Psalms

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Psalm 146

1 Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. 2 I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God as long as I exist. 3 Do not trust in princes, or in human beings, who cannot deliver. 4 Their life’s breath departs, they return to the ground. On that day their plans die. 5 How blessed is the one whose helper is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God. 6 The one who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them,⁠ who remains forever faithful, 7 vindicates the oppressed, and gives food to the hungry.⁠ The Lord releases the imprisoned. 8 The Lord gives sight to the blind.⁠ The Lord lifts up all who are bent over. The Lord loves the godly.⁠ 9 The Lord protects the resident foreigner. He lifts up the fatherless and the widow, but he opposes the wicked.⁠ 10 The Lord rules forever, your God, O Zion, throughout the generations to come. Praise the Lord!

Texts in conversation

Compare Surpu IV and Psalm 146:8

Ancient Near East, Babylonian · Hebrew Bible

Summary

The language of restoration in Psalm 146 resembles earlier ancient Near Eastern traditions, such as the Akkadian Surpu tablets, that similarly describe the god Marduk healing the sick and restoring the people.

Passages

Surpu IV

Ancient Near East, Babylonian · Sumerian and Akkadian Incantations

It rests with you, Marduk, to keep safe and sound, the committing of assault or violence, who defeated the Asakku, to eat what is taboo to one’s god, to infringe an interdict and to release it, to visit the wife of one’s friend secretly, to visit unwittingly the daughter of his god, bad luck, complaint, the pointing of the finger, the complaining to the god, to say how happy! and not to guide, to make the angry god and goddess return to a man, to conciliate a person’s wrathful god, angry goddess, to pacify the angry heart of the god and the goddess, to extirpate sin, to remove crime, to make good error, to heal the sick, to lift up the fallen, to take the weak by the hand, to change a bad fate, to bestow a good protective god upon somebody,

1200 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Surpu

Psalm 146:8

Hebrew Bible

6 The one who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who remains forever faithful, 7 vindicates the oppressed, and gives food to the hungry. The Lord releases the imprisoned. 8 The Lord gives sight to the blind. The Lord lifts up all who are bent over. The Lord loves the godly. 9 The Lord protects the resident foreigner. He lifts up the fatherless and the widow, but he opposes the wicked. 10 The Lord rules forever, your God, O Zion, throughout the generations to come. Praise the Lord!

600–201 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Psalms

References

"... In official cult activities as in personal beliefs, the prayers composed in the Akkadian language stood alongside different religious texts in both Sumerian and Akkadian – namely, incantations, hymns, lamentations and other kinds of songs as well as longer literary works commonly called myths and epics by modern scholars. Although different ancient terms were used, all Akkadian prayers had more or less similar, if not identical roles in the cult and daily life of these ancient people. It is, however, rather complicated to determine what ‘a prayer’ was in antiquity or what kind of ancient texts belonged to the genre of ‘prayer’. The modern classifications of ancient Mesopotamian texts are normally given on the basis of comparison of the contents of the ancient texts with their equivalents in the Bible but with no regard to the ancient identifications. Hence these categorizations do not always present entirely accurate pictures. There are two reasons for such inaccuracy: 1) the difference of conceptions with regard to certain styles of compositions between the Akkadian speakers and modern people, and 2) similarities in formulae and contents shared by different genres. Some scholars often classify a text as a prayer while others call the exactly the same text a hymn or a psalm ..."

Takayoshi Oshima, Babylonian Prayers to Marduk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 7.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

Psalms150 psalms

Compare Surpu IV and Psalm 146:8

Summary

Passages

Surpu IV

Psalm 146:8

References

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