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Feb. 22, 2024 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:12:45

PSALM 2 with James & Alex Thomson

Alex Thomson served in a Christian mission in the former Soviet Union and went on to spend the rest of his twenties as a GCHQ officer. Aged thirty, He moved to the Netherlands and has spent the last decade and a half as a translator, interpreter and a researcher of networked evil. / / / / / / Buy James a Coffee at:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk ♦♦♦♦♦ x

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	Psalm number 2, translated by Miles Coverdale.
	This is the Book of Common Prayer version.
	Why do the heathens so furiously rage together?
	And why do the people imagine a vain thing?
	The kings of the earth stand up and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed.
	Let us break their bonds asunder.
	Let us cast their cords away from us.
	He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn.
	The Lord shall have them in derision.
	Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath and vex them in his sore displeasure.
	Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.
	I will preach the law, whereof the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.
	Desire of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.
	Thou shalt bruise them with a rod of iron, and break them in pieces like a potter's vessel.
	Be wise now, therefore, O ye kings.
	Be learned, ye that are judges of the earth.
	Serve the Lord in fear, and rejoice unto Him in reverence.
	Kiss the Son, lest ye be angry, and so ye perish from the right way.
	If his wrath be kindled, yea, but a little, blessed are all they that put their trust in him.
	Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Delingpole.
	And today we're going to deal with the wonderful Psalm 2 with my amazingly erudite friend, Alex Thompson.
	Alex, Alex, welcome back.
	I say welcome back because you know and I know, as the viewer and listeners don't know yet.
	We did this before.
	And the high winds so shook my satellite receiver thing that we had to nix the podcast.
	So we're going to try again.
	It's almost psalmic, isn't it?
	The winds so shook my satellite that I was not able.
	David didn't have satellite dishes, but it's the kind of thing he would mention in one of his plaintiff's psalms, isn't it?
	I think it's what happens when you spend too much time, as I do, reading the Psalms.
	I read the Psalms every night.
	I do at least three Psalms before I go to bed.
	And I read them in the Miles Coverdale translation, which we'll talk about in a bit.
	But first of all, I was so fascinated with your story about how you became familiar with Hebrew, which is a difficult language, isn't it?
	It's one of the more difficult languages around, for sure.
	Well, the first answer, I suppose, is if you take to languages early, then acquiring other ones, even if they're from totally different language families in different alphabets and written the wrong way round, that becomes easier.
	The other thing to say is the interest is there.
	Many parents of recalcitrant children will attest to this.
	If you manage to snag their interest in an unexpected way, then they'll follow through.
	And devour the subject nevertheless.
	And with me, I was certainly never reluctant to learn languages, but it was more particularly the knowledge that it would open up the Word of God to me in new ways that got me powering through.
	So, I had my father's books to hand.
	I could always read them from his library.
	Harper's Elements, another 19th century classics.
	The Kyle and Dalich Commentaries, that's K-E-I-L.
	and D-E-L-I-T-Z-S-C-H.
	These are 19th century German greats, also available in English in various editions.
	These opened up to me, not least on the Psalms, that you were missing a world of information if you didn't have the Hebrew.
	And the big break is I went up to Cambridge and the then Dean of St.
	John's College, Cambridge, taught Hebrew to all comers at the University and he did so at what until very recently was still the Divinity School opposite the front of St.
	John's College, Cambridge.
	If you go to it now and Look across the road from the front of St.
	John's, you will see a building with statues of divines in the front, because they haven't removed them, obviously, but it's no longer the Divinity Schools.
	It was until around the turn of the millennium, and it's the very location where Jewry, the Jewish quarter of Cambridge, was, and Desiderius Erasmus, the Rotterdam humanist scholar, went to that very place in Cambridge to learn his Hebrew.
	Directly from the rabbis.
	There weren't even any grammars yet.
	The first ever European Renaissance man to learn Hebrew was Johannes Reuchlin around this time of the Reformation.
	And so if you were of Erasmus' or Luther's generation, you had to go to the Jews.
	And a very few years later, William Tyndall, who got martyred halfway through his Old Testament translation by a collusion between Henry VIII and Emperor Charles V. Tyndall, in his famous last letter, written just a few miles from where I am today in Brussels, said, I please beg you, let me carry on with my Bible translation, for that I need the grammar, there was only one, the lexicon, there was only one, and the text, there was only one of the Hebrew.
	And yet he produced that monumental translation.
	Not the Psalms though, because as you've referred to, his work for the rest of the Old Testament was completed by a number of sympathetic men, using pseudonyms Thomas Matthew, Miles Coverdale was the translator who did the Psalms, and as people know, Even though we have the full King James Version now, what's sung in Anglican services is still Coverdale's translation, not the King James Version, so it's the original, shall we say, first generation Reformation translation that we use there.
	But that's it.
	Just as an 18 to 20 year old I had the opportunity to get to grips with Hebrew properly, and after that time a number of conservative Bible societies in various countries said would you mind awfully making use of it because we're short of people who can check in my case Eastern European translations against Greek and Hebrew and then eventually I was made a teacher of Hebrew for the School of Theology for my small Dutch Reformed denomination again because there's few around to have studied Hebrew now.
	You're making me slightly envious.
	If I could go back in time and have my time at university again, I think I might spend less time trying to get into girls' knickers and taking drugs and drinking too much, and instead take up Hebrew.
	I mean... You know, in the Waltons, Mama's advice was, kisses don't last, cooking do.
	Well, you might say, kisses don't last, theology do.
	So, yeah, well, I'm with you there, but I think I would have laughed to scorn the idea that I would have become so interested in theology later on in life.
	I thought it was just kind of one of those peripheral things that eccentrics did.
	Well, it explains to us why the monetary system is in a wreck, and it even tells us why we are trying to get into girls' knickers and why it's no good for us.
	So, theology is the apex subject, the queen of the sciences.
	And the key to theology is the biblical languages.
	That's always been the classic understanding of all branches of Christendom.
	So if before Tyndale Hebrew was essentially unavailable to In the West.
	Yes.
	A few outliers like 13th century Dominicans in Italy were able to hold disputations with the rabbis on the contents of the Talmud.
	So they even had some Aramaic.
	But effectively, yes, the West had had a thousand years of only understanding the Latin Vulgate.
	It had even forgotten the Greek for centuries before the humanists.
	So they were dependent, up until the Reformation, they were dependent, for their understanding of the Bible, on the Latin translators.
	Who did the Latin translations?
	It was Jerome Hieronymus, in most other languages, but Jerome we call him in English and French, who did the Vulgata, the popular version, that's what Vulgate means, the language understood by the people.
	Before that there was what's known as the Vetus Latina, the Old Latin, Which interestingly, the Welsh Church, because it was anti-Vatican and independent, kept using until the 9th or 10th century, even longer than the Irish Church.
	But effectively, Jerome's Vulgate, which was certainly not a malicious job, it was an extremely competent, passionate Bible translation into Latin for the masses in Rome, in the Western Roman Empire, that was all the clergy had, and even the scholars at universities, when universities became a major fixture of Western scholarship in about the 13th century, that's what they were going for.
	There was never any intent to stop people reading in the vernacular, in their own national languages.
