Devotional Short Note to Psalm 104: It
will be irresponsible of me to just walk away what scholars are postulating about
this psalm, including my great teacher prof. Charles Fensham. They concluded
that this psalm was plagiarized from the Egyptian poem during the time after
Ikhnaton, about fifty years into the Judges of Israel period. First let us get
our vision straight about this psalm. Is it about creation language? Yes, it
seems creation words appear. Is it about the great Creation event at the
beginning of the world? No. There is enough Flood of Noah language in it as well
as 104:6-10 indicated. The Flood of Noah was in the year 2692 BCE. That is my latest
updated calculation based on conservative chronology of the Old Testament. If
Edwin Thiele was still alive and we would have been colleagues, I think I could
have convinced him to date it according to his system to 2688 BCE. That is the Thiele-Horn-Waterhouse
system which is adopted by nearly all scholars over the world. The Eschaton
creation is also mentioned in 104:30 with the Resurrection “You send forth Your
Spirit, they are created” which is not the creation of Adam (single person) but
many persons and note the recreation of the earth: “and You renew the face of
the earth” (104:30b). This is the new heavens and new earth that John talked
about in Revelation. Creation took place at Creation, renewed creation at the
Flood and absolute perfection renewal or complete restoration at the Eschaton. Thus
Psalm 104. So far we do not care what scholars say.
But let us get back to the plagiarizing accusation. They claim that in the Aton
Hymn from the time postdating the hippie of Egypt, Ikhnaton and his wife came
this Hymn that breathed ideas into our psalmist. Stop the bus. When was the
date of the Hymn of Aten? 1350 BCE. If the Psalm was written later, it could
then theoretically borrowed from this hymn. That is correct. False. Moses wrote
Genesis in the wilderness hiding from Thutmosis III the illegitimate son of
Thutmosis II after Moses manslaughtered the Egyptian overseer in 1490 BCE and
had to flee. Result. Moses wrote Genesis with possibly some books his mother
gave him the night he fled: Book of Adam, Book of Noah, Book of Patriarchal
History. So he cited here an there from them to write and compile Genesis.
Pre-Flood history in detail was not necessary any longer so only citations
sufficed, as the Holy Spirit as editor decided. Now here is the point: Moses had
those ideas of the Hymn of Aten in 1460 BCE already, 110 years before the
Egyptian hymn! Who copied from whom? A very legitimate question and very
noteworthy one as well. Then came Mitchell Dahood after the
discovery of Rash Shamra texts called Ugaritic texts since they were written in
a similar language as Hebrew but in an alphabetic cuneiform script dating to the
Middle and end part of the Judges history of Israel between 1280-1110 BCE. Dahood
found many grammatical correlations in Psalm 104, pairwords that were the same,
and in 104:15 where wine, oil and bread are mentioned, also in UT (Ugaritic
Texts) 126.III.13-16 wine, oil and bread are dealt with. An
Ugaritic-paralellomania originated and Dahood went bananas allocating nearly
every Psalm as plagiarized from Ugarit. He later even used scissors to cut out
grammatical forms to align with Ugaritic text’s forms. Like in 104:13 where he
wants to read a word’s pronominal suffix at the end as –kî instead of the
original –îka. No. Changing the Word of God is taboo. Period. That does not
mean that he does not have good ideas sometimes. But we read his Anchor Bible
Commentary with a toothpick. By the time of Ugaritic literature, the
Habîru also settled during the entry into Canaan in 1410-1405 BCE at Rash
Shamra or Ugarit. Their presence is there as the cuneiform texts indicated. So
with them came the Moses corpus and loaded with Mosaic ideas from Genesis,
raindrops of Moses’ phrases and logic could fall on this pluralistic society
entering the Canaanite religion of Baal and Dagon there so that Dahood could
see correlations with Psalms that are compiled from Moses’ writings in Job and
Genesis. At last we got all on the table now. We can enter psalm 104 with an
open mind and navigate the right way. Moses was the source from which someone
in Egypt was citing and Moses was the inspiration for ideas in Ugarit and Moses
was also the inspiration for citations in the compilation of the Psalms. Creation is in 104:2 saying that the
Lord “stretches out the heavens like a curtain”. In 104:2a “Who covers Yourself
with light as with a garment” compared to the Hymn of Aton talking about the sungon
