The importance of “place” in Book Five of the Psalter

I do not pretend to know all of the arguments and issues surrounding the questions of “land” in South Africa; I am an outsider looking in. I may, however, have some orientation on the subject of land—a one-hundred-acre farm in southern Indiana, in what is known as the “corn belt” of the United States. My great-grandfather bought the farm in the mid-1800s; my grandfather, then my father, and now I and my siblings have inherited the farm. Moreover, we are committed to farming it and keeping it in the family. It is my firm grounding, the place to which I return time after time, and the place to which my husband and I plan to retire in a few years’ time. For centuries before my great-grandfather bought the land, however, the Shawnee Native American Tribe occupied it. In an 1804 treaty, the United States government “purchased” the land from the Shawnee and resettled them further west in the United States. Thus, long before I came to this farmland, it was someone else’s firm grounding.

Land—the land, my land, our land. It is a nostalgic, evocative, heart-stirring concept and one that occurs repeatedly in the text of the Hebrew Bible. As I pondered the subject of land in general and the subject of land in the biblical text in particular, I consulted a number of sources. Two that I will dialogue with, particularly in this article, are: Walter Brueggemann’s The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, second edition, and Ellen Davis’s Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. ¹ This article is not intended to be a mere summary or review of either Brueggemann’s or Davis’s work. Nevertheless, I have included many of their words, because their works helped focus my thoughts about the concept of land in the Old Testament in two key ways.

First, these works helped me to understand the significance of “land” in the Hebrew Bible. Brueggemann writes, “The Bible is not just about Yahweh and the people, but Yahweh, the people, and the land.” ² He states further, “Israel’s faith is essentially a journeying in and out of land, and its faith can be organized around these focuses.” ³ Ellen Davis comments, “The covenant is properly conceived as a triangulated relationship among Israel, the land, and Yahweh.” ⁴

If Brueggemann and Davis are correct, then how we read and interpret many biblical texts will, in the words of Brueggemann, “take on different nuances and tones” and we will find “that the Bible in its entirety is about another agenda that calls into question our conventional presuppositions and our settled conclusions.” ⁵ These “presuppositions” and “settled conclusions” have to do, I maintain, with a polarization between time and history on the one hand and space and nature on the other. The seemingly settled conclusion for so many Christians is that God works through time and history to bring the telos of the world into fruition with little regard for this created world and its inhabitants—the space and nature. A reading of the text that pays attention to the significance of land, however, intermingles the concepts of time and history with those of space and nature.

Second, the works of Brueggemann and Davis helped to sharpen my focus and helped me to draw a distinction between the ideas of “land” and “place.” Brueggemann writes, “Land is never simply physical dirt but is always physical dirt freighted with social meanings derived from historical experience.” It is never “contextless space,” ⁶ but rather what this author (not Brueggemann) likes to call “storied place.” Davis insightfully adds, “The Bible as we have it could not have been written beside the irrigation canals of Babylon, or the perennially flooding Nile, any more than it could have emerged from the vast fertile plains of the North American continent.” She goes on to say, quoting American Midwestern writer Scott Russell Sanders, “All enduring literature is local, rooted in place, in landscape or cityscape, in particular ways of speech and climates of mind.” ⁷ Thus, readers have two important concepts to keep in mind as they travel through this article—the significance of “land” in the Hebrew Bible, and that fine distinction between “land” and “place.”

From the very beginning of the biblical text, the importance of land, but more importantly place, a particular place, is significant. I traced the relationship of the Israelites to the idea of place in the biblical text and discovered what I think is a movement and a cycle: from Promise to Deprivation to Restoration and Settlement and then back again.

The movement begins with Promise: in Gen 2:8, we read that God creates the first human, ha’adam, from a particular substance, the ‘adamah, and places the human in a particular place, the garden, to farm it and keep it. Davis reflects, “Beginning with the first chapter of Genesis, there is no extensive exploration of the relationship between God and humanity that does not factor the land and its fertility in that relationship.” ⁸

The movement continues with Deprivation: in Gen 3:23–24, the first human pair are driven from their place, the garden. Furthermore, after Cain kills Abel in Gen 4:8, God drives Cain away from his place—the ground, the ‘adamah that provided his livelihood, and Cain settles in the land of Nod, a foreign place (Gen 4:12, 16). The third element of the movement is Restoration and Settlement: after the flood narrative, God allots particular lands—particular places—to Noah’s three sons in Genesis 10. And those places become, over the centuries, “storied places.”

We come next to the narratives of the ancestors, where we begin again with Promise: God says to Abram in Genesis 13, “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place (maqom) where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land (‘eretz) that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.” God repeats these words of promise over and over: to Abraham in Genesis 15 and Genesis 17; and to Jacob in Genesis 28 and Genesis 35.

