De hemel ontvouwt - Psalm 19 = The Heavens Unfurl The Glory of God (Ps 19), 1967 - 2000

In Psalm 19, we find two poems. The first and shorter is a hymn of praise to the 'Author' of Creation. But this is merely a prelude to a greater hymn of praise to God as Giver of the Law. If there were no Law, there would be no honoring of the Creator. This is clearly illustrated in the Psalter where Psalm 104, the great hymn of Creation (a poetic retelling of Genesis 1) is a prelude to a group of psalms (Pss 105-107) about the Exodus and the Giving of the Law. In this psalm, the former poem is thought to be the more ancient. It honors a remote un-named deity, the God of the Powers [EL] from the Northern tradition, who created the Sun. It is believed this is but a fragment of a longer poem, similar to Psalms 8, 104, and 148. It is further believed that at some stage, a Temple editor linked this poem with a poem about YHWH and the Law, the more personal God of the Southern tradition. In ancient Near Eastern thought, the Sun was linked with Justice (the purpose of the Law). This earlier hymn is of pre-Hebraic, Babylonian origin. By contrast, the second poem is of marked late post-Exilic times. The Sun Poem 1-4 The Cosmos of Heaven and Earth 5-7 The Great Hymn of the Sun The Hymn to the Law 7-10 Praise of the Law 11-14 Prayer of the Psalmist Huijbers follows a 'step design', where each refrain grows by adding phrases from the preceding verse, so that the assembly are echoing the words of the choir. Outside of this pattern is the Intermezzo, a poem devoted to the Sun. It incorporates some unusual, if not anomalous, rhythms and I have preserved Huijbers' treatment of these. They are each to be seen as part of a broader, greater phrase, and not to be treated as isolated measures where the composer 'got his accents wrong'. Attempts to avoid these unusual stresses, while easy enough to do, would not only be too simplistic but would destroy the integrity of the composer's masterful understanding of the language. But do these stresses work in English? Huijbers maintained that the arrangement of the text was as masterful as his own.