Psalms And Selected Canticles

About the Book

The Book of Psalms in the Bible attracts a great deal of devotional attention from many people, including this author. This attention turned in the Spring of 1993 toward a project of translating the Psalter from the original Hebrew. This was as a spiritual as well as scholarly task for me. The end product, with a few other Hebrew poems added to the collection, came complete in the Spring of 1994. In the late summer of 2022, I took to revisiting my work, revising and correcting it as I found it necessary, and brought to this format in the late Autumn of the same year. I had sought to provide a translation in the immediacy of the present tense, as free as I could manage of the generic masculine, and as lively as I could manage to formulate. I wanted to convey the energy of spirit and of devotion that I felt in the text as I had engaged it. As I brought my revisitation to a conclusion, I felt I had achieved what I had hoped and wished to share it all with what readers I may accumulate, hopefully you.

About the Author

I am a retired minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) living in central Illinois. When I began my formal development toward Ordination in the winter of 1972, I found my center of interest in the area of Bible. Ever since I took a required Introduction to the Old Testament course as an undergraduate, I had been fascinated by scripture. In the course of my development, I took Hebrew as a two-semester sequence after which I developed what my Hebrew professor termed a "facility" with Hebrew - given a text, the tools and some time, I usually could figure out what was going on. This attention to the original language fed, I felt, my work as a pastor and a preacher. I also attended to the Greek text, also with the use of accumulated tools. In the Spring of 1993, I took up the discipline of translating the book of Psalms, to which I added a few other poetic passages. That discipline has now come full term and appears as this book. I am glad I took that decision to take up the translation project and now to revisit it in my retirement as I live out my life with my wife of 54 years, two dogs and several cats.