	The very countries where the Reformation later gained a foothold, basically northern and western Europe plus France, they were the countries where on the eve of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church of the time was perfectly happy for wealthy laymen who could afford it to buy Bibles in their own languages. the Roman Catholic Church of the time was perfectly happy They were, of course, translated from Latin, as was John Wycliffe's followers version, probably not bound on by Wycliffe himself, but we call it the Wycliffe Bible of the 14th century.
	These were made from Latin, so, you know, it's Chinese whispers to a professional translator.
	You're going to language.
	Two levels away from the source language, but it's as competent as they could do in the time, and such is the doctrine of Scripture of itself, the preservation of it and the perspicuity of it, so that God keeps His own word sound and that the Bible can understand and can interpret itself, that very few of the doctrines were jeopardized or misunderstood by people who intelligently read a Latin or a vernacular like a medieval English translation.
	There were, of course, softening terms used by the church, you know, so repent became do penitence, famously.
	But the malice, the intent to mislead, was not there until pretty late before the Reformation.
	And that's when they suddenly clamped down and said, you'll be burned at the stake if you have an unlicensed English or German Bible.
	It's not strictly relevant to the Psalms, but tell me about the Lord's Prayer.
	Which is the most accurate translation of the Lord's Prayer?
	That is a hard one.
	The King James is the most accurate and reliable of anything in English.
	There are two forms of the Lord's Prayer.
	We've mentioned this in a UK Column article that Brian Gerrish and I co-wrote.
	If you search for the word paupers or gaia on ukcolumn.org you'll find it.
	Talking about well-being and at the end of that article we say that forgive us our debts has been eradicated.
	But only from the Church of England.
	The established Church of Scotland still uses debts in the Lord's Prayer and it's there in the version in Luke.
	There's two versions of many things in the Gospels.
	There's a Luke version and a Matthew version of the Lord's Prayer.
	The Luke version doesn't have the words after but deliver us from evil.
	The doxology at the end, for thine is the power, the glory, and the kingdom of the glory, forever and ever, amen, is only in Matthew.
	So the Roman Catholic Church doesn't pray those words.
	But isn't it originally to deliver us from the evil one?
	Ah, hoponeros.
	It could also be toponero.
	So it could be the evil one or evil as a phenomenon.
	I was teaching that just the other week to our teenage catechism.
	Students in our Dutch Reformed congregation, that we tend to translate it the evil one.
	Apotuponiru makes more sense there as the evil one.
	Especially because it was probably uttered in Arabic and there it would be hara, so the evil person.
	But it could equally well be the evil one or evil.
	Biblical languages don't get so hung up on these things because, to use a technical term, they use substantival adjectives a lot more.
	They personify things as adjectives.
	So if I really want to do the Lord's Prayer absolutely 100% correctly, I need to learn the Aramaic version?
	But then you're falling into the idea that there's some kind of talismanic virtue.
	I know Psalm 91's one of your favourites, but...
	To recite with the heart.
	The Bible itself says this in many passages.
	1 Corinthians 14, I will sing with the spirit and I will sing with the understanding also.
	To recite with the heart in your own vernacular.
	In the best translation you could get, so for English to King James, is far to be preferred.
	That will do you a lot more spiritual good than trying to go to Ma'aloula in Syria where even after the last horrendous war they still have a few Aramaic speakers who can recite, as I've heard them do, the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic.
	That's a reconstruction.
	What we have in the New Testament is Greek.
	A lot of people struggle about that now and they say Don't call him Jesus, call him Yeshua.
	Don't say the Lord, say Jehovah or even Yahuwah, if you're a black Hebrew.
	There's more magic, totemic power in these words, they say.
	No, that's not the Bible or Christ's doctrine of his own words.
	It's the logic of the words, not the sounds of the words.
	So, we're going to have a slight tussle here, because I started learning the Psalms, the first Psalms I did were 23 and 91.
	And I learned them in the King James Version, because at that time I was kind of a newbie, and I hadn't been aware of the Coverdale translations predating the King James.
	And I have to say, I think I prefer, on the whole, the Coverdale translations.
	They seem to have more poetry in them.
	Many people say that.
	Adam Nicholson, without an H in Nicholson, is the famously unbelieving Scholar of Shakespearean and Bible English, King James English.
	who's done a number of books and programs on this and says that he's fascinated by Coverdale for this very reason, the quality.
	More generally, you can say that even secular Tudor English is less ossified than Jacobean or Stuart English.
	And you have to consider the context in which the King James Bible was commissioned, the Hampton Court Conference just after 1600, where the new Scottish king who'd come down to London was successfully ambushed, we say, by a bunch of Puritans.
	Who said, Your Majesty, the existing Bibles are not accurate enough.
	And from the court's side, King James, who'd just come down from Edinburgh and was no friend of Puritanism, knew he didn't want to have more factions in the church.
	And he also knew that if nothing was done, a lot of people would, undercover, be reading the Geneva Bible.
	Which had been produced by Puritans in exile in Switzerland.
	Which was much hotter against crowns and kings that became despotic.
	Famously it had notes that said things like in Exodus 2 it said, the midwives were jolly right to disobey an unconstitutional order by the king.
	So you couldn't have that kind of thing.
	So he wanted to hammer out a compromise.
	And that became the King James Bible.
	There were some orders in it like you mustn't translate episkopos as overseer.
	It must be bishop.
	Must keep the churchy language.
	Don't give Presbyterians and Puritans any ground to stand on.
	Coverdale didn't have any of those hang-ups.
	He just saw the visceral poetry of the Psalms, as Tyndale did with the songs in the parts of the Old Testament he managed to get to.
	Like Judges 5, the song of Deborah and Barak, where in Tyndall's language it's just, Up, up, Deborah, up, and sing a song.
	It's very earthy and immediate, but that was somewhat polished away by the King James men.
	When was Coverdell around?
	Because he was living in quite dangerous times, wasn't he?
	It was the end of Henry VIII's reign and pretty much every year there was a new wind blowing from Hampton Court on what the religious policy was.
	Thomas Cromwell was the de facto Prime Minister of England at the time.
	A lot of this detail, by the way, you can read in a three-part interview I did with my father.
	Go to ukcolumn.org and search for literacy.
	You'll see a lot of this.
	Thomas Cromwell, as the Chief Civil Servant at the time, there wasn't really a Prime Minister.
	Thoughts.
	Now is the time for all of those of us sympathetic to the Reformation and who want, in Tyndale's words, the boy that driveth the plough to know the word of God.
	We must judiciously push, but Tyndale's name, after he had been executed at Filford just outside Brussels in 1536, Henry was determined never to hear the name Tyndale mentioned again, so his courtiers just skirted around it and gave Tyndale's work a bunch of nicknames and pseudonyms, and flattered the king that it was his own idea to have Tyndale published without mentioning the name.
	And that was all fine, because Cromwell and others realized, and this was a distant ancestor of Oliver Cromwell, over a hundred years beforehand, That the English, shall we say the middle class, to the extent that it existed back then, was sick of being misled by decrepits and immoral clergy and foolish ignorant clergy.
	It was a pan-European problem.
	All of the northern and western European countries in particular had seen this because they'd reached that stage of development.
	And they didn't want to be in hock to that system.
	Some of them could even see that the Vatican was the problem too.
	So Henry was not content to go all that way.
	He wanted to be, you know, Catholicism without the Pope.
	He wanted his own big ego to be the supreme law in church and state, with no constitutional breaks on him at all.
