Psalm 29
I am a professor. Welcome to Canaanite Religion 101. Today’s class is an overview of two Canaanite gods, Baal and Yam. The name Baal is frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, but not the name Yam. The name Baal means ‘lord’ or ‘owner.’ He was the god of fertility and rain. He was called the thunder god. Near Eastern artists drew lightning bolts as weapons in his hand. His worshipers recognized thunder as his voice.[i] Imagine how popular he was with farmers whose livelihood depended on the fertility of their livestock and crops. And water, in the form of rain, was equally important to both the cattle and crops.
Yam was the sea god. Regard him as a chaotic “god of mighty waters.”[ii] He controlled the destructive force of the rivers and seas which often killed the cattle and ruined the crops. Yam decided Baal should become his slave and sent that message to Baal. Baal attacked the messengers and then attacked and defeated Yam. This allowed Baal to control the waters of the earth. He did this in a positive way sending rain and dew for the benefit of the farmers.[iii] When the new Israel immigrants arrived in the Promised Land and began to farm, they asked their Canaanite neighbors how to be successful farmers. It should not surprise us that the answer was, “Worship Baal!”
With that overview, we are ready to study Psalm 29.
Oh, one other thing (profs often pursue tangents). We are so dependent on weather forecasting that we have a weather app on our cell phone which generally forecasts the weather for the next nine days. Imagine living in the time of the psalmist. What you knew about the weather was based on looking outdoors at the sky. Our weather apps give us a satellite view of any region of the world. The author of Psalm 29, possibly King David, could only see his world out to the horizon. Yet the sweep of this psalm reveals the complete geographic understanding the author had of his nation. This makes great sense. David had fled, hidden, and fought all over his nation.
Back to Psalm 29.
A monstrously powerful thunderstorm had ripped through Israel. David was awestruck by its power. His awe turned its focus from the storm to the Creator of the earth and its weather. David began to write. He is so overwhelmed by what he is experiencing he feels that human praise is not adequate, so he reaches out to “heavenly beings.” He feels all of creation must be involved in praising God (v 1). The psalmists often called the Lord’s people to praise and worship the Lord. David choses to include all created beings in worship.
David pictures the storm first building over the Mediterranean sea (v 2). It makes landfall in Lebanon at Israel’s northern border (v 5). It splits cedars and the mountains rock as it turns to head south down the entire length of Israel (vv 5-6). The thunderstorm “shakes the wilderness of Kadesh” at the southern border of Israel. (v 8). This is where Moses and the Israelites camped while sending the spies into the Promised Land.
What a storm! What power! Yet how much more powerful is the Creator of our world and its weather. We refer to destructive storms as “acts of God.” We often question why they happen to us. Yet Matthew 5:45 explains that, “he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike.” Weather happens to everyone.
Consider the structure of Psalm 29:
An invitation for the heavenly beings to praise the Lord – verses 1-2
The power of the voice of the Lord – verses 3-9
The peaceful blessing and reign of the Lord – verses 10-11
This psalm stands in distinction from other psalms in its praise for God. James Montgomery Boice points out that Psalm 29 “…consists entirely of praise to God. Other psalms praise God… But almost all mix praise with something else…” This psalm is unique for being “pure praise.”[iv]
Look at the stats of Psalm 29. David uses ascribe three times in the first two verses. The NLT translates this as honor. Then David calls the heavenly beings to worship the Lord. Ascribe can simply mean ‘give,’ and worship can mean “to bow down.” When we ascribe or give something to the Lord, we do it using our heart, hands, and voices. When we worship the Lord, that comes from our will and the humble attitude of a servant.[v]
The name that God first shared with Moses, Yahweh, is mentioned 18 times in this psalm. It is translated into English as Jehovah or Lord. The latter is frequently represented with the ‘ORD’ as smaller capital letters than the ‘L.’
