Week 3, Blog 2

It is interesting how many of the psalms have been taken from their original contexts to mean quite different things than the authors intended. The psalms, with much of the ancient Hebrew texts, including the Torah, have been adopted as part of the Christian Bible. Therefore, it is reasonable that in their Christian usage, they would take on Christian meanings and ideas. So much time has passed since the psalms were written that most likely even modern day Jews read them with meanings that differ from the original.
Like much of Scripture, many psalms were likely written in response to events that were occurring at the time. People who read them at the time they were written understood them in a way that is impossible for modern readers. When reading a religious text, people look at it through a certain lens. They have a preconceived framework into which they attempt to fit the text. Especially in modern times, readers want to apply ancient text to their own lives. In the case of the psalms, this can be done, but the original meanings might be lost. Religious writings can be very ambiguous in this way. While a religion as a whole might accept a text as truth and generally read most of it in the same way, different members can derive different meanings from the same writing. And this interpretation can be quite different from the original meaning of the text, especially when the text has been translated from a different language. We all come at everything we read and study with a certain perspective; it is impossible to be entirely objective. This goes for religious texts as well as other things we read. When reading the psalms, we read them with our own ideas of God, ideas which might be vastly different from those of the authors. The tendency to over-personalize the psalms is not a bad thing, it is fulfills the purpose of gaining personal satisfaction from the psalms. However, it does not allow one to read the psalms looking for their original meanings.