Before the Promise is fulfilled, however, is Deprivation: Jacob’s descendants travel to Egypt and live there. After a time, God calls Moses to lead the people out of that land (‘eretz), in order to, according to Exod 3:8, “bring them to a good and broad land (‘eretz), a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country (maqom; the place) of the Canaanites, the Hittites.” In the narratives of the wilderness wanderings I found an interesting repetition of the term nahalah (“inheritance”) in reference to the place to which God was bringing the people. The term occurs four times in the book of Exodus, sixty-one times in Numbers, twenty-eight times in Deuteronomy, and sixty-two times in Joshua. We will return to this term later in the article.

Next is Restoration and Settlement: fast forward to the death-scene of Moses at the top of Mt. Nebo. There God says, “This is the land (‘eretz) of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying ‘I will give it to your descendants.’” Subsequently, Joshua leads the people in the settlement of the land, and in Joshua 24, God says to the people during the covenant ceremony at Shechem, “I gave you a land (‘eretz) on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant” (v. 13).

Israel established a land, a place to call their own with temple and court. Yet, once again we find Deprivation: the Davidic nation was a short-lived venture. The kingdom divided north and south; infighting ensued; the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom, the Southern Kingdom eventually succumbed to the Babylonians and, according to the biblical record, much of the population was taken into exile in Babylon.

But we cycle back to Promise: the hope remained for a return to the land, the place of promise, as we read in the words of, among others, the prophets Hosea (chap. 14), Amos (chap. 9), and Jeremiah (chap. 31).

Finally comes Restoration and Settlement again, at least somewhat. In 538 BCE, many of the Israelite people returned to their land—to Judah, their place—but they lived under the rule of the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Romans. They occupied their “land (‘eretz),” but they did not truly possess it.

Thus, I have offered a brief rehearsal of the biblical narrative; not too brief but also not too tedious, I pray, for those of us familiar with it. Now, I suspect that many readers of this article are asking at this moment, “What does all of this have to do with the title of the article—“The Importance of Place in Book Five of the Psalter”?

The article now focuses on that topic. First, I offer some background on reading the book of Psalms. I adhere to the school of study that sees a purposeful shape and shaping to the book of Psalms, that it relates and reflects on the history of ancient Israel from the time of the reign of David in about the tenth century BCE to the people’s return from exile in Babylon and resettlement in Jerusalem in 538 BCE. The story begins in Book One (Pss 1–41) with the reign of David; it continues in Book Two (Pss 42–72) with the close of the reign of David and the handing over of the kingdom to Solomon; Book Three (Pss 73–89) reflects the story of the divided kingdoms and the falls of both the northern and southern kingdoms; Book Four (Pss 90–106) narrates the exile in Babylon; and in Book Five (Pss 107–150) the Israelites return to Jerusalem and the reestablishment of temple worship.

Thus, I examine herein Book Five of the Psalter, set in the postexilic period, and the concept of “place.” Brueggemann maintains that place “has historical meanings, where some things have happened that are now remembered and that provide continuity and identity across generations.” ⁹ Although the Israelites who returned from exile and reestablished their lives in Jerusalem could no longer possess it as “my land, our land, the land” because it was a land under foreign rule, I suggest that they could possess it as “my place, our place, the place”—one that provided continuity and identity across generations. Before proceeding, however, this author posed a question of methodology to herself. Could poetry (the literary genre of the book of Psalms) rather than prose narrative (as we find in, say, the Deuteronomistic history) reveal what I was looking for—a true sense of “my land, our land, the land” in the postexilic period? As I pondered the question, I came across these words of Ellen Davis: “Poetry may be, along with music, the most direct means for touching the shared memory of a people.” ¹⁰ Thus, perhaps, even in poetry, perhaps especially so in poetry, the reader may find the heartfelt sentiments of a people.

I will, in preface to a close examination of Book Five of the Psalter, begin with Book Four. Recall that, according to the Psalter’s story line, Book Four (Pss 90–106) is set in exile in Babylon and expresses a longing for—a hope for—a return to the land of promise. Psalm 90 is the only psalm ascribed, in its superscription, to Moses. Those who accept that the Psalter has a particular story line argue that Psalm 90 would have brought to the minds of those in exile in Babylon the time of the Exodus and the Wilderness Wanderings—another time in the history of Israel when the people were outside the land of promise and were hoping for a return to the land, to “the place” that God promised to the ancestors. Psalm 90 and the two psalms following it, Palms 91 and 92, are words of hopeful promise of God’s care and provision for the faithful.

Psalms 93–99 (and I include Psalm 94 ¹¹ ) are categorized as Enthronement Psalms, celebrating God’s reign over the whole earth. What intrigues this writer is the repeated use of the Hebrew word tebel rather than ‘eretz to describe the realm of God’s reign. Tebel refers to the earth’s habitable places—places of solidity and permanence for all of God’s creation. The word occurs fifteen times in the Psalter, with six occurrences in the six Enthronement Psalms. ¹² The only occurrence of the word in Book Four outside of the Enthronement Psalms is in Ps 90:2. There we read that God, literally, gave birth to (from the Hebrew verbal root hiyl) the tebel, the habitable places of earth.