	But men used that moment.
	But as I say, in the process, Cromwell and others did lose their lives.
	Tyndale too.
	But it was worth it, and the men engaged knew that it was worth it.
	Tyndale's dying prayer was, Lord, open the King of England's eyes.
	And then the Belgians, not that it was called Belgium then, but the people around here, out of respect for his status as a scholar, garrotted him before they put the flame to the faggots, so he didn't burn to death.
	Why has the Church of England... I'm presuming sort of old-school American Christians will get their psalms from the King James?
	Yes, they do.
	There's a lively tradition, both Presbyterian and other Protestant denominations in America, of chanting the psalms But they tend to write their own music, and unless you're a try-hard, you know, anglophile, a loyalist, as it were, in America, an Episcopalian, they will still do the chanting, as you'd find in an Oxbridge College or an English Cathedral.
	And all of that would be Coverdale, but that aside, everyone in the States who chants the Psalms would do so in the King James or something else.
	So why did the Church of England retain the earlier version?
	I think it's because the high churchmen, even in the reign of James VI and I, so the 1600s, 1610s, was never completely on board with the King James.
	They saw it as a hybrid or a compromise.
	And I think the choral practice, which is notoriously conservative, had already dug its heels in.
	I like that.
	I respect that.
	And Coverdale uses Anglo-Saxon cadences, and of course you know the musical rhythm.
	You can choose your chant tune at will, depending on which chapter, I mean in the sense of which chapter house or which choir master you've got, they all have their own preferences.
	But the rhythm is da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
	Right, and of course you've got to fill in how many syllables you need to, to get the whole line of prose in, so that the verse is chanted on that many syllables.
	And that's easier with Coverdale's Anglo-Saxon terms, should we say.
	Although the King James itself lends itself far better to it than, for example, try the New International Version.
	Try setting that to a cathedral chant.
	It won't work at all.
	Right.
	OK, well let's get into Psalm 2.
	Why do the heathens so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing?
	Right, well, James, do you know where the answer to most things in the Psalms is?
	No!
	In the middle.
	Most Psalms are chiastic, if you're very Greek in your pronunciation.
	Chiastic.
	C-H-I.
	Chiasmus.
	Meaning they have a cross structure.
	The essential stuff is in the middle.
	This is often the case in chapters of the Bible.
	And the Psalms, you might think, oh, they didn't have chapter numbers back then, but the Psalms were so carefully composed that the verses and the number of syllables in each verse half was very carefully calculated by the writers.
	This is long before the Masoretes came along after Christ and codified it all.
	So we do know that there's twelve verses here and that's not just a later addition as it would be if you were talking other parts of scripture.
	There's twelve lines, four strophes or stanzas of three lines each.
	Three speakers, and if you split it up that way, so you've got 1, 2, 3, space, 4, 5, 6, space, 7, 8, 9, space, 10, 11, 12, you will see that the midpoint is the caesura, or the fold between verses 6 and 7.
	And what is the last thing resonating in your mind?
	There's no selah or pause here, but there often would be in the psalms.
	What's resonating in your mind is the first half of the psalm gives way to the second, verse 6.
	I have set my king upon my holy hill.
	That's what they haven't seen.
	So you must always go for the midpoint of the psalm or very often to see what's going on.
	That's the essential truth here.
	God has anointed Christ and although neither David nor Solomon as precursors or types nor Jesus himself was anointed On Mount Zion, which stands for the power and dominion of the Lord over his people, nevertheless he's been set there.
	Well, because in the New Testament Church we understand that Mount Zion is the willing people of God.
	Psalm 110, the partner of Psalm 2, a messianic psalm like it, says that his people will be willing in the day of his power.
	Well, all those who are willing to see his reign That's the holy hill on which he reigns.
	He has many subjects.
	Psalms say elsewhere that the glory of the king lies in the number of his subjects.
	And so that's what the fools who are raging against God and against his anointed in this psalm haven't seen, is that there's a people of God that is already acting in his will and which is going to be triumphant on earth.
	Right, so yes, I remember when I first read this psalm, Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.
	And then it goes on, Thou art my son, this day have I forgotten thee.
	And I was thinking, wow, this psalm predates Christ by how many years?
	Probably a millennium.
	I mean, it was either a sticky event in David's reign, or possibly in one of his successors, such as Ahaz the Wicked King later on, but at the very latest it would be seven centuries before Christ.
	Probably older.
	So you've got the equivalent of something that may, it's as if the Anglo-Saxons before the Battle of Hastings made this prediction of an event now, that's the distance in time, which is extraordinary.
	I mean, it's one of the things that appeals to me about the Psalms, and I meant to ask you about this.
	I wanted you to sort of explain to me why it is I like the Psalms so much and why they matter, why they're not a sort of peripheral thing but they're the core to everything.
	Luther calls them the Bible in miniature and the Jews have always understood that the Psalms together with a couple of the shorter poetic books of the Old Testament, notably Ruth and Jonah, are keys because they show God's mind and also man's heart.
	The events described in the psalm, which is all in 2 Samuel, so much of the theology of the Bible comes out in that, it's described there in dry, factual terms, but the motives, the feelings of those involved at the time, what did David feel when he got to Ziklag and all of his camp followers, wives and children, had been abducted?
	Well, you know, you see in cinematic terms what happens in the prose account, you know, they all wanted to kill David, and he managed to calm them down and go on the rampage against the abductors, but in the Psalms you see what David felt.
	And then he asks the raw questions of God.
	Why did this happen?
	The very word with which this psalm opens, lama, why?
	Because it's cinematic again, somebody is watching in horror.
	A poet who may or may not be King David or another king, probably a courtier, sees a bunch of heathen turn up at Jerusalem under either David's reign or a successor, and says, how dare they?
	And, you know, God gives the answer here.
	That's why the Psalms are so crucial.
	So, the people who wrote the Psalms, I mean, they weren't all written by David, were they?
	No, about less than half of them.
	Half of them?
	About half, yeah.
	They must have been in... They must have had prophetic skills or... I mean, they must have been more in tune with God than we are today.
	Yes, and you see it more clearly in the Hebrew because Hebrew has only two verb tenses.
	A perfect and an imperfect.
	And the way in which they combine often indicates that they see something as already having happened when it's in fact a prophetic future.
	That's always struck both Jewish and Christian commentators on the Psalms.
	And in fact it embarrasses some of the rabbis.
	The two main rabbis of medieval Jewry in Europe were Rashi and Kimhi.
	K-I-M-C-H-I is the latter name.
	Kimhi was always more predisposed to say the Christians have got some good understanding.
	Rashi, who's more popular still among the Jews, he's regarded as the definitive interpreter, is quite fiercely anti-Christian.
	When it came to the Second Psalm, by the way, we don't know whether it was originally the Second Psalm because there's no separate title to it, but probably it got edited together with Psalm 1 by Ezra later on, so that the two of them form a kind of introduction to the material of the Psalms, but Psalm 2 was probably composed on its own, even though it has no title.
	Rashi treating Psalm 2 says well yes we understand that this is about the Messiah and his glorious future reign but let's not go that way because the Christians, the heretics as he calls them, are going to taunt us with this and so instead let's just in one challenge say that this is all about glorious King David and refer to 2 Samuel chapter 5 but that wasn't the original Jewish understanding of this psalm.
	Right.
