Psalm 110: Messianic psalm

Questions:

l   V1: My Lord

l   V2: Sceptre: a sceptre coming from Zion would belong to a Davidic king. Enthronement.

l   V3: Troops. Battle.

l   V4: Melchizedek

l   V5: “He will crush the kings”: who is he?

l   V7: Enthronement vs battle? Which context is V7? Lifting head is “invigoration”. When a battle is doing well, you run a lot, hitting the enemies. So you stop for a drink for refreshment then continue. Then “he” would be the king. Enthronement happens in Jerusalem. The spring could be the Gihon spring. As part of the enthronement ritual, the king gets down and has a drink for that spring ceremonially. Ambivalence in meaning: can mean this or that, a range of possibilities. There is ambivalence between battle and enthronement meanings in this psalm.

Structure:

l   2 oracles: V1-3: Oracle of Yahweh to my Lord. V4-7: Yahweh has sworn to do.

l   V1: oracle

l   V2-3: implications

l   V4: oracle

l   V5-7: implications

The priestly function of the king is not developed at all.

V1: “The Lord says to my Lord”: The king sit at the Lord’s right hand: unusual.

V5: The Lord adonai at being the king’s right hand: more usual.

In certain periods of Egypt’s history, the Pharaoh became elevated to the divine realm. There is a tight connection between the king and cult.

In Jerusalem, temple and palace abut each other. The tight connection between king and cult. But the king generally did not have a cultic function.

V4 reflect some of the cultic associations more typical of ANE kings.

Indirectly messianic psalm. A directly messianic psalm speaks always of a coming Davidic king and does not speak of a present Davidic king. Indirectly messianic psalm speaks of a present Davidic king that may have implications of a coming messianic Davidic king. The other view is that David himself consciously addressed the psalm to the messiah. Andrew Sloane is not persuaded, as the whole psalm need to be looked at, not cherrypicked, and if it’s directly messianic, the whole thing must have been written by David for a coming messiah, not just parts of it.

Understand the psalm in the OT context first. Then look at the NT reference to it later.

V1: “The Lord says (nauum) to my Lord”. Nauum=utterance, linguistic marker used to mark out an oracle. What’s the significance of sticking your feet on a footstool in the context of enthronement? This saying their power is inviolable. It’ the enemies that are the king’s footstool. Image of kingly power and the enemy’s humiliation and submission. The claim is made that this is an oracle of Yahweh, so it’s not something the king is claiming for himself, but a commitment Yahweh is making to the king.

V2: Unpacking what the above may signify. “Yahweh will extend your sceptre from Zion”. Zion was a seat of royal power. “City of David”: clear political associations as a seat of royal power. Also a seat of divine power, because this is where the temple is, and the presence of Yahweh. Do not forget Ps99 when we come to Ps110. The kingdom of David and the kingdom of God: the two things come together. “Send and stretch out”: Words have a range of meaning, so need to figure out the semantic domain of each language and how best to line up.

V3: A lot of this verse is unclear in Hebrew. It speaks of warfare and the willingness of the people to offer themselves in this service. Imagine the context of the early monarchy. There was no standing army until David’s reign, when he gathered his 37 warriors. There were only farmers before that. Soldiers do nothing except when there’s a battle to fight. These people are using a lot of energy: economically and socially deadwood. Only in monarchy there can be a standing army. Before that, people have to leave their farms to fight. Farmer have to change their farm tools to a sword. The dew is one of the primary way farm goods get pastured.  

V4: “Yahweh has sworn”. Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, we have this extraordinary thing, “‘I swear by myself’, declares Yahweh”. Any Israelite would automatically hear Abraham in this. “Melchizedek” in Genesis 14: validate his priestly claim, as Melchizedek is both king and priest. 2Samuel 8: there’s some kind of priestly function. Davidic king as priest: how much does it controls what follows? It comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. This notion of the Davidic king as the priest: neither does the psalm or the OT in general goes anything further with this. What is the reference to the priest doing in this psalm? This reference does not establish some sort of ritual functions for the king. What does a priest gets to do in the temple system that other people don’t? The high priest accesses all areas to the temple. The other priests still get access to Yahweh that people in Israel in general does not. So this is speaking about the degree of access the king has to Yahweh. It’s also picking out the special privilege Israel has compared to other nations.

V6: “Rosh” heads can speak of a club that’s crushing people’s heads, or the head of a country/those in authority. The parallelism suggests “rulers”. 

V7: “He will drink from the brook” seem to fit more with being the Davidic king, when we look at its fit for the whole psalm. It doesn’t sound like the future career of Jesus.

It’s talking about the types of power relationships that are necessary in the context of kingship. Ps72 ends the David collection, which is all about the shalom that follows the proper exercise of royal power. There is a clear connection between royal ideology and God’s rule, and that fits with messianic ideology. Messianic: anointed. Messiah connected to a future Davidic ruler who will achieve what Yahweh intended for the David ruler by being what Yahweh intended the Davidic ruler to be. There will always be some people who rebel against God. If God is going to be demonstrated as the king of the world, the only response is for the enmity to be overcome. Our job is not to be crushing heads, but to be proclaiming God and extending God’s invitation. The work of judgment is something reclaimed by God and God’s messiah as their job alone. The psalm’s job is affirming God’s promises.

Ps110 and NT:

l   V1 is one of the most commonly cited verse in the NT.

l   Mark 12:35-37:

n   Jesus was just asked 2 combative Qs and 1 less combative Q. Asked about paying imperial tax. Asked about marriage in resurrection. The greatest commandment.

n   Of course the Messiah is David’s son, so Jesus cannot deny that. Matthew and Luke’s genealogy showed Jesus’s descent from David is crucial. “Son of” doesn’t just mean lineage, but also “characterised by” a certain way. Jesus is saying how Jesus can be characterised by David features. Here Jesus is saying the David kind of lordship is not the kind of lordship that the messiah would enact. Andrew Sloane thinks Jesus is saying “your expectations of what the messiah would be like is wrongheaded”.

l   Melchizedek has no genealogy: he has no beginning or end.

l   A number of people see it as directly messianic, and the speaker in V1 is David, who describes the messiah as “my Lord”. This is based on Mark 12 and Act 2. McCain p1131: Jesus was crucified because he announced the simple good news that “God rules the world”.

Messianic psalms:

l   Grant and Longman worth looking at.

l   Some refer directly to the king and king’s rule. Pss 2, 18, 20, 72, 110, etc.

l   Some are more general. Pss 8, 16, 22, etc.

l   Directly messianic: Jesus.

l   Indirectly messianic: Written for another Davidic king and fulfilled in Jesus.

l   God’s purposes for the king was not fulfilled in David or any other Israelite kings in Israel’s history. A descendant of David is one in whom and through whom the kingly rule of God would manifest. That, the NT claims, is true of Jesus.

l   OT psalms in the NT: It’s important to remember their contexts in the OT, then think about their theological context in the NT. Most of the psalms are compiled post-exilic, so many of the psalms are modified to fit the post-exilic context.

l   The importance of Christ—is Christian interpretation of the OT Christocentric, Christomonist, Christological or Christotropic? Andrew Sloan’s preference is Christotrophic: OT points towards Christ. We have to decide on one and use it consistently. Christocentric, Christomonist and Christological involves reading into the text. Christotrophic reads out of the text and see where the text takes us, always the practice of exegesis.