In his seminal 3-volume commentary on the
book of Psalms, Mitchell Dahood rendered Psa 29:1 as follows:
In his commentary on this verse, Dahood wrote:
A psalm of
David. Give Yahweh, o gods, give Yahweh glory and praise.
In his commentary on this verse, Dahood wrote:
xxix. A hymn
in which the sons of God are invited to acclaim the sovereignty of Yahweh who
manifests his power in a storm. The recognition that this psalm is a Yahwistic
adaptation of an older Canaanite hymn to the storm-god Baal is due to H.L. Ginsberg,
“A Phoenician Hymn in the Psalter,” in Atti
del XIX Congresso Internazionale degli Orientalisti (Roma, 1935), pp.
472-76 . . . 1. O gods. In Canaanite
mythology the bn ilm “the sons of El,”
(e.g., UT, 51:III:14) are the minor gods who form part of the pantheon of which
El is the dead. In the Old Testament the term was demythologized and came to
refer to the angels or spiritual beings who are members of Yahweh’s court and do
his bidding; cf. Pss Lxxxix 7, ciii 20, cxlviii 1 ff.; I Kings xxii 19; Isa vi
2 ff.; Job I 6, ii 1. The phrase bene ‘elim
recurs in Ps lxxxix 7 and in Deut xxxii 8, where we should read with the Vrs. Lemispar bene ‘el(im), “According to the
number of bene ‘el(im),” as against
MT bene yisra’el. (Mitchell Dahood, Psalms I: 1-50 [AB 16; Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965], 175)