	And so, okay, so we've got this chap, maybe a thousand years ago, writing this... Three thousand years ago.
	A thousand years before Christ.
	Oh, sorry, sorry.
	A thousand years before Christ.
	Jerusalem is yet again beset by enemies and he's saying how how is this allowed to happen?
	Is that the kind of... That's it.
	In fact what I might do before we get into the text in the Hebrew and you reading along is I might give you the poetic Englishing of it as they used to call it.
	The psalm was Englished for Thomas Tallis to sets to music which he did in 1567 in the tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter.
	And people will often know, have heard the tune involved there because it's the tune that was used by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis.
	The quintessentially English tune with the floating cello line, you know the one.
	Well anyway, look it up if you don't know it.
	No, I do know, it's one of my I like all that set of Vaughan Williams pieces.
	They normally come with the English Folk Song Suite.
	Well, many people will not know that that Thomas Tallis tune, although Tallis was a high churchman, was written for the Puritan Archbishop Matthew Parker, whose library is still at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
	And here, and they've even kept the scheme so each stanza is one verse of the text, is a very Puritan and good understanding of the Christian meaning of Psalm 2.
	So that will give you the spirit of it before we get into the detail.
	Why fumeth in fight the Gentiles' spite, In fury raging stout?
	Why taketh in hand the people Fond vain things to bring about?
	The kings arise, the lords devise, In councils met thereto, Against the Lord with false accord, Against his Christ they go.
	Let us, they say, break down their ray, meaning array, of all their bonds and cords.
	We will renounce, that they pronounce, their lures as stately lords.
	But God of might, in heavens so bright, shall luff them all to scorn.
	The Lord on high shall them defy, they shall be once forlorn.
	Then shall his ire speak all in fire to them again therefore.
	He shall with threat their malice beat in his displeasure sore.
	Yet am I set, a king so great, on Zion hill full-fast.
	Though me they kill, yet will that hill my law and word outcast.
	Meaning broadcast.
	God's words decreed, I, Christ, will spread.
	For God thus said to me, My son, I say thou art, this day have I begotten thee.
	Ask thou of me, I will give thee to rule all Gentile lands.
	Thou shalt possess in sureness the world, how wide it stands.
	With iron rod as mighty god, all rebels shalt thou bruise, and break them all in pieces small, as shards the potters use.
	Be wise, therefore, ye kings, the more, Receive ye wisdom's law, ye judges strong, Of right and wrong advise you now before.
	The Lord in fear your service bear, With dread to Him rejoice, let rages be, Resist not ye, Him serve with joyful voice.
	You see what the spirit of the psalm is?
	It's giving kings and judges what for, isn't it?
	It is.
	You see what the spirit of the psalm is.
	It's giving kings and judges what for, isn't it?
	It is.
	It's a much more, it's sort of a more child-friendly version, I think, than the one I've been looking at.
	It sort of lacks the Sturm and Drang and... Actually, Delitzsch, the definitive German commentator, who knows more, I think, than any Jewish rabbi about the psalm, there's no doubt about that, that Christians by his day knew more than Jews about the meaning of Hebrew.
	Delitzsch said that that particular section from verse five onwards was dona artich, thunderous, So you're quite right.
	God does thunder.
	I mean, even the rhythms.
	Verse 5 in the Hebrew.
	Adelich and Bishop Parown say that God is actually starting to thunder there.
	You can even hear it in the rhythms.
	So, we've got the heathen furiously raging together and the people imagining.
	Who are the heathen?
	Well, The Hebrew here doesn't say Hagoyim, the Goyim or the nations, but that's because the Psalms often dispense with the definite article.
	It just says here Goyim.
	So peoples, it could mean the nations all told.
	If we take it prophetically, it means that because all the world is against Christ, because they're sinners.
	But more specifically and literally here, it's some heathen have turned up to challenge the supremacy of the king.
	Whom they're supposed to obey.
	So, in the first instance, it's David or his immediate successors who still receive tribute from kings in the vicinity.
	And as was often the case in the ancient Near East, they decided, we've had enough of this, let's have a conspiracy and, as the psalm puts it itself, overthrow their bonds.
	Right.
	This enrages the psalmist because, you know, this isn't an ordinary king.
	This is a king whom God has put in position.
	So they're actually trying to murder God, but as always in history, neither evil men nor the devil can do that.
	They can only get at the church, because Christ has already ascended.
	So the kings of the earth stand up and the rulers take counsel against the Lord and against his anointed.
	Well the first thing they do is Yehagurir.
	They imagine an impossibility or a vanity in verse 1.
	And then they proceed to the action you describe.
	So it starts with them make-believing that they can be God on earth.
	Is this not telling us that, I think weren't we warned about this in the Bible, where there's a bit isn't there, where God says yeah okay I'm going to give you a king, kings because you want kings, but I can tell you now it's not going to work out well.
	That's right.
	And here we are.
	Famous passage you know which we often give to students of Hebrew because there's a lot of future predictions in it when Samuel says do you really want this king?
	He's going to take your daughters and send them off to be apothecaries and What not, and your sons are going to be chariot runners.
	Very flowery passage in Hebrew.
	Good for translation.
	And the people of God say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know that, but we just want to be like everyone else.
	Right, okay, and then here we've got the proofs in the pudding.
	We've got kings and other rulers just rebelling against God.
	Yes, as simple as that.
	With so many things in the Psalms, this included, it has a supernatural origin.
	It's only a reflection on earth of what happened in the heavenlies when Satan and the angels who were loyal to him said, well to use Milton's line for it, better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
	I'm glad you mentioned that, because the next line is a mix of Milton and Shelley, I'd say.
	It's got this romantic notion of, let us break their bonds asunder, let us cast their cords away from us.
	This is the Luciferian-strikes-satanic view of God, isn't it?
	As an oppressor from whose shackles one must free oneself.
	Which has come back in spades with Alice Bailey and all of the charlatans who followed Madame Helena Blavatsky onwards.
	Andy Besant, all of them, as the 20th century goes on, the New Age movement as a whole gets into this.
	They even say there's two gods and that Jehovah's a false god and that Lucifer's the real one or Lucifer was Jesus' older brother and was much wiser, etc.
	And if you already go with Lucifer's enlightenment then you could be God for yourself and no need of of the real God.
	This has gone on so many times in history.
	It was clearly very present in ancient Babylonian mystery religion.
	The idea was that there was no attempt to deny that God existed.
	It was more a case of, well, okay, he's our creator, but he's puny and we will outstrip him by building our ziggurats.
	That's one of the things that's going on in the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.
	Right.
	Yes.
	But, I mean, I sometimes read these or recite these psalms in my head and think they were written for now.
	Yes.
	I see this very much.
	This notion spreading, even among sort of awake people, this idea that, yeah, well, okay, there's the Bible version of events, but actually It's possible that we were created by aliens and... It's all dilettantism.
	The giveaways, they always say things like, I'd like to think, or I prefer to believe in the kind of God who... Or if they're supposedly churchgoers, they'll often say, well, my Jesus wouldn't do that.
	He wouldn't condemn sodomy.
	You see what's going on?
	It's making God in man's image.
	Yeah, exactly.
	We'll see a lot of that going on.
	But we then have this...
	Well, do you want to talk about that a bit more?