At the end of Book Four are two very interesting psalms, 105 and 106. Both are recitations of Israel’s history from the time of Abraham to the settlement in the land after the Wilderness Wanderings. Nevertheless, whereas Psalm 105 is a community hymn, celebrating all of God’s good provisions for God’s people, Psalm 106 is a community lament, recalling the ingratitude and rebelliousness of the people of God. This writer maintains that what we have in these two psalms at the end of Book Four is an admonition to the people in exile in Babylon to recall and remember the actions and attitudes of their ancestors in the faith and decide a path for their own future, especially in terms of land—of place. In Ps 105:11, the community hymn, God says to the people, “to you I will give the land of Canaan as your portion for an inheritance (nahalah).” In Ps 106:24, the community lament, we read that the people despised (or rejected) the “pleasant land,” and in 106:40, “Therefore the anger of the LORD was kindled against his people, And He abhorred or loathed his inheritance, his nahalah.” Recall the repeated references to nahalah in the time of the Wilderness Wanderings—the books of Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and then on into the story of occupation of the land of promise in the book Joshua.

At the end of Psalm 106, we read this cry of the people:

Save us, O LORD our God

and gather us from the nations,

that we may give thanks to your holy name

and glory in your praise.

Under the rule of the Persians, in 538 BCE, many of the Israelites living in exile in Babylon returned to the land, their place, and occupied it, but they no longer “possessed” or “owned” the land. They were vassals of the Persian Empire. How did the returnees from exile understand their relationship to the land of promise? The opening psalm of Book Five, Psalm 107, may provide some clues. It begins with words of praise to God for answering the cry for rescue we find at the end of Psalm 106. In verse 2 we read:

Let the redeemed of the LORD say so,

those he redeemed from trouble

and gathered in from the lands,

from the east and from the west,

from the north and from the south.

The psalm continues, in vv. 4–32, with vignettes of four groups of people who represent, perhaps, the “redeemed of the Lord” mentioned in verse 2. The following verses, 33–42, declare that the Lord makes it possible for the hungry to dwell safely in the land (‘eretz) and establish a city for habitation (‘iyr moshab), to sow fields, plant vineyards, and gather a harvest, and to have children and increase their cattle (vv. 36–38). The psalm closes with the words: “Let the one who is wise give heed to these things and consider the hesed (the covenant promise) of the LORD.”

We find no words in Psalm 107 about a return to the land of promise or of the nahalah (inheritance) of Israel. Rather, we find stories of rescue by God and words about God’s provision of security, shelter, food, abundance, and safety—in the land, in a city of habitation.

At the end of Book Five, just before the closing doxological Psalms 146–150, Psalm 145 celebrates the reign of God as Sovereign, just as in the Enthronement Psalms in Book Four. Yet, the focus of Psalm 145 is slightly different. Whereas the Enthronement Psalms emphasize God’s reign over all creation, Psalm 145, for the most part, emphasizes God’s reign and God’s provision for God’s people. In verses 11–13 we read:

All your works shall tell of the glory of your kingdom,

and of your mighty works they will speak,

in order to make known to the children of humanity your mighty work

and the glory and the splendor of your kingdom.

Your kingdom is a kingdom for all times,

and your dominion is for all generations.

Immediately following this declaration, verses 14–20 describe the actions of God on behalf of humanity. In a series of active participles, the psalm singer outlines God’s generous care for God’s people: God supports and lifts up (v. 14), gives food (v. 15), opens his hand and satisfies desires (v. 16), is just and kind (v. 17), is nearby (v. 18), fulfills desires, hears cries, saves (v. 19), and watches over (v. 20). As with Psalm 107, we find no words in Psalm 145 about a return to the land of promise, of the nahalah (inheritance) of Israel. Rather, we find a powerful declaration of God’s provision for God’s people.

What, then, about the psalms between Psalms 107 and 145? This writer found many references to God’s good provision, but the only direct references to the land that God promised to the ancestors as a nahalah (inheritance) occur in only three psalms in Book Five. In the twin Psalms 135 and 136, the word nahalah occurs three times, but always in reference to a past promise of God to the people. Both psalms recount God’s defeat of any who would oppress the people and God’s provision of the land as an inheritance—a nahalah. ¹³

The other place in Book Five that refers to the land as nahalah is Psalm 111:6. There we read, “The strength of his deeds God made known to his people, in order to give them the inheritance of the nations (nahalath goyim).” The reference certainly seems to be to a past promise of God, but perhaps there is more going on here than meets the reading eye. The closing verse of Psalm 111 (v. 10), which reads, “The beginning of wisdom is the reverence of the Lord, a good understanding comes to all who do it,” is reminiscent of the closing verse of Psalm 107: “Let the one who is wise give heed to these things and consider the hesed of the Lord.”