Aton as “Thou you are away, your rays are on earth”. Stop. Can we give Moses a
chance in his epic in 1460 BCE of Job saying “He makes a path shine after Him”
(Job 41:24a). Talking about the Warrior God Christ “Under Him are rays of
brightness” (Job 41:22b). “You make darkness and it is night”
(104:20a) compared to the Hymn of Aton “Darkness is shroud, and the earth is in
stillness. For he [sungod Aton] made them rests I his horizon”. Moses said in Genesis
1:4 “God separated the light from the darkness”. When the night comes the “beasts of the
forest creep forth the young lions roar after their prey” (104:20b-21a)
compared to Hymn of Aton that when darkness comes “Every lion is come forth
from his den all creeping things, they sting”. God provides grass to “spring up for
cattle and herb for the service of man to bring forth bread out of the earth”
compare to the Hymn of Aton saying “All the beasts are content with their
pasturage. Trees and plants are flourishing”. Can Moses also say something? “From
any tree of the garden you may eat freely” (Genesis 2:17). Also “Let the earth
sprout vegetation, plants, yielding seed, fruit trees bearing fruit after their
kind with seed in them on earth” (Genesis 1:11). “Wherein [in trees made by God] the
birds make their nests” (104:17a) compared to the Hymn of Aton reading “the
birds which flies from their nests, their wings are [stretched out] in praise
of your Ka [the soul part of the sungod]”. Moses: Genesis 1:20 “let [said God] the
birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens”. Says the Hymn of
Aton “whatever flies and alights, they live when you have risen [for] them”. This
Egyptian is following the Egyptian-Hebrew Moses here very closely, is it not? In Psalm 104:26 he talks about ships
going in the sea and also the whales or leviathan “whom You has formed to sport
therein”. The whales are to play around in the sea. In the Hymn of Aton he says
“the ships are sailing north and south as well, for every way is open at your appearance.
The fish in the river are before your face”. Moses: “He places the sea like a
seething mixture” (Job 41:23). Genesis 1:21 “And God created the great sea
creatures [tannim] and every living creature that moves with which the waters
swarmed after their kind”. Man works during the day “until the
evening” which is sleeping time (104:23). In the Hymn of Aton it says that when
the sungod “set in the western horizon the land is in darkness in the manner of
death. They [humans] sleep in a room with heads wrapped up”. Why wrapped-up?
Maybe many mosquitos in those days or flies. God rested on the seventh-day of
Creation as a symbol for man to do the same every seventh-day Saturday, as God
has done says Moses in Genesis 2:2-3. The heathen Egyptian says: rest every
night. God says: rest every seventh-day Sabbath on a Saturday. In 104:29 it says that “You withdraw
their breath they perish and return to their dust” which reminds us of the
opposite creative act in Genesis 2:7 and Ecclesiastics 12:7 that when God
breathed into the dust lump man became a created human being. Says the Hymn of
Aton “Who give breath to sustain all that he has made”. “When the chick in the
egg speaks within the shell within you give him breath and maintain him”. This
Egyptian have read Moses well. That is for sure. “In wisdom You have made them all the
earth is full of Your creatures” (104:24) and Moses said earlier in Genesis 1:26
exactly the same. The Hymn of Aton said “You did create the world according to
your desire while you were alone. All men, cattle and wild beasts. Whatever is
on earth, going upon [its] feet, and what is on high flying with its wings.”
Just a note. Aton religion was a monotheistic religion by this hippie pharaoh
that changed the religion of Egypt from pantheism to monotheism and Siegfried
Freud thought that Moses borrowed from him his monotheistic concepts. Not so.
Our Adventist teacher prof. Douglas Samuel Waterhouse was also very fascinated
by Ikhnaton’s monotheistic ideas. My own thinking is a plagiarizing of Moses
opposite to the view of Freud. One correction of a word in 104:34 which
is translated in my opinion wrongly as “musing/meditating”. The word ends up as
meditating if on follows the Arabic semantics of the root meaning but Arabic is
too late to apply to a Psalm as early as David or even at the exile. Therefore
the word is derived from Egyptian s3ḫ meaning “glorify”. “Let my glorification
be sweet unto Him, as for me I will rejoice in the Lord”. The synonymous pair
is better than the meditation-rejoice pair.