	Because anyone who's studied Paradise Lost will know that one of the criticisms of Milton is he was accused of being of the devil's party because the character of Satan is so kind of sympathetic because there he is, he's been cast out of heaven
	And he's in this sort of tar pit, surrounded with his rebel angels, but he's gonna make the best of it.
	Put on a brave face, yes.
	It's just a testament to Milton's genius, isn't it?
	Like any committed Christian, he understood the power of sin.
	In biblical language, sin cleaves to us.
	We can't shake it.
	It really is a tar baby.
	It sticks to us.
	Paul in Romans 7 talking about this, I'm trying to shake it, but I can't.
	It clogs up everything I try to do.
	So, you know, the overpowering lusts and rages that Satan feels are very well known to Milton and he's making no bones about it.
	He understands the motives.
	Yes.
	Which is kind of the answer to the next question I was going to ask you.
	Because the next lines are, He that dwelleth in heaven shall last them to scorn, the Lord shall have them in derision.
	It's that repetitive structure You often get in the Psalms, which C.S.
	Lewis didn't understand.
	He was a complete... I mean, for an English professor, how did he not get this?
	But in his book on the Psalms, which I think is appalling, he apologises for this.
	He said, oh, they're a bit repetitive, and some readers may find... Hang on a second, this is the point, C.S.
	Lewis!
	Well, I... They're not meant to be read by... Well, you can read them while smoking a pipe and wearing a tweed jacket, you know, and about to butter your crumpets, but they're really for people who are wrestling with the issues of life.
	You know, who are covered in dust trying to recover the women and children who have been abducted from Ziklag.
	With men who can barely make it over the brook.
	So that's the spirit in which they're written, and what stays in your mind is a pulsating double structure at such moments to keep you going.
	You know, Anglo-Saxon poetry, of which Lewis's friend Tolkien was the great exponent, and Norse poetry had precisely the same structure, so it's remiss of Lewis not to have realised that.
	The whole point is the A-line states things quite bluntly, and after the caesura, the second half of the line states things more poetically, so that you meditate upon them.
	But the cumulative effect of those lines is to tell us, God has got this one.
	Whatever this, whatever the King's... It's also depicting Jehovah, you know, because verse four is the first of the three lines of the second stanza, four to six, and so verse four is a camera cut.
	Ooh, God's sitting in heaven, and he's having a jolly good belly laugh.
	And then, quote God, right?
	So the high point is verses 5 and 6, where God is in his terrifying mirth, saying they really haven't got a clue.
	So that's why the attention's being called to him in verse 4.
	Yes.
	So then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.
	So God is really unhappy at this point.
	Of course he is, because he knows that they're going to make a hash of it, and it's not just that he's angry with these creatures for rebelling.
	He's most particularly displeased, and always is, wrathful, against anyone who has a go at his son.
	It's in this very Psalm that we read, together with Psalm 110, that Christ is His Son.
	He's been given the highest name.
	Read Philippians 2 about this.
	He's been given the name above all names.
	And for anyone to dare to challenge that, to say that other Christs are available, you know, a world government would be a better bet.
	God didn't really quite know what He was doing.
	It's casting huge aspersions on the suffering that Christ loyally went through, in a reformed understanding, not first and foremost to save sinners, although that's the glorious result, but to ensure and safeguard the honor and glory of his father.
	That's why the father is so pleased, beyond all description, with Christ, because he underwent all that for his father's glory, to restore his father's virtues, which had been broken by these kings.
	Okay, so then we get close to the key line.
	Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.
	Now Zion is in Jerusalem?
	Zion is the poetic name for the mountain on top of Jerusalem.
	Not to be confused with Sinai, the mountain in the Arabian desert where the law was given.
	And it always stands for God reigning without contradiction among his willing servants in both the Jewish and Christian ages.
	It's where God reigns gloriously without enemies having a go.
	So for them to turn up to the gates of Jerusalem where the Temple and Mount Zion are at the top is such an effrontery.
	That's what's caused the rage here.
	God is saying they're having a go down there clambering at the gates at the bottom of the city and yet Although the Hebrew just says and, it's very sparing with its conjunction.
	So Hebrew just says and, in the sense of all the while.
	I've already installed my king.
	In other words, they might storm up and kill him, and in God's permissive will they did that to Christ.
	And the Tudor poetic version I just read alluded to this.
	They can kill Christ, they can try if they want to, but it won't make any difference to his eternal kingship because he's going to be restored.
	And then we get to this, the Psalm does this thing which happens quite often in the Psalms, where you get a change of perspective.
	A very dramatic one, only to be compared with Psalm 40, where again Christ breaks in in the middle and says, I am here, I am willing to do your will, O God.
	Here we've got the King, so Christ, following abruptly, without a marker of change, what his father has said.
	I will preach the law, whereof the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.
	So it's Jesus declaring, look, that God has told me that I am his son.
	Can you explain this?
	It's an odd formula for anyone who hasn't really encountered it before where you get this change of perspective.
	Is this just something that they did?
	They did it all over the Psalms and because they had music and pauses and because the theology was known to those who sang it wouldn't have been as abrupt to them.
	But it's always required Jewish and Christian commentators to unpick this in their commentaries and say who's speaking here?
	Here it's clear enough from the pronouns and whatever, but it's a massively poetic effect.
	Again, it's cinematic like so much of the Psalms.
	It's so much more effective if you suddenly cut to Christ speaking than it is to have some character in the film say, let us go and hear what Jesus has to say about this.
	Yeah.
	I've got to ask you about that translation, Lord, which presumably in the Hebrew is Yahweh.
	Yahweh or Jehovah, however you want to pronounce it.
	The Jewish exponents would say, you must say Adonai out of respect, not to use the Lord, take the Lord's name in vain.
	But that's something that they developed in about the third century BC.
	So at the time this psalm was written, they would have just chanted it as Yahweh.
	Right.
	English, German and Dutch, they will capitalize the name Lord or Hier in the translation to make it clear that the covenant name Jehovah or Yahweh is being used here.
	What's wrong with saying Yahweh then?
	Nothing's wrong with it, but it's like this idea that you get with the New Testament often where people say, oh don't give him his Greek name, Jesus, his real name's Yeshua.
	Excuse me, the New Testament is written in Greek.
	If you want to fly in the face of the Bible that we've been given, then you might as well write your own.
	There's nothing at all more authentic about Yeshua HaMashiach than there is about Jesus Christos, the Greek form from which we get Jesus Christ.
	Okay.
	Please God for that name to be recorded.
	Likewise, and here's the key evidence, Some esotericists, Platonists, did try to capture the essence of the name Yahweh by transliterating it in Greek into the letters Iao, which you might have known is what Aleister Crowley did, you know, the iota, alpha, omega.
	And so among his followers there was this rage of mocking the name Yahweh, which was an alternative pronunciation of Yahweh.
	What did the pious Jews of the time do before the time of Christ?
	They simply translated the covenant name given in Exodus of Jehovah or Yahweh into the Greek word kurios, Lord.
	And then Critically, for anyone who takes the New Testament seriously, the Lord Jesus Christ is called the Lord using the same Greek word, kurios.
	So that identifies him with Jehovah, and it also tells us beyond any doubt that it pleases God for us to call him Lord in our own languages.
	So in our Bibles we better call him that.
	Nothing wrong with calling him Yahweh, but it doesn't give him any more reverence or any more magic power.
