Commentary Roundup: Psalm 29:9b

When the King James Version comes to the first colon of Psalm 29:9, it translates: “The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve.” The Scottish Psalter follows suit with “God’s voice doth make the hinds to calve.” This is certainly an awkward image to conjure up when praising the Lord on a Sunday, but singers of modern psalters may not have this same experience. The Sing Psalms psalter reads the text quite differently as “The LORD causes oaks of the forest to quake,” while others soften the expression, as with the 1912 Psalter's “wild beasts are affrighted.” However, while the Trinity Psalter Hymnal retains the 1912 version, it supplements it with a second version containing “the voice of the LORD makes the deer to give birth.” And the Covenanters stay on the old paths, as the Book of Psalms for Singing has “The voice of the LORD makes the deer twist in labor,” while the Book of Psalms for Worship has “The Lord's voice induces the deer to give birth.”

Which of these readings is correct? Is this verse about deer or about trees? And are the deer giving birth, miscarrying, or just getting scared? This is what I want to address in this commentary roundup.

But why is there an interpretive issue in the first place? Psalm 29:9 reads as follows:

קֹ֤ול יְהוָ֨ה׀ יְחֹולֵ֣ל אַיָּלֹות֮ וַֽיֶּחֱשֹׂ֪ף יְעָ֫רֹ֥ות וּבְהֵיכָלֹ֑ו כֻּ֝לֹּ֗ו אֹמֵ֥ר כָּבֹֽוד׃ Psalm 29:9

The voice of Yahweh makes the hinds give birth, and strips the forests, and in his temple all say, “Glory!”

The term in dispute is ˀayyālôt. It reads unproblematically as “hinds.” But some scholars want it to stand in closer parallelism to the following colon about the forest. If we could read it as a term for a plant, we would have matching images — and also reprise the image of tree destruction in v.5. So the term is repointed as ˀêlôt, “great trees.” Incidentally, there is also a proposal by DriverDriver, “Studies in the Vocabulary of the Old Testament II,” The Journal of Theological Studies 32.127 (1931), pp.255-6 that instead reinterprets the following line, relating the term translated “forests” to an Arabic word for goats, and attempting to connect the verb to reproduction. We would then have a consistent animal image for the two lines. But Driver's proposal has not attracted much support, and I won't discuss it further here.

While the majority of the commentaries overall favor the tree interpretation, this seems to have changed over time: after the year 2000, there are only four commentaries supporting the tree interpretation to six following an animal reading. Still, this is no clear consensus: the commentary tradition is divided on the issue.

The arguments for the tree interpretation are as follows:

First, and most significantly, scholars would like to see parallelism of meaning between the two cola. The second line is about the storm damaging trees, and this reinterpretation of the first colon matches it. There are several examples of this sort of close semantic parallelism in the psalm, in fact, most of the lines are bicola with synonymous parallelism (vv.1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11). Furthermore, a couple of the commentaries commit themselves to a chiastic structure for vv.5-9, which would require v.9 to match the tree imagery in v.5 (Hossfeld/Zenger 1993; Girard 1996)

Second, it is not clear what the image is supposed to communicate. Does it assert some “etiological connection between thunder and animal birth” (Girard 1996)? Or is it that the terror of the thunderstorm causes premature labor? The image of the storm damaging trees is easier to comprehend.

In defense of the animal interpretation, it is argued:

First, that if we restore ˀêlôt, “great trees,” we are positing a feminine plural ending on a word which elsewhere takes a masculine plural, and so this makes the reinterpretation less likely. Supporters of the tree interpretation respond that in the very next colon, “forests” appears with an unexpected feminine plural ending as well. Here there is a longer discussion to be had about noun gender in Hebrew. After all, the singular ˀêlâ appears to have a feminine ending, while the masculine plural is only attested three times in the book of Isaiah. In fact, these apparently “feminine” endings may not be feminine endings at all, but instead endings reflecting a system for generating “unitary nouns,” accompanied by unitary plurals. WagnerWagner, “Zum Textproblem von Psalm 29,9,” Zeitschrift für Althebraistik 10.2 (1997) pp.177-197 gives a fulsome discussion of this phenomenon in connection with Psalm 29:9.

If the grammatical objection to this reinterpretation is thus overcome, there is a second problem: The argument from parallelism and structure may not be as strong as it seems. Parallelism does not need to be rigid. It might be good enough to parallel the forest with the animals living therein (Davidson 1998). At the level of broader structure, Goldingay proposes an alternative chiasm, where v.9a parallels the metaphorical animal imagery of v.6, and v.9b alone parallels the tree imagery of v.5, centering on a wilderness focus in vv.7-8. This is a good illustration of the problem with letting proposed chiasms drive interpretation at the level of individual verse or word - it is often all too easy to propose alternative structures that work for different interpretations!

