First blog for week four/ About ethics in the Psalms/ Ten Commandments, right?

Yes, the title is in haiku.  So what?  I still think it's an effective title.

It's hard to place exactly what the ethic is.  I'd like to think it was the Ten Commandments, but I never saw certain commandments within the psalms.  So clearly, the psalms are emphasizing certain commandments over others.  I do think that this question is an especially tough one, because I remember last week in class, we talked about the ethics, and how they aren't in the psalms themselves  The psalms make references to a code of ethics, but never explicitly state them.  But you don't have to explicitly state things to get your point across.

The first commandment is "you will have no other God before me".  And you can clearly see that in the fact that there is a book of psalms, praising God.  And the fact that most of the psalms were written with the intention of being first-person plural, a "we", makes it clear that the Israelites were a group with not only a strong connection as a group, but strong connections to God as a group.  And in Psalm 14, it's written "The scoundrel has said in his heart,/ 'There is no God.'  They corrupt, they make loathsome their acts./  There is none who does good."  Clearly, non-believers were held in high esteem, to say there least.

Both Psalms 5 and 12 make references to the the wickedness of liars, a relation to the 9th commandment of "do not bear false witness".  In Psalm 5, it is written that "You destroy the pronouncer of lies,/ a man of blood and deceit the Lord loathes" (7) and in Psalm 12, he writes "Falsehood every man speaks to his fellow/ smooth talk, with two hearts they speak.  The Lord will cut off all smooth-talking lips,/ the tongue that speaks of big things" (3-4).  Obviously, any form of lying, whether a full "false witness" in court, to "smooth-talking", is not taken lightly, and it appears that lying is one of the worse offenses.

But probably the best example of a code of ethics in the psalms is Psalm 15, which literally opens with the question of "who will dwell on Your holy mountain?"; who is righteous in the eyes of God?  And then the Psalm goes on to explain who is.  He who "does justice/ and speaks the truth" (2), doesn't do evil against other men, and honors his family (Fourth Commandment?!), and doesn't extort money from others.  The Psalm ends with the line "He who does these/ will never stumble" (5).  If that's not an ending for a code of how to live, I don't know what is.

This is definitely a livable ethic.  It's been lived by for thousands of years, by good Christians and Jews alike.  It's quite clear, between the 4-syllable sentences of the Ten Commandments, to the upfront-ness of Psalm 15.  I do wish that they had mentioned the Sixth Commandment, but that might have conflicted too much with all of the violence in the other psalms.  But for the most part, the Psalms are straight-up Judaic (and later, Judeo-Christian) ethics.

Man, I'm just not up for my usual conclusions this early in the morning, sans cigarette.  Peace.