	What is the literal translation of Yahweh, Lord?
	There's been endless debates about that because Hebrew tense forms are so difficult.
	The closest we can get is something like, I will be.
	In other words, I'll never stop being.
	You can't do anything to assail my being.
	Right.
	And there's even two forms of it in that famous chapter in Exodus where Moses encounters God at the burning bush and he says, what name, Lord, shall I give when I go back to my people?
	And in a couple of verses time you see the form Yahweh, but also Ehyeh, which it means I will be and he will be, respectively, because It's adapted by Moses, so when he goes back to the people he says, he will be, but God himself says, I will be.
	So in itself, in the original context, the original chapter where the covenant name is revealed, there's a strong indication that it's not a fixed magic form, it's just a way of describing God's essence, the one who is.
	Right.
	I'm just thinking that the Lord doesn't really capture the majesty of Yahweh.
	Not the way it's gone, because of course you and I have hobnobbed with some fleshly Lords in and out of the Houses of Parliament.
	They're all Satanists.
	They're not a great shake, are they, compared with Christ.
	So maybe the time has come for us to use a new word which is deliberately provocative like Master or Or despot or something like that, which are terms used in the Greek New Testament of God as well.
	No, I'm just thinking that if Yahweh encapsulates the concept of eternal and all being and was and ever and will be Lord, you know, it just seems like a bit of a... anyway.
	Yes, and yet it pleased the not inspired but well-meaning and very learned Jewish translators of the Septuagint into Greek to use that term kurios because precisely by dint of that fact that pagan languages, including sophisticated ones like Greek and Egyptian, didn't have a word that would do justice.
	Does Jesus, because I know Jesus quotes a lot of the Psalms in the New Testament, or demonstrates familiarity with them, does he mention this one at all?
	This one he doesn't, but its partner, its other half, is Psalm 110, and he has a whole ding-dong with the Pharisees about that.
	He says, who do you say the Christ is?
	And they say, well, our proper formula, Jesus, is that he's the son of David.
	And he then says, well, you haven't got the whole understanding there, because in Psalm 110, not that he uses that number in the gospel, but that's what we know it as, he says, the Lord said unto my Lord.
	So, you know, what man calls his son Lord?
	So he leaves them flummoxed, as on many other occasions, because they haven't realized that great David has a greater son.
	Ah!
	You can answer an idiot question of mine, which is not strictly germane to this, but does Jesus ever actually say outright that he's the Son of God, or does he just hint at it and kind of... He does, in Matthew, in the trial.
	He doesn't say, I am the Son of God, because that's not continent with his meekness in the true sense, you know, he wants to give honour to his Heavenly Father.
	And so he prefers the term son of man.
	But when it comes down to the trial, illegal nighttime trial, before the Sanhedrin, and the false witnesses have been shown up for a bunch of clowns, of course we know Caiaphas is getting beside himself with rage and he wants something to convict Jesus on, at least to send him to Pilate.
	So he says, he actually uses the covenant name of God.
	He says, I adjure you, meaning I cause you to swear by the name of the holiness of Jehovah.
	You tell us whether you're the son of God or not and even on that occasion Jesus as it were can no longer resist and it's also he knows it's God's will for him to be condemned so he doesn't escape the moment but even in that moment he doesn't say yes I am that would just be not the way that the Lord Jesus Christ acts instead he says you said it in other words he goes deeper as well as being more humble and he says you know perfectly well that I am.
	Well yes but so you kind of answered my question he doesn't We're sort of both right.
	He doesn't directly say I am.
	It's to be inferred.
	That's right and this makes it a very tricky question whether he was duly condemned under the old covenant because they said in John's Gospel we have a law and by that law he must die.
	That can only refer to the verse in Deuteronomy about blasphemy but it's questionable whether that was Properly invoked.
	Nevertheless, God permitted it, because without the death and resurrection of Christ, which is also the theme of this psalm, he wouldn't be the King and Lord of his people.
	I don't want... this is a terrible thing to do, but it's a bit like... teeny bit like Clinton in his... about the dress.
	I see what you mean there, yes.
	He's sort of ducking it.
	But that's how Jesus rolls.
	He said many times in the Gospels, my time has not yet come, my hour has not yet come.
	He knew what was going to happen.
	And when opposition mounted and the Pharisees and Jerusalem authorities tried to murder him, on one occasion there was a mob in Nazareth trying to throw him off a cliff as well, he escaped them.
	Not because he was a coward, but because he had more ministry.
	He had more people to reach, more miracles to do, more words of his to be recorded before it was time for him to go up to Jerusalem and die.
	Now we get to the next bit in the psalm where we get kind of South Park Jesus.
	I'm packing.
	I think a lot of idiots are under the, laboring under the misconception that Jesus is just like peace and love man.
	He's kind of a hippie.
	But here we have desire of me and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance.
	Yes, this is especially good because he's quoting what his father has told him.
	The point of this stanza, verses 7 to 9, is he's fully confident that even though he's going to be murdered, it's in God's will, and he's got victory already assured.
	Boundless dominion, as Bishop Parown calls it, because of this divine decree, which he has already heard in eternity past, the same as Psalm 40 and Psalm 110.
	He already heard it in the Divine Council.
	Before the world was created.
	But here, he's quoting it to us.
	He said that, my father told me, ask of me and I will give you.
	A Hebrew, an intense way of saying, I'll give you anything you want.
	You have all my good will.
	And what is his inheritance?
	The same as the end of Isaiah chapter 53.
	It's that so many people around the world will become his subjects and will joyfully follow him.
	They will be given to him.
	His work will not have been in vain.
	Isaiah 53, he shall see the travail of his soul and be satisfied.
	And in verse 9, Teroim b'shevet barzel, yes, so he's quoting what his father's told him.
	You will break them with an iron rod.
	And this is the climax, musically I would say the climax of Handel's Messiah in many ways is thou shalt bash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.
	It's quite violent.
	So the version I've got is to actually bruise them with a rod of iron and break them in pieces like a potter's vessel.
	And you're thinking, wow!
	These are the powers that Jesus could have invoked if he hadn't recognised his kind of purpose was to be Crucified.
	He could have done all this stuff if he'd wanted to.
	He really did.
	He did crush them.
	Paul talks about it in various passages.
	He triumphed over them.
	He led them in a victory parade, the Roman kind, where your enemies are tied up behind you in a wagon.
	He did all that.
	He openly did it all in the cross.
	Daniel's Explanation to King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel chapter 3 about the statue, where the great big stone that was hewn out without hands fell and crushed the feet of the statue of the Roman Empire.
	It happened!
	Christ did destroy the Roman Empire and there's never been anything like it since.
	And Christ himself said, if you fall on that stone your body will be broken but if that stone falls on you, you'll be pulverized.
	And how many has that been true of?
	Think of that pagan emperor I think it was the fourth century, wasn't it, who avoided and evaded Christ all his life and at the end of it he said, you've won after all you wretched Galilean!
	That's how Christ destroys his enemies and breaks them to pieces.
	Yeah, and there are Vikings, aren't there, in the Uhtred Cycle?
	I think they're based on real Vikings who convert.
	Oh yes, yes.
	All the heroic cultures realised that.
	Think about the Heliand, the old Saxon poem as well.
	The way to present Christ to those cultures, as evangelists did in Asia and Africa not so long ago as well, was to say this is the greatest warrior of them all.
