office in the Liturgy of the Hours has:
Come, ring out our joy to the Lord;
hail the God who saves us.
Let us come before him, giving thanks,
with songs let us hail the Lord.
I just don’t like ‘ring’; and I don’t like ’hail’ (in this context at least. I’ve no problem with them as words per se) For some reason I find this translation irritating and inaccessible. I think it feels dreadfully tame, almost ‘bourgeois’ in its restraint. And so I thought it was time to unravel the original text.
It was the word “ring” that particularly annoyed me. I don’t know why, and perhaps it doesn’t matter why. But it was worth looking further into the original, if only to discover its visceral passion.
As it happens, my confidence in the Anglican translation was also partly misplaced. However, many roots it had put down in my psyche.
Because “singing” doesn’t do it.
There’s no reason why we should not ‘sing’ out to the Lord, but that wasn’t what the Psalmist had in mind. He was doing something more passionate than that.
And it is precisely because of the passion that this becomes a trail worth pursuing.
There is a perfectly good Hebrew word for “sing”: shir. It’s the root word behind the Song of Songs.
And just in case you’re choosing to sing music accompanied by instruments, then the word changes very specifically to zamar.
Just in case the singing you’re doing is praise, then that gets described as halal, which, of course, as alert readers will immediately recognise, is the root of hallelujah.
There is a dignified liturgical singing of thanks, which is todah.
But the word at the heart of this beautiful Psalm is none of these.
It is ranan.
This is where the passion and the ecstasy come in. It describes an almost involuntary cry of joy and delight that the body makes as an almost unstoppable response to profound feeling.
We don’t have a word for this in English, perhaps because it’s not the kind of thing the English do. We mistrust involuntary cries of joy and ecstasy. They run a little counter to our preference for self-control and moderation.
(It’s unusual for us to run out of words in English. That is, after all, what English is best at. We have a vocabulary of between 600,000 to a million words. Compared to German with 300-500,000; French with 1,-2,00,000. Latin with 40,-100,000 and Biblical Hebrew with 8,000. But at this point Hebrew has a word we seem never to have needed.)
But the Psalm is asking us to loosen the ties of our respectability a little and loose some of the passion the Holy Spirit stirs up in our depths as we contemplate the enormity of who God is and the profundity of what he has done for us.
Let it out. Let loose. Let it rip. Let it happen.
All carry us closer to ranan, and perhaps, since we have to use at least two words, they should be “cry out”. Just cry out our joy to the Lord.
If we cross-check the use of the word in other parts of the Bible, we find that Lamentations 2:19 turns to the word to describe the anguished cry at night of Jerusalem’s destruction. Ranan carries the sense of the fact that the emotion, in this place the grief, cannot be contained or carried by words.
And in Isaiah there is a wonderful vision of anthropomorphic projection, where the trees come alive as they do in Tolkien’s imagination with the Ents in The Lord of the Rings. We are presented here with dancing, exultant, almost human-like trees, as Isaiah describes the trees breaking out in rinnah, (deriving from ranan,) as the trees break out into this crying aloud in joy at the Lord’s redemption.
Isaiah uses it again when he writes:
“Sing, O barren one, who did not bear.”
Ronni, again from ranan, addressed to Zion as a woman who has been shamed and exhausted by childlessness, has been given her voice back, along with fruitfulness, and the cry, the exultant cry, that emerges is too deep and passionate for anything other than this eruption of gratitude from the depths of the heart.
Psalm 132:9 and 16 speaks of crying out or shouting out for joy (yeranenu), as the priests respond with passion and celebration at the establishment of David’s line. It allows the word to work outside the confines of personal passion, describing the unusual phenomenon of institutional ecstasy. It’s all about the fulfilment of the covenant and the deep joy that can’t be contained.
Psalm 71 ties singing and the crying out together:
“My lips will cry out when I sing praises to you.”
Here the Psalmist is doing some accompanied singing, (Zamar) but moving to a deeper, more passionate level. What starts with singing overflows into crying out for joy.
However unusual it is for English not to have a word, in this case it may be that Hebrew developed a vocabulary particularly rich in learning to praise the God who had chosen them and made them a tribe for this very purpose from the beginning. English was after all formed in its earliest construction in a pagan culture. There was no such intimacy with the rather more dangerous gods of pagan encounter.
Once we’ve moved beyond the bland rather to “ring”, the rest of the Psalm justifies the passionate, exultant crying out for joy.
For a world of flux, change, threat and fluidity, God is encountered as El, the God, the Rock of our salvation.
The invitation to “come before his face” finds its origin in the word qadam, which is a cultic, choreographed, processional word. This is not about the individual imagining the presence of God, but a whole body of worshippers physically advancing into the divine presence, approaching as closely as they can get to the Holy of Holies, as we now approach to put ourselves together, individually or collectively, in front of the Blessed Tabernacle.
To bow is to be blessed, since when the Psalm calls upon us to bow down and kneel, the root word to kneel is the same word as a blessing. We bend our wills and our bodies before God, the immovable Rock, and in so doing the bending becomes blessing.
The end of the Psalm turns fierce and frankly threatening.
One of the strange oddities of the Anglican Prayer Book was that any part of the Psalm that was slightly intemperate or cross, threatening, demanding, warning, straying outside the boundaries of the nice, were given a star, and they could be left out in any liturgical offering.
So the last verses of this Psalm were starred:
Today, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness; when your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their hearts, for they have not known my ways; unto whom I sware in my wrath, that they should not enter into my rest.
This was too much for Anglican sensibilities. The combination of the demand for repentance and the threat of consequences was uncomfortable and disturbing enough to be ignored, which rather proved the point of the whole Psalm in the first place.
The Hebrew lying behind the words is very carefully judged.
“If you would hear his voice.”
The word for hear is the same verb as the Shema, the central core theme of Israel’s relationship with God:
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”
Hearing God is a matter of the utmost seriousness, not only in the Psalms but throughout Holy Scripture.
The Letter to the Hebrews, chapters 3 and 4, builds an entire argument on the need to hear, pay attention and surrender the will, rather than putting God in the dock as the accused criminal who has not performed quite to our liking.
Meribah describes a formal lawsuit brought against someone, and Massah is the word for testing, to expose what was really there.
Where the English in verse 10 has:
“Forty years long was I grieved with this generation,”
the Hebrew is more visceral:
“I loathed this generation.”
This is not mere irritation. This is the God who, in the Apocalypse, will loathe the tepid and spit it out from his mouth because he prefers the passion of either full-scale opposition or ecstatic compliance. Committed opposition can at least be turned into profound penitence, with the penitence as energised as the rebellion; but what can you do with apathy?
