who share righteousness and relationship with God. This community of the righteous evokes the NT covenant community. To be sure, the church is made of sinners, but these are also the beneficiaries of his faithfulness to the covenant, and by virtue of their identity in him, are indeed “the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).101 The psalmist does not have in mind the fullness of the church as the new covenant community in Christ, but his language evokes it when read through the lens of Christ’s work, which includes the establishment of the church, the new covenant community. A christological reading of Ps 1 emphasizes Jesus as the blessed/righteous “man” who avoids the snares of temptation by his devotion to God’s torah and whose covenant faithfulness sustains the messianic community.
57. Mays, Psalms, 44.
58. Tesh and Zorn, Psalms, 85–86.
59. DeClaissé-Walford, Introduction, 61.
60. Ibid., 64.
61. Davidson, “Ashrey,” Lexicon, 52.
62. Longman, Psalms, 56–57.
63. DeClaissé-Walford, Introduction, 61.
64. Reardon, Christ, 2.
65. The Heb. enosh is a synonym for adam, and most often refers to mortal humanity.
66. However, as Greidanus observes, this may press the syntax too far, and should not be used to exclude righteous people in general. The word can be used in gender-neutral contexts (e.g., Gen 13:16). The thought of the two psalms, when taken together, is that the “man” is any godly person who abides by torah and walks in covenant obedience (Ps 1), and anticipates the end-times reign of God through his Messiah (Ps 2). See Greidanus, Preaching Christ, 56–57. Even so, exegeting OT passages according to their minute syntactical details is not out of the realm of the NT use of the OT (e.g., Gal 3:16). For the “blessed man” of Ps 1 as the Davidic king of Ps 2, see Collett, “Christology,” 394.
67. We do not actually know what biblical Heb. sounded like. The vocalization of the MT was codified over a millennium after the composition of most of the psalms, and centuries after Heb. had ceased to be the vernacular of the Jewish people (Alter, Art of Biblical Poetry, 4).
68. Kugel, Idea of Biblical Poetry, 8.
69. Ibid. As Kugel observes, “B always comes after A, not simultaneously” (p. 43).
70. Longman, Psalms, 44.
71. Ibid, 56.
72. DeClaissé-Walford, et al., Psalms, 60–61.
73. Ibid.
74. Mays, Psalms, 41.
75. Tesh and Zorn, Psalms, 88.
76. Ibid.
77. DeClaissé-Walford, Introduction, 61. Mays notes the probable complement to the five books of the Pentateuch in the five books of the Psalter (Psalms, 42). Torah is often capitalized when referring to the five books of Moses as written Scripture. However, because the Heb. term torah means more than written revelation, the decision to capitalize is based on the context in which the word is used, and this is always interpretive. It is virtually impossible to be consistent in every instance. I personally prefer to leave the term lower case to preserve the ambiguity of the original Heb., unless it is clear from the context that the literary Torah is in view, which most scholars take to be the case in Ps 1.
78. DeClaissé-Walford, Introduction, 61.
79. Mays, Psalms, 42.
80. DeClaissé-Walford, Introduction, 61.
81. Mays, Psalms, 41–42. Mays also notes that torah piety is a fitting introduction to the Psalter because Ps 1 implores the reader to read the whole Psalter as instruction in prayer, in praise, in God’s way with us, and our way under God (p. 42).
82. DeClaissé-Walford, et al., Psalms, 61. Rolf Jacobson notes that the word translated “meditate” is also used in the OT for the cooing of a pigeon (Isa 38:14), the growling of a lion (Isa 31:4), and the voice of a human (Ps 35:28).
83. Ibid., 64.
84. Ibid.
85. Wilson, Psalms, 97.
86. Calvin, Psalms, Apple e-book, ch. 1.
87. Ibid.
88. Longman, Psalms, 58. There is also a contrast of poetic length devoted to the tree and the chaff: the tree occupies four cola, but the chaff only one (DeClaissé-Walford, et al., Psalms, 62).
89. Longman, Psalms, 58. Longman notes, however, that given the postexilic setting of many of the psalms, it is not inconceivable that a more sophisticated understanding of the afterlife had developed by the time of their composition.
90. Ibid.
91. DeClaissé-Walford, et al., Psalms, 60.
92. Ibid., 62–63.
93. Ibid., 63.