The voice of the Lord appears seven times in verses 3 to 9. In the Bible, the number seven represents perfection and completion. Patrick Henry Reardon explains how this phrase in Hebrew, qol Adonai, has an onomatopoeic feel to it.[vi] Onomatopoeia are words that sound like the object to which they refer, for example, sizzle, meow, or peep. In Hebrew, qol (pronounce it like coal) can make one think of thunder. James Mays reminds us that the voice of the Lord which is seen in the thunder, lightning, and wind, can be “heard, seen, and felt.”[vii] The Lord gave us our senses and then gets in touch with us using all our senses.
The psalmist uses thunder as a poetic image for the Lord’s actual voice, which is far greater than the thunder itself. This is the same voice that spoke everything into creation. Check John 12:28, 29.
28 Father, bring glory to your name.” Then a voice spoke from heaven, saying, “I have already brought glory to my name, and I will do so again.” 29 When the crowd heard the voice, some thought it was thunder, while others declared an angel had spoken to him.
When the Lord speaks, his voice can thunder!
When we stand at the base of a giant sequoia and look up, or view the size of a mountain, the size of each implies power and strength. In verse 5, we discover that the voice of the Lord can both split and scatter the cedars of Lebanon. In verse 6, the mountains skip and leap. Here remember a night thunderstorm you witnessed and how the lightning strikes seemed to make the landscape and buildings nearly jump in your vision. Peter Craigie writes:
The famous cedars of Lebanon are easily broken by the Lord’s voice; the immobile mountains of Lebanon skipped like calves frightened at the sound of a voice. The language…takes Canaanite symbols of stability and mocks them through a demonstration of their instability in the context of the Lord’s thundering voice.
The word glory appears four times. David Thompson helps us understand the meaning of glory when he writes, “Taken concretely glory has to do with weight, heaviness. Abstractly it has to do with social and cultural ‘weightiness,’ that is, with honor, being of high repute, distinction, splendor. Colloquial English has a similar semantic play when it describes a person as ‘a heavyweight.’” [viii] This means we hold the Lord in high repute and honor. We acknowledge his great distinction and splendor. Best of all, the Lord is on our side as the greatest heavyweight of all time.
Notice the word flood or floodwater in verse 10. It is the same Hebrew word that was used of the flood in Noah’s time. It only appears in the Bible in these two places. The flood that the Lord unleashed on humanity in Genesis 6 – 9 was a one time judgement by water. Here the psalmist tells us that only the Lord reigns over the flood as a king forever.
We saw in verses 5 and 6 that the Lord’s strength is stronger that the strongest trees and mountains. In verse 11 the Lord gives strength to his people. This is fantastic news, even for those of us whose strength is declining due to age. Not only do we benefit from the Lord’s strength, but he also blesses us with peace. Gregory Polan considers peace to be our “well-being on every level — body, mind, spirit…the blessing of peace was considered the perfection of life, God’s greatest blessing.”[ix] We Christians truly need peace – God’s greatest blessing – to reign in our lives in spite of any chaos that surrounds us in today’s culture. More than 100 years ago Franz Delitzsch called this peace a rainbow arch over this psalm.[x]
We began with Canaanite Religion 101. Now let’s apply what we learned. Listen to Mays, “in Canaan’s myth, sea and river were the opponents of Baal in his battle to gain kingship, in the psalm the mighty waters in the flood are simply subject to the Lord’s power as symbols of his everlasting reign.”[xi] Craigie sums it up best, “the powerful imagery of v 10, conveys clearly the concept of the Lord as victorious, not only over chaotic forces in general, but over Baal, the conqueror of chaos (Yam), in particular; God’s power is greater than the greatest power known to the Canaanite foes.… the Lord, as a consequence of his victory, gives protection and peace to his people.”
Thank you, Father, for your protection and peace.
[i] Craigie, P. 247
[ii] Craigie, ibid.
[iii] “Baal”
[iv] Boice, P. 254
[v] Kidner, P. 125
[vi] Reardon, P. 55
[vii] Mays, P. 136
[viii] Thompson, P. 158
[ix] Polan, P. 61
[x] Kidner, P. 127
[xi] Mays, P. 138