Psalm 29—My God, My Whisper of Flame

"The pain hasn't lessened, but it visits me less."

Note from Andy

This is an older version of Psalm 29 that has since been updated. You can find a link to the updated rendition below. I have left the commentary on the psalm from the first version in case anyone finds it helpful or interesting.

Commentary: Psalm 29 and Genesis 1

This psalm is in dialogue with Genesis 1. You can see the obvious parallel between the repetition of the actions of the voice of God in creation and the actions of the voice of God in Psalm 29.

God’s voice creates. Theologians call them “speech-acts” for with God to speak is to make, to cause to be, to take action.

I drew out this connection a bit further by rendering verse 3 as:

“The voice of God hovers over the waters”

I inserted the word “hovers” here even though the word is not present in the Hebrew text of Psalm 29 in order to underscore the connection I see between this verse and Genesis 1:2, which reads:

“And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

When we get into some of the things the psalm says the voice of the Lord does (see note #2), we’ll see that Genesis 1 and Psalm 29 have even more in common. Genesis 1 is a paean to God’s absolute supremacy in creation. His voice orders all things and brooks no rivals. In many ways, Psalm 29 is a rumination on those very traits of God and ends with a prayer that that same strength and order-making peace would flow to his people.

Note #2: What does God have against the cedars of Lebanon?

“The voice of the Lord shatters trees,
God breaks the cedars of Lebanon.”

At one level, this is a poetic image that the power of God’s voice—which the psalmist has just declared the be vast and strong—is so great that something that is also vast and strong, the renowned cedars of Lebanon, can be made to shatter like glass by something of greater power and permanence, the voice of God.

But the meaning of this image goes even deeper than that. If we look more closely into the meaning of the cedars of Lebanon, we can find echoes of other interesting meanings created by juxtaposing God’s voice with the cedars.

In particular, look at Ezekiel 31, where the cedars of Lebanon is compared to the might of the Assyrian empire.

“Behold Assyria was like a cedar in Lebanon,
with beautiful branches and forest shade,
and of towering height,
its top among the clouds…
All the birds of the heavens
made their nests in its boughs…”

So, at least in Ezekiel, the cedars of Lebanon can also be used to refer to empires in rebellion against God. The “this is not just about trees” connection is made deeper by the next line in the psalm:

“He makes Lebanon skip and dance like a calf
And Sirion shake like a wild ox.”

Deuteronomy 3:9 tells us that “the Sidonians call Hermon Sirion, while the Amorites call it Senir…” So when the psalmist is talking about “Sirion,” he is actually talking about Mount Hermon (which is just inland from the cities of ancient Lebanon).

If you remember the notes on Psalm 22, you’ll remember that Mount Hermon (and its bulls) are symbolically connected to the forces arrayed against God. And if we are talking about mountains and nation-states bouncing, skipping, and dancing, we aren’t really talking about skipping for joy.

That is earthquake language.

So these verses are really saying that God can make the forces who oppose him topple and fall with only his voice. Which is not much of a challenge for God.

[And just one further note on this. The ESV inserts a paragraph break between verse 6 (“and Sirion like a wild ox”) and verse 7 (“the voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire,”) but I think they belong together so I have removed the paragraph break in my translation. The verb the ESV translates as “flashes” is chatsav and it appears 29 times in the Bible. It means to “hew, dig out, or cleave” as one might dig a hole. Every other time that word appears, the ESV translates it using digging words. However, here they render it as “flashing.” I suppose the reason for that is that “flashing” is a word we might use to describe a burst of fire. But if verses 6 and 7 are really talking about mountains and earthquakes, then continuing to translate chatsav with digging words makes sense because it taps into the image of a volcano, an image that is associated with God elsewhere in the Bible too (see Psalm 18). I translated it as “The voice of the Lord gouges out flames of fire.”]