Sigmund Mowinckel on Psalms at the Enthronement Festival of Yahweh [Part One]

I have been trying to get beyond philology and take my readers back to the original Judeo-Christian mysteries of Alexandria which I have argued were centrally focused on the throne of God. Now I am going to bring out the heavy artillery - Sigmund Mowinckel's The Psalms in Israel's Worship and its long chapter dealing with what Mowinckel calls 'the Enthronement Festival of Yahweh.' Mowinckel was was one of the world's most significant Psalms scholars. Educated at the University of Oslo(1908; ThD 1916) (in those days Oslo was still officially called Kristiania), and from 1917 onwards he was a lecturer there. He retired in 1954.


From the 1920s onwards Mowinckel headed a school of thought on the Psalms which sometimes clashed with the Form Critical conclusions of Hermann Gunkel (see Form criticism) and those who followed in Gunkel's footsteps (Hans Joachim-Kraus etc). In broad terms, Gunkel strongly advocated a view of the Psalms which focussed on the two notable names for God occurring therein: Yahweh (JHWH sometimes called tetragrammaton) and Elohim. The schools of Psalm writing springing therefrom were termed "Yahwist" and "Elohist".


Mowinckel's approach to the Psalms differed quite a bit from Gunkel's. Mowinckel explained the psalms as wholly cultic both in origin and in intention. He attempted to relate more than 40 psalms to a hypothetical autumnal New Year festival.


I think Mowinckel provides an important context for many of the ideas I see developing in Jewish and Christian Alexandria. I will try to transcribe the whole chapter which consists of thirteen sections. I will begin now with the first section in what is Chapter V in his work:


The fact that the 'Epiphany psalms' mentioned above in Chapter IV are connected, at least ideologically, with the harvest festival, is evident from the close relationship between their underlying mood and ideas and those of the so-called enthronement psalms. That these psalms are connected with the harvest and the new year festival, the present author has tried to show in his Psalmen-Studien II, and we shall take up the question further below.


Characteristic of this group is that they salute Yahweh as the king, who has just ascended his royal throne to wield his royal power. The situation envisioned in the poet's imagination, is Yahweh's ascent to the throne and the acclamation of Yahweh as king; the psalm is meant as the song of praise which is to meet Yahweh on his 'epiphany,' his appearance as the new, victorious king. Hence the name: enthronement psalms.


This applies, in the first place, to Pss. 47, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99. But Ps. 95, as well, belongs in its first part to the same type, even though it be not purely a hymn, but also contains other important liturgical items. A clear parallel with 95 is 81, with the same construction and the same poetical (and liturgical) vision. This fact indicates that Yahweh's enthronement is ideologically and in the religious consciousness of the Israelites connected with other complexes of ideas and liturgical situations.


It cannot, therefore, be our task solely to give a description of the forms and contents of the enthronement psalms in the narrow sense from the point of view of Gattungsforschung and the history of literature, but we must also seek to find the cultic situation which lies behind them, and to give a picture of this in all its ideological and liturgical complexity. Then, granted that there is a such a cultic situation, Ps. 95 shows that it contained other ideas and liturgical situations beside the idea of the enthronement alone. And that is only what is implicit in the nature of the matter and of the cult. In the cultic festival the whole orchestra of the life and experience of the religion can be heard playing. No single psalm type nor any unbalanced typological treatment can reveal the whole content of the cultic festival. The fact that the second part of Ps. 95 expresses an idea other than the mere enthronement, and that the psalm, from the point of view of Gattungsforschung is a 'liturgical composition,' gives no right to exclude it from the group of enthronement psalms and from the scope of our investigation, as Gunkel, and more recently Kraus, have done. This means that we are at once forced outside the narrow circle of the enthronement hymns proper. Among other things the above mentioned epiphany psalms will be seen to have close ideological and liturgical connexions with the ideology and the cultic situation of the enthronement hymns of praise.


But first we must see how far we can advance through a consideration of these latter alone.