Psalm 1 Commentary: Two Trees, Two Paths, Two Destinies

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Introduction: The Porch of the Psalter
Six verses. Forty-three Hebrew words. And with them, the Psalter lays down the most important binary in all of Scripture.
Psalm 1 has no title. No superscription. No attribution to David or Asaph or the sons of Korah. It stands without introduction because it does not need one. It is the introduction – the porch through which every reader of the Psalms must pass before entering the great cathedral of Israel’s worship. As Keil and Delitzsch observed, it serves as the prooemium of the entire Psalter, just as Isaiah 1 serves as the prologue to the prophetic collection. Both are anonymous. Both are programmatic. Both demand a decision before the reader is permitted to proceed.
Grant Osborne confirms the scholarly consensus on the Psalter’s deliberate arrangement: “Scholarship no longer considers the psalms as isolated works artificially collected together in haphazard fashion. Rather, the psalter is recognized as a canonical whole, and studies tend to center either on the macrostructure, considering ‘overarching patterns and themes’ or on the microstructure, namely, ‘connections among smaller groupings of psalms’” (The Hermeneutical Spiral, Osborne, p.286). Psalm 1’s position at the head of this carefully edited collection is therefore itself a hermeneutical statement.
The placement is deliberate and ancient. The Talmud records that Psalms 1 and 2 were originally considered a single composition (Berachoth 9b), bound together as the double gateway to the Psalter – one ethical, the other prophetic. The early church father Hippolytus confirms that the Hebrews joined these two psalms into one section. Bruce Waltke confirms their programmatic function: “Most agree that Psalms 1-2 are the Psalter’s introduction and Psalms 146-50, its climactic finale of praise.” He observes that these two psalms “lack a superscription, unlike the rest of Book I;