Weathering the Psalms

A Meteorotheological Survey

Steve A. Wiggins

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625647771
  9781498222488
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877316
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The weather is all around us all the time. From ancient times people have attributed the weather to the work of the gods. Ancient Israel shared this perception. The book of Psalms reflects theologically significant views on the weather that have not, until now, been fully explored. In this meteorological survey of the Psalms, whimsically called "meteorotheology," every reference to the weather is translated in accordance with the known climate and weather of ancient Israel. Each verse is discussed with particular attention to the function of the weather in the hymnal of ancient Israel. This book will be a resource for translators, clergy, and scholars with an interest in how the weather impacted religious outlooks in ancient Israel. Readers will learn that some expected associations, such as thunder and lightning, did not influence Israelite views on the natural world in the same way that they do today. Yahweh was God of the weather, and the Psalms frequently use this paradigm as a reason for both praise and fear of the Lord.

Chapter One

Ancient Weather, Ancient Poetry

Parameters and Possibilities

The weather, as an integral aspect of nature, has theological implications.19 Such implications led to the pursuit of a theology of nature, which was popular a couple of decades ago. As Terence Fretheim noted in 1988, the theme of nature in the Bible is one that has been studied only minimally.20 Taking his observation a step further, it is important to note that to date, no full-length study of the weather in the Psalms has yet appeared.21 Even in books concerning nature in the Bible, the weather is an aspect of the natural world often overlooked, although its presence is noteworthy in several biblical books.22

The science of meteorology is a relative newcomer among the physical sciences, but it is a field of immense importance, as well as of popular interest. It is also a field that humanity is only beginning to understand. “In the last thirty years and especially during the war of 1939–45,” R. B. Y. Scott began his article on weather terminology in the Bible in the early 1950s, “immense advances have been made in the scientific observation of weather and climate.”23 The same basic sentiment may be echoed today, and doubtless will be echoed again in the future. Any study concerning weather terminology must admit that it cannot be the final word, since new techniques of studying the atmosphere continue to develop and the precision with which the general principles are understood is constantly increasing. At the same time, a strong urge persists to find the common level which the weather shares with religious language—a phenomenon especially evident in the religious language of the Psalms. The many biblical weather citations provide fixed points of reference to which new meteorological understanding may be applied with fruitful results for the student of the Bible.

M. D. Futato wrote in his 1984 dissertation on the subject that “OT poets knew the weather of Palestine well and took it seriously.”24 This led him to ask: “How is it that they [i.e., the conclusions based on a meteorological analysis of Psalms 104, 65, and 29] have been missed for so long? I would suggest that the problem is the different ways in which the ancient and the modern worlds talk about weather.”25 Futato here makes explicit the relationship between the weather and the Psalms. The gauntlet he tossed down, however, has not been picked up; no full treatment of how the psalmists, as representatives of the ancient worldview, perceived the weather has yet appeared.

Although ancients, and some moderns, attribute the weather to God (or the gods), the language used to discuss this connection has, as Futato suggests, changed over time. Such a change makes a study like this one necessary. In important ways there is a continuity of thought, while in other ways, worldviews have changed radically. In the context of this change, it is important to keep tradents of theology and the Bible in communication with scientific developments.26 Twenty-first-century people still take the weather seriously, and the Psalms continue to hold a special place in the religious language of many in this same era. There seems to be an implicit awareness of the relationship between perceptions of God and the weather. It is this implicit awareness that will be brought to the surface in this monograph.

As the title of this chapter suggests, both of the disciplines brought together in this study involve ancient contexts. The Psalms are an ancient book of liturgical poetry.27 The weather scenarios utilized in the Psalms are ancient, unrecoverable meteorological events, or metaphors. Each subject requires careful handling, lest modern constructions read current agendas into the text. This chapter brings together the two separate disciplines of Psalms study and meteorology to set the groundwork for the chapters that follow.

The Psalms: Ancient Poetry

The Psalms are an unusual collection of ancient literature. They are unusual in a number of aspects,28 not least of which is the sheer number of ways in which they have been utilized. This current work is a further example of the wide usage to which the text has been put.

The Psalms were chosen to compare with meteorology for several reasons. Prolonged familiarity with the Psalms, in either academic or liturgical settings, leads to the recognition of the large number of meteorological references within the corpus. Having been written over many centuries and by many different authors, the Psalms represent a cross-section of ancient thought rather than a monotypic view. This cross-section demonstrates a remarkable convergence on the importance of weather in relationship to God. Within the parameters of this study such a cross-section also reveals different perceptions of the same weather phenomena. This convergence and divergence begs for exploration.

Study of the Psalms, however, has considerable limitations, both ancient and modern. These parameters must be kept in mind for any literary exploration of the Psalms, especially one that attempts to relate this literature to both science and theology. Dating the Psalms, with rare exceptions, involves considerable guesswork, and this robs the researcher of one of the most basic literary analytical devices. Despite the advances in Psalms studies, the history of the development of the book and the history its ancient liturgical use remain uncertain. The titles added to many of the Psalms cloud the issues of authorship, provenance, and date. In modern times, the issue is complicated by an ever-increasing number of publications on the Psalms for any number of uses: popular piety, academic study, literary value, modern liturgical renewal. Among these, the academic aspect itself is crowded with commentaries, monographs, and periodical articles.

For the purposes of this study, which is specific as to the material to be gleaned from the Psalms, some parameters are necessary. Many major commentaries have agendas that do not inform the specific concern of weather imagery in the Psalms. Commentaries remain useful tools for illuminating specific words and issues of prosody, but their value for a thematic study is often limited.

Nearly every imaginable aspect of the Psalms has been probed by various periodical articles, as a survey of the recent indices demonstrates. Not all of these sources have any significant impact on the theological use of weather terminology in the Psalms, and these articles clarify only specific, mostly unrelated, issues. These issues tend to be mostly structural studies or individual lexical issues. Fuller bibliographic resources on the Psalms can be found in many of the monographs and a few of the commentaries cited below.

While the issues of authorship, and particularly date, are often essential elements for interpreting an individual psalm, these issues are largely unaddressed in this work. It is sufficient to note that time of composition of a particular psalm has little to do with how the weather was perceived, suggesting a considerable stability of the issue in antiquity.

As a working hypothesis, the composition of the Psalms dates very roughly to the period 1200 to 500 B.C.E. This dating scheme is based on the parameters provided by the historical environment which gives a context to ancient Israel, namely, from the collapse of many Late Bronze Age civilizations to the relative stability of the Persian administration. This dating scheme is intended to be a rough guide only. Some individual psalms may ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Ancient Weather, Ancient Poetry
• Chapter 2: The Thunderstorm
• Chapter 3: The Wind
• Chapter 4: Rain and Clouds
• Chapter 5: Hail, Snow, Frost, Rime, and Dew
• Chapter 6: Temperature
• Chapter 7: Synthesis and Development
• Afterword
• Bibliography