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Psalm 104, and How Much That Proves

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Psalm 104, and How Much That Proves

The comparison that gets made is with Psalm 104, and it is a genuine one that is regularly overstated in both directions.

The parallels are specific. Both describe the beasts of the field coming out at night while the lion seeks its prey, and both have creatures returning to their dens and humans going out to work at dawn. Both have God laying the foundations of the earth, both give attention to ships and to the young of animals, and the sequence of ideas in the relevant stretch of the psalm tracks the hymn's sequence reasonably closely. James Henry Breasted pointed this out in 1906 and the comparison has been in every discussion since.

What it does not establish is dependence. The hymn is fourteenth century BCE; the psalm's date is uncertain and is very unlikely to be that early. The Amarna religion was suppressed within a generation of Akhenaten's death, its monuments dismantled, and his name struck from king lists; the hymn was inaccessible until European excavation. A direct line therefore requires an intermediary, and the usual candidate is a broader tradition of solar hymnody in the eastern Mediterranean, elements of which could have circulated for centuries and reached Israelite writers in some form. That is a hypothesis about a lost intermediate literature.

The alternative explanation is that two poets in neighbouring cultures, describing a creator god's provision through a day and a night, reached similar observations because the observations are available to anyone.

Serious scholarship holds both positions. Neither is a fringe view, and the confident assertion that the psalm was copied from the hymn is not supportable.

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