Here I would like to make a few points of my own about parallelism. As mentioned above, Psalm 29 furnishes an abundance of the two-member parallel lines that scholars are taught to look for in Hebrew poetry. But we should also look at the exceptions. There is a tricolon in v.3, while v.7 is a monocolon. Disturbed by this, older scholarship tended to emend the text, transposing the middle colon of v.3 to v.7 to “fix” the problem. This proposal is now generally rejected. It is understood that there is room for variety with the use of parallelism in Hebrew poetry, and that poets varied the use of these patterns for various effects and even structural reasons.

When we come to v.9, we should notice that if we dispose of the first two cola as a well-behaved pair, v.9c is left alone as a monocolon. In fact, since it is about declaring God's glory, it really alludes all the way back to vv.1-2, a connection which defies organization into a neat chiasm. And yet it is joined with the other two cola by a conjunction. I would suggest that here we have a tricolon without close semantic parallelism, and we should be open to disparate imagery in all three cola.

The third argument for the animal interpretation is the strongest: it seems that the image found here is also found in Job 39:1-4. As God interrogates Job about his lack of knowledge, he includes a vignette about animal birth. Has Job observed the “birthing of the hinds” (ḥōlēl ˀayyālôt)? This is the same vocabulary used here. The image is thus likely a “poetic commonplace,” as argued by Barthélemy.Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’ancien Testament 4 (2005), p.166 As the imagery unfolds in Job, knowledge about the birthing of the hinds includes the mystery of what time the birth occurs, the exposed nature of the birth and rearing of the offspring, and the early independence of offspring from parents. We could add to this Jeremiah 14:5, where in response to a drought, the hind abandons her newly born offspring in the field for lack of food. We should note that this failure of child rearing is a response to drought conditions, while Psalm 29 describes a thunderstorm. When God questions Job's knowledge about animal birthing, he implicitly claims this knowledge for himself, implying that God is responsible for the birth, its timing, as well as the providential care of the offspring that they do not receive from their own parents. Connecting this theme of natural fertility to God's power displayed in the thunderstorm does not seem like a huge stretch to me.

Especially for this last reason, I support the animal reading of the verse. There is still a discussion to be had about its precise meaning. The verb ḥ-y-l may mean “to writhe” (with connotations of fear), as well as “to be in labor, to give birth.” The same verb is used in the previous verse to describe the writhing of the wilderness as it trembles at the voice of Yahweh. So perhaps the hinds merely tremble in fear? But of course using the same verb with different meanings is part of the artistry of poetry, and the use of the same term in Job 39:1 suggests the meaning related to birth. The verb in 29:9 is in the polel stem, and Böhler (2021) wants to push the factitive meaning of the D-stem here to mean precisely “to cause to go into labor” rather than “cause to give birth.” This would support the idea that the fear of Yahweh's thunder causes the deer to go into premature labor and even miscarry. In fact, the use of the polel elsewhere, including in Job 39:1, describes the act of giving birth, with the birth-giver as subject. This is the only place where we find a causative/factitive use, and we should not be too sure we understand the semantics.

If the verb does describe the induction of labor, this does not necessarily imply miscarriage. The same language in Job 39:1 describes successful reproduction at a regular time. We would have to infer miscarriage from the context. One reason for doing so would be that the manifestation of God's glory in his voice throughout the psalm seems generally destructive. Trees are shattered, and hills shaken. But perhaps there is more duality here than appears at first sight. For example, when the voice makes Sirion and Lebanon skip like animals in v.6, this is a verb that can refer to dancing. The occurrences of ḥ-y-l in v.8 are in fact homonymous for a verb for dancing (though the ḥet would have been pronounced differently in each case). Does creation respond to God's voice with fearful trembling or joyous dancing? Or a bit of both?

In Job 39:1-4, the successful reproduction of the deer is implied to be a result of God's providential oversight at every stage, while in Jeremiah 14:5, death of the offspring is a result of drought conditions (the opposite of a thunderstorm). Perhaps the use of the trope in Psalm 29:9 is meant benevolently, striking a contrast with the destruction of trees in the next colon. It would then be the only reference in this psalm to the life-giving accompaniment of God's thunderous voice: rain. This is not really a very surprising association given the frequency of this duality of thunderstorm imagery elsewhere, and it is worth considering that the psalm ends on a benevolent note in v.11, with God giving strength and blessing to his people. We might need to allow for some compression in the imagery — perhaps the voice of Yahweh does not cause labor directly, but through the giving of rain, bringing rebirth to creation. The audience would need to understand the trope well enough to fill in the gaps in the psalmist's elliptical statement, but this seems quite plausible to me.

This is where I come down on the issue: Psalm 29:9a describes the power of God's voice exercised in providential superintendence over the birthing of the hinds.