Thou Brakest the Heads of the Dragons in the Waters

Reading Psalms 73-89

In this newsletter, I am reading the approx. 850 authors and works of Harold Bloom's Western canon, from cover to cover, from the Epic of Gilgamesh of ca. 1200 B.C. to Tony Kushner's 1991 play Angels in America. For today I’ve continued the third item on Bloom’s list: the Holy Bible.

I’ve enjoyed reading, in the Books of Job and Psalms, the brief but more detailed accounts of the creation of the world, which Genesis makes it look like was the result of the LORD merely vocalizing his will, but which these later Old Testament books describe in more material terms. Passages of the Book of Job hint at some sort of battle between the LORD and the sea or with sea monsters which resulted in the formation of the earth, but these lines from Psalm 74 say it outright:

For God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth. Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness. Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood: thou driedst up mighty rivers. The day is thine, the night is also thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun. Thou hast set all the borders of the earth: thou hast made summer and winter.

The mention of leviathan’s being given as meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness is curious, and, along with the reference to dying up mighty rivers, something God also did for the Israelites when they crossed the Jordan into Canaan, might make one think a comparison is being made between the creation of the world and the founding of the Israelites as an independent nation, with the meat of leviathan becoming the manna, or perhaps the quails dropped from the sky to feed the Israelites wandering the wilderness in Exodus and Numbers; and of course the LORD divided to make dry land, momentarily, when Moses and Aaron led their brethren out of Egypt. This theme is taken in an interesting direction in Psalm 77, where the grandeur of the already marvelous parting of the Red Sea is further increased by conflating it with God’s primeval ordering of meteorological phenomena, in order to make a point about theodicy:

The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee; they were afraid: the depths also were troubled. The clouds poured out water: the skies sent out a sound: thine arrows also went abroad. The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven: the lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook. Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the greater waters, and thy footsteps are not known.

As God was not personally seen intervening in Israel’s flight from Egypt, although that did not prevent him from working miracles to save his chosen people from tyranny, so we should not be discouraged if we fail to see the LORD’s hand in the more mundane reversals of our lives, or think he has abandoned us.

God’s status as conqueror and ruler of the sea is even made a source of King David’s own royal legitimacy in Psalm 89. First we are introduced to God’s preeminence in the heavens and his lordship of the earth:

And the heavens shall praise thy wonders, O LORD: thy faithfulness also in the congregation of the saints. For who in the heaven can be compared unto the LORD? who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the LORD? God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints, and to be had in reverence of all them that are about him. O LORD God of hosts, who is a strong LORD like unto thee? or to thy faithfulness round about thee? Thou rulest the raging of the sea: when the waves thereof arise, thou stillest them. Thou hast broken Rahab¹ in pieces, as one that is slain; thou hast scattered thine enemies with thy strong arm. The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them. The north and the south thou hast created them: Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in thy name.

Then we have David, whom the LORD founds over the world in the same way as he founded the world itself:

I have found David my servant; with my holy oil have I anointed him: With whom my hand shall be established: mine arm also shall strengthen him. The enemy shall not exact upon him; nor the son of wickedness afflict him. And I will beat down his foes before his face, and plague them that hate him. But my faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him: and in my name shall his horn be exalted. I will set his hand also in the sea, and his right hand in the rivers. He shall cry unto me, Thou art my father, my God, and the rock of my salvation. Also I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth.

This passage partly deifying David, combined with Psalm 45, the wedding song, which ambiguously refers to the king as a god, may explain the polytheistic assumptions of Psalm 82:

God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods. How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah. Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked. They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course. I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.

It’s plausible that these gods are really the kings of the earth who are abusing their subjects and whom God intends to supplant, possibly replacing them with David or his descendants as Psalm 89 might suggest, and this interpretation has the benefit of not forcing us to posit some sort of means by which a god can become mortal, a notion I did not encounter in the Epic of Gilgamesh or Egyptian Book of the Dead whose proveniences are close to that of the earliest parts of the Bible. If one wanted to make these “gods” angels and tie this psalm in to the Christian story of the fall of Lucifer, that might also be defensible, but I would remind readers of the part of Moses’ song in Deuteronomy where, at least in the New Revised Standard Version, it’s written that the Most High divvied up the peoples of the earth and assigned the Israelites to the LORD, other gods (for the LORD is not the chief deity in this episode) getting other nations to rule over, which sounds a lot like the situation in Psalm 82, with the important difference that the LORD has been appointed head of the divine counsel instead of being a minor god. It’s pointless for nonbelievers to argue with devout Christians or Jews about how to interpret scripture, because any theologically embarrassing reading, for the latter, relates to the respective articles of their faiths in the mode of modus tollens, so I’ll only say that I’m surprised King James allowed God to convene a council of lesser deities, seeing how easily this psalm thus translated could lead to misunderstandings.

Also theologically challenging, at least from a Christian perspective, is Psalm 88, which, unlike the other petition psalms that voice a complaint and then express confidence God will deliver the speaker in the end, sometimes such great confidence that the psalm speaks of the intervention as having already taken place, plays only a note of despair:

O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth night unto the grave. I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man that hath no strength: Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou remembrest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves. Selah. Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me; thou hast made me an abomination unto them: I am shut up, and I cannot come forth. Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction: LORD, I have called daily upon thee, I have stretched out my hands unto thee. Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise thee? Selah. Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? But unto thee have I cried, O LORD; and in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee. LORD, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face from me? I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up: while I suffer thy terrors I am distracted. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me; thy terrors have cut me off. They came round about me daily like water; they compassed me about together. Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.

The editors of my Oxford Annotated Bible think this psalm does betray some small hope or expectation that God will save the speaker, but I don’t see it: maybe the opening lines that address the LORD as “God of my salvation” implies that the psalmist thinks salvation will come in this own case, but this epithet could be formulaic and not representative of any genuine feeling or belief on the speaker’s part, and the rhetorical questions at the end that try to persuade God to rescue the psalmist from death, so that he can be praised by a living man when otherwise a dead one would stay silent, seem desperate in their cumulation and not to suggest the slightest confidence that the LORD is going to change his mind. Like Job, the speaker longs for death, and it’s interesting how he places himself “in the darkness, in the deeps,” being assailed by the waves of God’s affliction, so far beyond the LORD’s love or attention that he has been exiled to the formless ocean that God had to conquer, time, and push back in order to create the world.

Next week I’ll continue reading the Book of Psalms. I thank everyone who has subscribed to and is reading this newsletter.

1. According to the editors of my Oxford Annotated Bible, a sea monster in the same vein as leviathan.