	Where are we now?
	Where does the rod of iron come from, by the way?
	Is it a kind of familiar trope?
	Yes, well, barzell, iron was the strongest metal there was at the time and in fact in David's time the technology of smelting iron ore had only just been recovered by the Jews.
	We read a verse in the books of Samuel that the Philistines, the Greek colonists, had forbidden the Jews even to maintain their agricultural implements with iron work.
	They had to go to a smithy in in one of the five garden towns to get that done and David recovered that.
	And later on we read in the histories again that he used axes of iron to attack his enemies.
	So it's the ultimate strength that there was in the time.
	It lends its name to the whole era, doesn't it?
	The Iron Age which begins in the Holy Land about that time, about the time of David.
	What sort of tactics were they using?
	Do they have sort of test doodos and things?
	I'm not sure they had that kind of thing.
	I mean I'm not a specialist on the archaeology of the time around 1000 BC, but I think it was close combats and spears that made the difference.
	And of course chariots were the great weapon of war at the time.
	You needed a lot of money and men available for the training.
	But that was the biggest formation they had was a bunch of charioteers with some infantrymen around them.
	Ah, some put their trust in horses and some in chariots.
	Yes, and he had no pleasure in the legs of a man.
	So again, that was, you know, that was still top grade military equipment, you know, a well-trained pair of man's legs.
	I would quite like to have been in this area with, you know, chariots, because obviously horses, what's not to like?
	I think you might have found it a bit gory.
	Various kings, both Jewish and Pagan at the time, end up in a bloodbath at the back of their chariot after one battle too many.
	Actually, you know what?
	I take it back.
	I don't really... Anyway, we've got all this stuff coming to us anyway because we're going to get the job as Christians.
	I'm afraid.
	There's no promise that the Lord will preserve his church in individual places or times.
	Only that he will preserve his church on earth and it will be triumphant in the end.
	Well you and I disagree on this Alex because you don't think that we're living in end times and that we're about... We are.
	We have been since the ascension of Christ.
	It's the question of whether the end of the end times is upon us.
	No, I think I'm totally going with end of end times.
	I don't think we've got... I give it ten years max.
	No, lots of good believers who are of that persuasion, and it certainly gives an urgency to their actions and their service of the Lord, so I'm not going to cast aspersions on it.
	No.
	You and I, I'm afraid, mate, we're going to get our heads chopped off and that is the deal, but then we get to wear white.
	To him that overcometh.
	People should read their book of Revelation.
	So, where are we now?
	Be wise now therefore.
	Yes, we have the salutary warning, so we've cut back to the psalmist.
	It was a verse of the psalmist, a verse of Jehovah, a verse of the Son confidently quoting Jehovah's decree, and now we're back to the psalmist saying, have you been listening kings and judges?
	Be learned ye that are judges of the earth.
	I'll tell you what, Alex.
	From what I've seen of judges of the judiciary in the last three or four years, I'm thinking they ain't been doing their job.
	Certainly not.
	If justice is their game.
	You certainly read a lot of cases where their irascible action, you know, belies their temperament.
	It shows that they perfectly well know that they're not following justice because they all have consciences and God-given intelligence, so they know that they're not following the principles of justice in many cases.
	I think no, not one of them is, I'm afraid, Even frankly Lord Sumption, I don't think.
	You show me a judge who actually does justice.
	Lord Denning is famous, certainly the noble John Waters has drawn attention to this quite rightly.
	We think of Denning as a champion of English liberties, but when the Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four came up for review in 1989, I think probably the Birmingham Six, I like these digressions, Alex.
	Thank you for bringing that one up.
	Yeah, because I too had bought into this kind of... It's almost become a meme, hasn't it?
	and it was a false flag operation all along.
	But on the other hand, that raises the appalling vista that Her Majesty's government is corrupt.
	So we won't go there.
	We'll go down the other route.
	I like these digressions, Alex.
	Thank you for bringing that one up.
	Yeah, because I too had bought into this kind of, it's almost become a meme, hasn't it?
	The idea that Lord Denning is, you know, just the...
	Look, there's a lot of, I'm not saying anything about his religious status, but I will say that a lot of constitutional champions in every English-speaking country, whether they be judges or senators or lords, do turn out to have been wrong-ons afterwards.
	And, as you would imagine, like Jesuits in a previous age, Satanists, the dark side, do like to have men who have a great cachet of being learned and so committed to English liberties.
	And all the time, Jacob Rees-Mogg, they're not really Putting their money where their mouth is and they have questions to answer in their own sphere of influence, shall we say.
	Luckily, we have on our side somebody even who's going to whip their arses.
	Serve the Lord in fear and rejoice unto him with reverence.
	Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and so ye perish from the right way.
	If his wrath be kindled, yea, but a little, blessed are all they that put their trust in him.
	And that second half, if his wrath be kindled, in the Hebrew it's the adverb ki, which can also mean because, so Bishop Peround translates it in his 19th century commentary, for his wrath is soon kindled.
	In other words, it doesn't take much to get God wrathful.
	People might think, well how This is a common refrain in the Psalms and I do rather sympathise with it.
	he upholds infinite justice.
	So you wouldn't want him to let sin through, would you?
	But that first half, sorry, go on.
	Sorry, this is a common refrain in the Psalms, and I do rather sympathise with it.
	The Psalmist says, look, when are you going to take action?
	Because this psalm says God's going to get really really angry or Jesus is going to get really angry.
	And in fact many of the psalms that immediately follow 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 are on that very theme.
	When are you going to take action God?
	That's the first note that sounded.
	It was probably Ezra that edited the psalms together in their final order.
	And before we get to the Psalms of David there's a whole slew of psalms that have this tenor of how much sin are you going to tolerate God?
	Well, I mean, how much is he?
	We look around now, Alex, and see the...
	The many evils in the world.
	And one does rather ask that question, doesn't one?
	Well, I think some of the particularly sexual and child-abusing sins that we have tolerated en masse now, the mass scale of abortion, as well as the sexualisation of children, have parallels in ancient Canaan.
	And as I was reading to our catechism students, the teenagers, just the other night, That's the thing in Leviticus that's described to the Jews as having caused the land to spew out its former inhabitants.
	And God doesn't tolerate that for long.
	You might say, why doesn't he crush it instantly?
	Well, wheat and tares anyone.
	You would uproot a lot of godly people and a lot of work that pleases God as well if you were to overthrow it instantly.
	But there comes a time when, in the repeated biblical description, the measure of the sins of a given people is full up.
	Full to the brim and God can't have any more of it.
	He's got to take preventive action.
	Otherwise his name will be sullied and evil will break out all over the whole world.
	We can't have that.
	God can't have it.
	I don't think the Canaanites ever went away, Alex.
	No, I don't think they did, actually, spiritually or physically.
	We know that's recorded in the Pentateuch.
	Why?
	Because the Jews were cowardly and lazy, as all sinful humans are, and decided not to have a go at driving out the strongest ones.
	They just thought, well, we'll draw the boundary here and leave them in peace in the mountains.
	You call them the Jews.
	They weren't called Jews then.
	No, they weren't called Jews at that time.
	You're quite right.
	They were the Israelites at that time.
	It was another thousand years before they were called Jews, yes.
	And the injunction at the beginning of the psalm, the verse 12 of the psalm, Nashu Bar.
