Robert Alter has a new book out, a new translation of the Psalms. It has several goals, among them is his wish to remove from the Psalms every trace of Christian theology, a theology he believes has been superimposed on the poems by translators. For example, where the KJV capitalizes Son, he does not; where the KJV suggests heaven as when it renders l'orech yamim as "eternally", Alter leaves it as "for many long days" and keeps the poem in the present.
I've been reading the book, and I see that along with taking the Christinity out of the Pslams, he may have also stripped them of their Judaism, the Judaism of the current exile I mean. Over the last two thousand years the predicition of the Rabbis in Midrash Tehillim has come to pass. We Jews (and Christians, too, as Adam Kirsch points out in a masterful review) have acquired the habit of imagining that everything in the Psalms "pertains to all Israel, and to all times." Some of that is a trick of translation, though. As Kirch explains:
Alter's Psalms look backward--to the warrior culture that produced them, obsessed
with honor, shame, and revenge; and even to the polytheistic Canaanite mythology
that lurked in the background of Israelite religion. Psalm 95 declares: "For a great god is the Lord,/and great king over all the gods"; and in Psalm 104 we find God making war on the Ocean, as Baal did on the sea-god Yam in Canaanite myth"
For Psalm 95 Artscroll gives us For a great God is Hashem and great king above all heavely powers. (the Hebrew is melch godol al kol elohim) Psalm 104 is Barchi Nafshi, and Artscroo's translation carries none of the sense of it representing
I also learned from Kirsch that the tehillim fad gaining ground [criticized here] in our neighborhoods has an unlikely predecessor: Once monks recited the whole book, every week, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer called for the whole cycle to be read monthly.
