My earlier post on Psalm 98 brought up some additional questions, and so I thought I would give a slightly more in depth review of what I think is going on in the Psalm. Please note that this is still a quick review of this section of the psalm.
Psalm 98.4-6, Hebrew Text:
הריעו ליהוה כל־הארץ פצחו ורננו וזמרו׃
זמרו ליהוה בכנור בכנֹור וקול זמרה׃
בחצצרות וקול שופר הריעו לפני המלך יהוה׃
Translation:
Shout to YHWH, all the Earth! Be joyful and cry out and make music!
Make music with the lyre! With the lyre and the sound of melody!
With trumpets and the sound of the horn give a blast before the king, YHWH!
This translation is my own, and different from any English Bible translations I’ve seen. It is not dissimilar to John Goldingay’s translation in his Psalms commentary, however. He prefers “resound” for the verb רנן whereas I prefer “cry out.” Otherwise our translations are quite similar, though I arrived at mine independently. One thing that this translation illustrates is the lack of specific musical terms in verse four until the final word.
Verse four contains four verbs. Each of them are masculine plural imperatives, and only the final verb is a specifically music term. רוע, the first verb, means simply “to shout.” It is mostly used in the context of war or battle, but may also be used generally for loud shouts or, as BDB puts it, “in public worship with music and sacrifice.” Its semantic range also extends to sounding a trumpet or horn, as in verse six of this passage.
The second verb used is פצח, a very rare verb (occurs 8x in the Hebrew Bible, 6 of which are in Isaiah). The verb often parallels רנן or a derived noun, as in this passage. CDCH understands the verb to mean “be jubilant,” and I have rendered it as “be joyful” in the translation above. It is possible that this verb, and the next one (רנן), go together and form a single idea, hence the common translation “break forth with song,” or the like. I am not convinced, however, that the verb רנן means “sing” except peripherally. Instead, I think the verb means to cry out, in either joy or sorrow (cf. TWOT). According to the lexicons and my own brief survey, the verb refers to cries or shouts of joy or sorrow, depending on the context. It’s certainly possible that such cries could take the form of song, but it is not necessarily so. Given these data, it is possible that one might translate the two verbs “give a joyful cry” or something similar.
The final verb is זמר, a specifically musical term. It may mean either to play an instrument (which may well be the case in the present context, given the instruments that are mentioned) or to sing a song. It is often used in parallel with שיר, which does mean “sing.” However, after looking at each of the occurrences of זמר in the HB, I don’t see any reason that it couldn’t mean simply “make music,” which may or may not have anything to do with singing. As such it would make a perfect parallel for שיר; the latter dealing with vocal music and the former with instrumental music. However I’d need to look more closely at various passages before I’d be comfortable actually making that case. Either way, the fact remains that none of the verbs in verse four refers unambiguously to singing. That isn’t to say that singing can’t possibly be in mind, but simply that it is by no means the central focus of the verse/psalm. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what many Christians force the psalm to say. In fairness, many English translations offer a translation which does seem slanted towards songs, even though the verbs themselves appear–to me–to have less to do with song specifically and more to do with loud shouts generally and instrumentation specifically.
Also of interest from a structural perspective is that verse four ends with the imperative of זמר and verse five begins with the same form of the same verb. Verse five also ends with a noun derived from the same root (translated “melody” above). Verse six continues the prep+noun structure of verse five. It concludes with a similar phrase to what began this section, forming a kind of inclusio. In fact, the Hebrew verb translated “give a blast” in verse six, above, is the same verb used in verse four and translated “shout,” (cf. CDCH, Holladay).
It is important to remember that verses four to six are part of the larger psalm. This section of the psalm comes after the recounting of YHWH’s deeds in verses 1b-3 (verse 1a, coincidently, is a far better verse to mention if one wishes to talk about singing). These verses describe the response the psalmist expects after hearing of the great deeds of YHWH. Verses 4-6 discuss what are arguably human responses which eventually give way (via the transition in verse 7) to the responses of creation itself. The psalm is much more than a command to sing. It is a call to praise YHWH in a variety of ways; indeed, a call to join all of creation in praising YHWH.
