Little is known about the writer of Psalm 89, but it’s still a great deal more than we know about the writers of some other psalms.
Ethan the Ezrahite was a Levite
musician, poet and prophet who came to prominence as a young man during David’s
reign, continuing his ministry into the reign of Solomon and perhaps even that
of his
Evidence for that last statement to come …
Late-Dating Ethan
Based on its content, especially the later verses, such luminaries as Matthew Henry accept the possibility that Psalm 89 was actually written much later than the reign of Solomon or Rehoboam, and written by someone other than Ethan, perhaps even as late as Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem in the early sixth century BC. In order to make that concession without alleging fraud (pious or otherwise) on the part of the writer, Henry suggests the psalm’s superscription may signify “no more than that the psalm was set to the tune of a song of Ethan the son of Zerah, called Maschil”.
That suggestion is, as they say, problematic. The superscription over Psalm 89 reads “A maskil of Ethan the Ezrahite.” In order to accommodate a later date and a different author, Henry and others want to make that “of” (implicit in Hebrew) mean something like “after the style of”, or “to the tune of”. There are all kinds of problems with that, not least the fact that this is the only psalm for which Ethan is explicitly recognized. As far as we can tell, as a psalmist, Ethan was “one and done”. If we are now going to say somebody else actually wrote his only acknowledged composition, which other psalm’s tune is it supposed to follow? Perhaps one of the uncredited psalms? That certainly leaves the modern reader in the dark, though it would not be for the first time.
More inconveniently, if the implicit “of” in the superscription of Psalm 89 can be read this way, then so can the superscriptions over all David’s psalms, those of Asaph and those of the sons of Korah. In effect, we then call into question the authorship of 2/3 of the Psalms, and all simply to accommodate secular critics who have difficulty believing a prophet could write intelligently about future events before they occurred. That’s just silly.
A Window Into the Future
I’ll take the inspired prophetic explanation every time, thanks; at least it leaves me with Bible intact. For the purposes of this post, Ethan wrote the psalm. That makes sense to me. The majority of the psalms in our Bibles date from either David’s or Solomon’s reign, and many of these have prophetic trajectories that reach into our own future. Ethan’s psalm is not unusual in that respect.
The Hebrew psalmists wrote about their own feelings, thoughts, difficulties and triumphs, but they also wrote about those of others, many of whom were not alive when their stories were written and climbing the ancient equivalent of the religious Top Forty. All the messianic psalms are like that. For the Israelites who sang them and memorized them, the experience must have been an interesting window into their own future, and if not theirs, then perhaps that of their children, grandchildren or distant descendants.
Prophetic and Not-Prophetic
No prophetic gift would have been required to write the first 37 verses of Psalm 89. The first eighteen are all about the glory of God and the blessedness of those who exult in his name. Beautiful and sometimes a bit hyperbolic, but nothing that required new revelation from God to pen. Verses 19-37 consider the details of the Davidic covenant, which also would have been common knowledge for any devout Israelite living during the reign of David after, say, 995 BC or thereabouts. Psalm 132 shows the covenant to have been familiar territory to other psalmists. If the people of God could not yet read about it there, they could certainly read it in the scriptural accounts of David’s life and reign.
So then, nothing Ethan says up to verse 37 required a prophetic gift, and perhaps nothing beyond it, depending which events these final verses are taken to refer.
However, verses 38 and 39 read like so:
“But now you have cast off and rejected; you are full of wrath against your anointed. You have renounced the covenant with your servant; you have defiled his crown in the dust.”
The usual explanation for this abrupt turn of events revolves around David himself. His adulterous episode with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband Uriah brought about the judgment of God on David and his family. Nathan told him, “The sword shall never depart from your house.”
A Fit That Isn’t
But though the language of judgment in these latter verses of Psalm 89 is personal and very obviously directed toward the king of Israel, the judgment Ethan speaks about seems significantly beyond anything he could possibly have observed during Absalom’s rebellion against his father’s rule. “You have breached all his walls,” he writes. “You have laid his strongholds in ruins. All who pass by plunder him.” Absalom took Jerusalem without a fight. No strongholds were laid in ruins. David and his loyal companions fled to ensure the safety of its citizens. Absalom did nothing more violent to the city of David than muss the bedsheets of David’s concubines, and he was killed in the first major battle thereafter. There were other wars and rumors of wars subsequently, but none in which it could be said that “you have not made him [David] stand in battle”.
Likewise, we have a problem with applying these words to God’s judgment on Solomon for idolatry, or to God’s judgment during the reign of Rehoboam. It’s not as big a problem, but the imagery still doesn’t quite fit. Ethan may well have been around to witness what happened to fulfill God’s judgment on David’s son and grandson; he was probably between eighty and ninety at the time. You will remember a series of adversaries lifted up their hands against Solomon, including Jeroboam son of Nebat, but they were a comparative annoyance rather than the humiliating and destructive force Ethan describes. Later, Rehoboam alienated ten of the twelve tribes and split the nation. That left Judah subject to the predations of the king of Egypt, who looted the temple, and to Jeroboam king of Israel, whose armies clashed repeatedly with Rehoboam’s over his 17 year reign. But again, the language of Psalm 89 seems just too intense to refer to these events. “The insults of all the many nations”? I’m not seeing it.
Nebuchadnezzar and the Captivity
It’s not really until the siege of Jerusalem that ended with its fall in 586 BC that the language of the later verses of Psalm 89 received any kind of literal fulfillment. By then, Ethan the Ezrahite had been in his grave for 400 years or so. These events are a perfect fit: the breached walls, the stronghold in ruins, the abject humiliation before all the surrounding nations, the inability to stand in battle, the king cut short in the days of his youth and covered with shame. That’s Zedekiah to a tee: the crown princes slaughtered in front of him, his eyes gouged out, bound in chains and taken to Babylon, every great house in Jerusalem burned down and all Judah’s cities taken. To all appearances the messianic line had come to an end, the fulfillment of God’s covenant with David was an open question, Judah’s people were taken captive and everything looked hopeless.
That would be something for Ethan to lament, and I think he did so in Psalm 89. But by the Holy Spirit of God, he also did it 400 years before it happened.
What would it have been like to sing that song in the temple if the people of God were really paying attention?
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