	Lots of people have assailed that reading, Kiss the Sun.
	And even James Barr, the 20th century commentator, said, Fiddle with the Hebrew consonants and come to what's called an amended reading, and you'll get something else like take instruction.
	But you have the Hebrew text that you have, and if you believe it's inspired of God, you do what you can with it, prayerfully.
	And nashgubar does make sense.
	It's not just kiss the sun, but it also means lay hold of the sun.
	That's the other meaning of that same Hebrew verb.
	So what does nash mean?
	Oh no, the na' bit is just a prefix.
	The verb itself is shakar, from the top of my head, and that is either to kiss or to embrace.
	The two concepts are not teased out, even in Greek actually, that much.
	Other ancient languages too.
	So it's probably lay hold of him in an entreating way, rather than snog him.
	Oh, I wasn't thinking that it was snogging, I was thinking more it's a sort of um... a sort of kiss of a sort of obeisance or respect as you would to a... like you'd kiss the feet of somebody.
	That sort of thing?
	Yeah, something like that.
	I might be talking nonsense here but I think it's the nif-al of the verb.
	I should have looked that up before we started but... Shame on you Alex for that oversight.
	It's something I would have castigated one of my students for not looking up.
	People are going to be... You know, I was really enjoying that Psalms podcast until Alex forgot.
	Do you know, while we're still recording, I'm going to look it up using a parsing tool.
	Got it.
	Which I have.
	So, you keep talking because it will take me a few seconds to get to that point.
	Yes.
	So, was Psalm 110 written by the same person?
	Do you think?
	We don't have an authorship... Actually, no.
	I'm getting it off the top of my head.
	Psalm 110 is a Psalm of David from memory.
	But first of all, let's just find out that Nashaku is... That's the bar.
	Where's the Nashak?
	Ah!
	I was correct that it wasn't a cal, but it's not an if-el.
	It's a pl, and the root is Nashak.
	Okay, so it is simply an intense form.
	But now we go to Psalm 110, and we will find who the author is.
	I don't think there is an inscription on that one either.
	It just starts with... Oh, Le David!
	Yes, I was right, my intuition was right.
	Psalm 110 is of David, we know that for sure.
	Psalm 2 we're not certain of, but the theme is very similar, so it could be David's.
	And by way of, because this has been a really, I've really enjoyed this, and although my podcasts normally go on for like an hour and a half, we've kind of covered so much ground.
	Is there any other ways you can contextualise Psalm 2 in, I mean, has it been quoted significantly in Christian history since it was written, is it?
	Yes.
	Where does it stand in the pantheon?
	Well, let's go to the Book of Acts, and again, people will have to look this up, because I haven't repaired it, but somewhere in... Oh, I have a Bible right in front of me, so I should look it up there.
	In the early chapters, Acts 4, I think, the Apostles actually, when they're facing persecution at the hands of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish authorities at the time, for preaching the name of Christ, they cite Psalm 2, and say it's now been fulfilled.
	Acts 4 or 5, from memory, Let's see... Of course, you'll edit out some of the silence here as I look it up, so I'll just do that.
	No, I tend to go for the kind of eched... Well, if you want the rough, the single-take version, then I'm going to be... I'll tell you what I'll do, because this is a wonderful Trinitarian Bible Society edition with references, and people should be using the Bibles with cross-references.
	I will go to Psalm 2, and it will probably tell me straight away what the verse is in And if you don't have a Bible that has that, you get something called a cross-reference Bible.
	I think I will!
	Because the middle column will show you where Old Testament quotations come in and New Testament and vice versa.
	So is there one you can recommend?
	Anything by the Trinitarian Bible Society.
	The best is the Westminster Reference Edition.
	tbsbibles.org Let us see where Acts... Yes, there we are.
	Acts 13, verse 33 is mentioned.
	Is that the 33?
	Yes it is.
	Any other Acts?
	No, Acts 4, verse 25.
	I think that's what we're looking for.
	Yes, the chapter was right.
	Okay, Acts 4, verse 25.
	I'll go back a bit, actually, through Acts 4, verse 23.
	And being let go, this is from, you know, being threatened with beatings up by the Sanhedrin, they, the apostles, went to their own company, the early church, and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said unto them.
	And when they, the church, heard that, They, the whole church, lifted up their voice to God with one accord and said, Lord thou art God which has made heaven and earth and the sea and all that in them is, who by the mouth of thy servant David, there's your answer.
	It's not in Psalm 2, but it is said here that it was David that wrote this psalm, although that's often used figuratively in the New Testament to mean David, by the Jews of the time to mean the book of Psalms.
	has said, quotation from Psalm 2 begins, why did the heathen rage, which is a very correct translation of the tense in the Hebrew, it's a perfect tense, why have they raged, and the people imagine vain things.
	The kings of the earth stood up and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ.
	So there's a whole, a full translation of the first couple of verses.
	You know the general rule if you quote the First couple of verses of a psalm.
	Both Jews and Christians understand that you've quoted the whole psalm.
	So, for example, on the cross, Eli, Eli la ma sabachthani, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
	Jesus is praying in aid the whole of the 22nd psalm, including his promised victory at the end of the psalm.
	So they quote that.
	So in other words, they're saying, oh Lord, this is the fulfillment of Psalm 2.
	Acts then goes on to say, in verse 27 of chapter 4, for of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, and the theme of sonship is in Psalm 2, whom thou hast anointed, and that's in Psalm 2 as well, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, again mentioned in Psalm 2, you see why they mentioned it, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, pray the early church, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.
	And they go on to say, Lord, see this and don't ignore it and punish it.
	And let us carry on preaching Christ.
	So that's the understanding that the church has always had of Psalm 2.
	It's a Psalm that says, don't be surprised.
	If you get preaching bans and if you see Christ ridiculed and have the same attitudes to it that Christ and his Heavenly Father have, which is puny little people who cannot stop his will being unfolded on earth.
	Alex, I've loved that.
	Tell us where we can find your stuff.
	UKColumn.org, where there will be an increasing amount of Christian output with me and Brian, I understand, he's quite keen for that as I am.
	And Telegram, Eastern Approaches, the direct link is t.me.au Brilliant.
	And it only remains for me to thank my beloved viewers and listeners.
	Do keep supporting me if you can.
	I find Locals and Substack probably the best, or you can try Patreon and Subscribestar if you prefer.
	Or you can buy me a coffee.
	And please continue to support my sponsors.
	My sponsors produce some good stuff, which I think is worth your attention, whether it's gold or vitamin supplements.
	For your health, which is going to be more important in these coming dark times.
	And finally, may I ask you to spread the word.
	I mean, if you're a Christian, or even if you're not, and you've enjoyed the Psalms podcast, share it among your friends.
	I'm very proud of these Psalm podcasts.
	And I love talking to people like Alex about this and getting under the skin of the Psalms, because I think they really are important.
	And I would recommend Learn the Psalms.
	Inhabit them.
	Because they ward off demons and they put you on the right path.
	Just take it from me.
	It's true.
	It really works.
	Doesn't it Alex?
	These things work.
	You'll find yourself protected in a way you didn't understand.
	But again, it's not some kind of amulet to where you're protected because you've understood and prayed the psalm and the Spirit of God will protect you.
	Yeah.
	Um, thank you very much.
	That was great.

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