The Line the Whole Psalm Circles Back To
At the center of Psalm 4 sits a single line where David uses three ordinary words to address the angry people around him. And then each of those three words comes back, later in the psalm, in exactly the order they first appeared.
They Asked for This
The Bantè workshop didn’t start with Scriptura knocking on a door. It started with a community knocking on Scriptura’s.
The Trouble with “Holy One”
In Psalm 16:10 God promises that he will not let his “loyal one” see corruption, the verse Peter later preaches in Acts 2. Yet nearly every English Bible translates this as “your holy one.” Would Scriptura translate it that way? Would they recommend it to translators?
The Tight Place and the Open Field (Psalm 4)
Psalm 4 opens with David remembering a rescue, and he describes it in two words that are, quite literally, opposite shapes.
The Taunt, Played Backward
At the end of the psalm’s first movement, the enemies get the last word: they are “saying about me” (omerim lenafshi). But then the psalm turns, and David answers: “But you, YHWH, are a shield for me… (umerim roshi)”
The Same Vision, Arrived at Separately
Africa Sings was founded in 2019 by Dr. Daniel Dama with a mission that sounds immediately familiar to anyone who knows Scriptura’s work: to promote peace, social cohesion, and the experience of living together through arts, culture, music, and Christian witness.
The Question Nobody Had Asked Them
On the margins of the Africa Sings meeting, Bio was asked if he could help students learn Biblical Hebrew. Bio agreed to talk. But first he asked a question: did the institute have any curriculum on biblical poetry?
A Command That Might Be a Memory (Psalm 3)
Open almost any modern English Bible to Psalm 3:7 and you’ll find David shouting orders at God, delivered in the imperative. But the Hebrew verbs aren’t imperatives.
The Sound of a Mouth That Can No Longer Speak
Read Psalm 3:8 (7 in English) aloud in Hebrew and something happens that no translation can carry. The verse is describing violence — God striking enemies on the jaw, breaking the teeth of the wicked — and the consonants act it out.
The Same Thing, Everywhere
When Jon Hutchins described his process of Psalms songwriting to Scriptura staff member Katie, she stopped him. She recognized it immediately: this was exactly the methodology ethnoarts experts teach in international workshops all over the world.
