STORIES
STORIES
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.
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.
Before writing a single line of a song, Jon Hutchins works through a psalm in detail — its structure, imagery, the progression of its thought. When he came to Psalm 19, he saw two main ideas. Then he opened Scriptura’s resources, which showed him a third idea he had missed.
The heading of Psalm 3 tells us when it was written: "When he was fleeing from Absalom." And then it adds two words that, strictly speaking, do no work at all: "his son."
The fireworks of Psalm 3 appear in the word translated "victory, salvation," which appears three times in the psalm. Yet each time it appears, the nuance is unique.
The room at the EMDC conference held thirteen people with differing roles. They shared a question that doesn't get asked often enough: what happens to a psalm when it crosses into a new language?
On the first morning of the workshop, our facilitator made an argument that stops people in their tracks: “If not beautiful, a poem translation is not accurate.”
At the center of Psalm 3 sits a single word, repeated three times: yeshuah, usually translated as "salvation." Yet a careful study reveals a problem with this translation.
In Psalm 2:3, the rebel kings declare their independence with four key words. When the psalmist addresses them again in verses 10–11, he responds with four key words of his own — and the sounds are remarkably close.
A few days ago, a Scriptura trainer boarded the bus from Kara to Lomé. At some point the driver put on a video of a group singing Psalm 150. She knew the song—because she had helped the team who made it.
The musicians who came to the Yaoundé workshop had composed before. Yet what they hadn't done was go through the process of internalizing a psalm. Working through Scriptura's materials changed that.
Psalm 2 ends with a command that has puzzled readers for centuries: “Kiss the son, or else he will become angry…” The word for "son" has generated more scholarly debate than almost any other in the Psalter. Scriptura dedicated a full exegetical analysis to the question.
Psalm 2 has a pattern: the first three sections end with someone speaking. Then the fourth section ends—and no one speaks.
The sculptors who came to the Yaoundé workshop were artists. What they had never considered was making something from the Bible.
In Scriptura's training materials, there is an image of David lamenting. Four participants in Mbandaka flagged it.
In Psalm 2:6, YHWH announces: “But I have poured out my king on Zion, my holy mountain.” But what does this phraseology actually mean?
There is a spatial drama in Psalm 2 that underscores the majesty of YHWH's kingship.
At the end of the training, one participant's final thought was different from the rest: "These are resources we have never seen before regarding a better way to translate the Hebrew poetry we encounter in the Psalms."
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