Saturday, July 2, 2016

Mitchell Dahood on Psalm 29:1

In his seminal 3-volume commentary on the book of Psalms, Mitchell Dahood rendered Psa 29:1 as follows:

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)


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