How may we understand what we encounter in Book Five? Psalms 111 and 112 are alphabetic acrostics, as is the massive Psalm 119, and Psalms 112 and 119 are classified as wisdom psalms. In addition, Psalms 111, 112, and 119 share a common theme of reverence for the Torah, the instruction given by God to the ancient Israelites at Sinai. Between them lie a collection of psalms (Pss 113–118) known as the “Egyptian Hallel Psalms”—psalms that are recited during the annual celebration of the Feast of Passover. Passover commemorates the miraculous actions of God in delivering the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and God’s kind provision to them during the Wilderness Wanderings. The giving of the Torah at Sinai was the defining moment of the Exodus/Wilderness Wandering experience. In the Psalter, then, a celebration of the Torah (Pss 111, 112, and 119) frames words of praise to God (Pss 113–118) for deliverance from Egypt, and together they form the centerpiece of the story of Book Five.

Israel’s focus had always been on the land of promise, the promise of nahalah, inheritance (see the repeated references in Exod, Lev, Num, Deut, and Josh). The Israelite people indeed occupied the land of promise at various times and built there a “storied place.” In the postexilic life situation, land (in which the people could occupy the land, but not own, not truly possess as a nahalah, an inheritance) became more place—defined, according to Brueggemann, as “physical dirt freighted with social meanings derived from historical experience.” ¹⁴ Still, how were the people to maintain this “place” as their own?

Let us return to the words of the Torah. Brueggemann points out that post-exilic Israel experienced a renewed interest in strict adherence to the Torah. What does Torah have to do with the land, with place? The Torah given at Sinai was a contract between God and the people of Israel for how to live as God’s people in the land of promise, in the land that God gave as a nahalah (inheritance) to the ancestors. Furthermore, the Torah includes very strict instructions about the land and care of the land and those who live on it and tend to it. Ellen Davis reminds us, “The descendants of Israel were given, not a land, but the use of a land, along with precise instructions for its good care.” ¹⁵ She goes on to quote Norman Habel (a biblical interpreter and advocate for social justice), who states that the social model implied in the Holiness Code in the book of Leviticus (Lev 19–26) is “an agrarian theocracy.” ¹⁶

How might we define an “agrarian theocracy” according to the book of Leviticus? Let us return to the Enthronement psalms in Book Four of the Psalter. The habitable earth, the tebel, belongs to and was birthed (see Ps 90:2) and nurtured by God. God entrusts its care to God’s creation, but that trust comes with responsibility. Walter Brueggemann maintains that the path for achieving that responsibility, a new way to what he called “landedness,” is Torah piety. He cites numerous passages in Ezra and Nehemiah that call on the people to return to a strict adherence to Torah—one that impacts the land. ¹⁷ How might the people achieve “landedness”—nahalah—by strict adherence to the Torah?

Book Five of the Psalter contains another occurrence of the word nahalah, but not in reference to the land of promise. Psalm 119, that massive wisdom acrostic, opens with the words, “‘Ashre (happy) are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the Torah of the Lord.” In verse 111, we read, “Your decrees (‘edoth) are my inheritance (nahalah) forever; they are the joy of my heart.” Here the word nahalah occurs not in reference to the land of promise, but to God’s decrees—one of the seven Hebrew words used as synonyms for Torah in Psalm 119.

Has nahalah, as used in Psalms 111 and 119, taken on a new meaning—a new understanding—or is this understanding the original intent of God’s provision of a nahalah for the people? Eric Freyfogle, a law professor at the University of Illinois in the United States, offers this definition of nahalah: “one that respects the land and its mysteries, that honors healthy, enduring bonds between people and place, and that situates land users within a social order that links past to future.” ¹⁸ This writer suggests that Freyfogle’s definition of “inheritance,” of nahalah, is precisely her definition of place—“land with a story.”

In the postexilic period, the Israelites could not own the land; they merely occupied it and cultivated it. Yet, a close examination of the concept of land, of place, of inheritance in the Hebrew Bible reveals that humanity cannot ever “own” the land, the tebel, the inhabitable earth. God painstakingly birthed the tebel (Ps 90:2), the land, and it belongs to no one but God. Israel may inherit the land as place, as “storied place,” but only in the context of strict adherence to the Torah, the instructions, of God. That, I maintain, is the message of Book Five of the Psalter. A question remains, however. How do we appropriate this message, the message of Book Five of the Psalter, in our various contexts today? That is the immense question that this writer poses to the readers of this article. What is land, inheritance, “storied place,” the tebel? And what is humanity’s relationship to it?