Encountering the Book of Psalms - C. Hassell Bullock

Encountering the Book of Psalms: A Literary and Theological Introduction by C. Hassell Bullock

Baker Academic 2009 (First printing 2001)

Rating: 6

Readability: 5

Impact: It might sound cliche to fall in the love with the Psalms...but that's the fact of the matter.

Read it Again: I dunno.

Recommend it: I dunno.

What to Expect:

This book is meant for college courses. Bullock tries to make the whole thing very student friendly with columns, graphs, pictures and such. It does make it a little more interesting, but it's still not a terribly exciting book.

It does have a lot of useful information and some genius quotes. Pretty well organized and easy to reference. Good review questions at the end.

There is no doubt that C. Hassell Bullock has a passion for the Psalms and it comes through..and is rather infectious.

My Squib:

I really enjoyed most of the book. He pulls from a lot of sources and brings in application.

He makes some pretty weird comments about the imprecatory Psalms through out the book but he's last chapter which is devoted to them, seems pretty solid. I'd love to read some other books that address this issue. Anyone know of any? Or other good books on the Psalms?

Glad I read the book.

From the Book:

To praise God is to live, and to live is to praise God. Anything less than that is substandard existence.

Th Psalms of lament attest, lamentation is never very far away from praise.

I know C.S. Lewis had problems with the imprecatory psalms... That knowledge was one of the great disappointments of my childhood...

But this quote that refers to him is very good-

C.S. Lewis takes a different take and observes that, on the side of Christian piety, the imprecatory psalms remind us that the absence of indignation may be an alarming symptom of the decline of righteousness and moral conviction. To lose this sense of conviction is to lose our moral moorings."

I know "moral" has some bad associations as a term, but I thought this quote was good. Indifference...not good.

I would love to have any recommendations on books of the Psalms. We have Calvin and Spurgeon's commentaries.

Thanks for reading,
Miss Pickwickian