Week 1 Psalm 3
I read the third psalm today.
Over on the right-hand side of the page – separated from the text – is the word “Selah”. It’s written after verses 2 & 4 & 8.
The marginal note in my bible says “Selah” might mean: Pause, Crescendo, or Musical interlude. I look at a different bible and it has the word “Interlude” written in place of “Selah”.
Psalm 3 doesn’t say anything about music in the subtitle but I glance down and see that the next six psalms do. David wrote all six and addressed them to the choir director (except psalm seven) – he even specified instrumentation.
If some of the psalms are musical psalms – if they’re lyrics set to music – then me sitting here reading them in silence is different from a Hebrew guy listening to them performed musically. How different? I looked up the lyrics of a song I heard last week (I couldn’t figure out the words the guy was singing). I read the lyrics. How different was reading lyrics from hearing them performed to music? Very.
And what if there’s even more to it than that? What if the “Selah” is tipping me off about something structural…maybe something like verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus? Or what if it’s got a Hebrew rhyme scheme…maybe some equivalent to ABAB? Or what if there’s two-thousand year-old figures of speech?
I came away a nagging feeling that – whatever all I might be getting from my reading – with the musical psalms I’m still missing something.