timfost
Puritan Board Senior
I think that is fair. Unique to the Psalms is a command to sing them and accordingly our translation philosophy must bear that in mind. Indeed, the Psalms are treated in the NT both as a book of prayer and prophecy to be read and studied as well as a book of hymnody to be sung. That being the case, I think two different translations are entirely appropriate--a reading form and a singing form. Both should be literal in the sense of carefully translating the words of the text, but the forms are different. I do think all Hebrew poetry ought to give consideration to rendering them in a less wooden, prosaic form, but those other sections are nevertheless meant to be read instead of sung and that impacts how we use them and translate them. Sometimes I do read the 1650 Psalter when reading through the Psalms so that I don't forget that they are, in fact, songs, but I will usually have a standard translation present to to consult where the metrical version is unclear or awkward for me.
Thank you for explaining. I still think that we're hung up on what makes poetry poetry. Certainly there is much beautiful English language poetry that is neither in rhyme or meter. It seems that to insist we need a less accurate translation to accommodate singing is biased towards very traditional poetry and song. I think many of our translations (consider KJV) to be poetically beautiful in it's rendering of the original language. Wouldn't it be better to accommodate our singing to the Bible, not the Bible to our singing?
Below is an instrumental accompaniment my church uses to sing Psalm 138. It is verbatim and most of the congregation either sings it by memory or they follow along in their NKJV Bible.