The Psalms Unveiled: Ancient Worship, Modern Lessons w/ Dr. Kevin Foth

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host as always, Pastor Johnny Ova, and I have the privilege of having Dr. Kevin Foth with me today. Thank you so much for joining us. I know we're going to be breaking open the Psalms and having some good chats.

Dr. Kevin Foth: That's right. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Johnny Ova: I had to have you on about the Psalms because I want to talk about the different styles of Psalms we read in Scripture, and I figured there's no better person to dialogue with me about some of these questions. Let's start right here. People approach the Psalms as devotional reading. You see Psalms and Proverbs everywhere in these devotionals. But in their original context they were central to Israel's worship. Could you paint a picture of what ancient worship with the Psalms might have sounded like, felt like, looked like?

Dr. Kevin Foth: If you imagine the temple or the sanctuary in the ancient world, the first thing that comes to mind would be loud. You have a lot of people coming and going. It's bustling in the area around the temple. You have the three different sections: the outer courts, the secondary courts, and then the Holy of Holies, and people would be in and out of that temple practice. Now, we don't know exactly where the Psalms started or what a psalm grew out of, but there's so much of this theme of the temple and the sanctuary that I think there's good evidence the temple was very much part of the practice. Even many of the Psalms that take place outside the temple show that. Think of Psalm 137. The context is exile. It's by the rivers of Babylon, not by the wadis of Israel, not by Zion, the mount we worship on. That's where we hang up our instruments, because we can't sing our songs there. So there's a sense that the music of worship is so associated with the temple that it's likely where people took part in that worship.

Dr. Kevin Foth: Again, we don't know exactly where in the temple people would have been singing or raising these songs. But melodically, you're more likely to be thinking less of our common worship songs today and more of the Islamic call to prayer you'd hear in an Islamic country. Those chant-like tones that rise and fall are more likely the sound of a psalm. There's also a sense that there's possibly more than one voice in many of the Psalms. Rather than one person singing or chanting, in many cases you probably want to imagine at least two people dialoguing, where one person sings something and then another person sings it. Sometimes we hear these different voices in the text itself: God speaks, the enemy speaks, the false friend speaks, someone accusing the psalmist speaks. Whether or not that actually happened in the ancient worship context, there are these voices, this polyphonic sound going on.

Dr. Kevin Foth: The last piece is music. Psalm 150 just lists all these instruments, which is why I said loud at the beginning. We have superscriptions, those little parts at the very beginning of a psalm that mention specific instruments. But in Psalm 150, I have it here, you've got the trumpets, the harp, the lyre, the timbrel, and people are dancing and singing. With sad songs, I can imagine there'd be more of a sad sound. But for the songs that are mostly about worship, I imagine it's taking place at one of the major festivals. People are excited. There's feasting, food and drink, and they're taking part in these songs, praising God for who he is and what he's done.

Johnny Ova: That's awesome. You went over the three parts of the temple. Do we know if there was any worship inside the Holy of Holies itself, or even the Holy Place? Is there any evidence or thought that a type of worship took place there too?

Dr. Kevin Foth: I'll go with thought. I'm not sure about evidence. If you look at some of the Psalms, there's at least an indication that some could have been temple entrance liturgies. Psalm 15 and Psalm 24 pop into my mind. They describe what the righteous person is. Who can ascend the hill of the Lord? Those who have clean hands and a pure heart. Familiar psalms and familiar songs. As for the Holy of Holies, access was pretty restricted, both in personnel and in time. You're not expecting somebody to go in there and sing, playing AC/DC in the background while they work on their car. It's more that there are these liturgies, and whether all of them were sung is debated, that have a sense of preparation for moving toward something. You can think of that with the lament Psalms too, crying out to move your way toward God, or with the confession Psalms, like Psalm 51, where the psalmist is speaking in order to bring their offering before God. So in the Holy of Holies, probably not, but participation and movement between the sections of the temple, maybe moving toward sacrifice, I could totally imagine that.

Dr. Kevin Foth: But I'm going to say this: we don't have a ton of evidence for any of it. We have allusions in the Psalms and mentions of parts of temple worship from time to time, different sacrifices. But a lot of the main ideas in the Psalms have to do with the story of Israel, or with the temple being significant for the people, rather than, here we go to the temple, let's march up and sing these songs. Still, there are indications there might have been. The Psalms of Ascent, Psalms 120 through 134, may indicate people ascending the steps of the temple. That's another place where there may have been singing and participation in the song aspect of worship, but that's as much as our evidence really says. There's an allusion to it.

Johnny Ova: That leads to where I was going next, the gatherings. Was it like, hey guys, Saturday at nine, meet me at the steps, we're doing a worship service? I'm sure there are multiple answers. Were some of these Psalms all of us gathering and chanting like you said at the beginning? And were some more like, I'm going through a tough time, I'm in a forest or a desert by myself, I feel the Lord giving me a song, and I'm writing it, maybe not even singing it or having anyone chant with me, just a songwriting session releasing what the Lord is putting on my heart?

Dr. Kevin Foth: You're asking about composition versus practice, how these were performed. I don't know how they would have been composed. In some ways there were a pretty limited number of people who could actually write something down. In scribal culture it's a limited set, and they were mostly part of the royal retinue, the group of people who supported the king, or probably among the priests. So locking yourself in a corner and pouring your heart out to God like we do with journaling today, I don't think that's exactly the same thing. But how do people write poetry? Sometimes very quickly and sometimes over a very long time. I taught eighth grade before, and one of the courses I taught was poetry. I taught Gerard Manley Hopkins, and his own favorite poem was The Windhover, about a kestrel that flies up above the sea and then dives down and catches the rays of light. He had the experience of actually seeing the kestrel in 1888 or something, and it took years for him to finish the poem.

Dr. Kevin Foth: So on those parallels with more recent poetry, which isn't quite modern since that's the 1800s, I can imagine many of these took years and years to come together. It's possible a piece of a poem was expanded by someone else, and then by someone else again. So with composition there's probably the whole range, and eventually it became a more textualized version. What we have in the Psalms are the psalms that were written down, not necessarily all the psalms that were performed in the temple. One classic example that scholars assume may not have been performed in the temple is Psalm 1. I'm not sure we have real evidence for that, and this is probably what you're going to hear me say a bunch of times: we just don't know a lot about how the Psalms came together.

Dr. Kevin Foth: When they were brought together, there was a lot of intentionality to place songs that sounded similar or had similar themes next to each other. Some scholars take the view that they were put in this specific order to tell a story of ancient Israel. I take a little more of a conservative approach there. I think it was a process that took time: this part was done first, and these were added later. As for performance, soloists versus groups, temples versus regular prayer services, I can imagine it all. Really, our imagination is our best guide here rather than the evidence.

Dr. Kevin Foth: I'll point to a scholar named Sigmund Mowinckel, a Norwegian scholar who wrote a bunch of books on the Psalms. He was a student of Hermann Gunkel, who was kind of the father of form criticism. Form criticism is about these genres of psalms, these forms. They start with the petition, they go to the next stage, they raise their request, then move to the next stage. So there's a form, not one you fill out, but one that was generally used for praise or lament, or an individual lament versus a corporate lament. Mowinckel thought about this and said, you know what, it's actually the cult. When I say cult, I mean the ancient worship practices, not a cult with a single leader making people do weird stuff. He looked through the window Gunkel opened with these forms and said, no, there are actual practices here. When he peeled back the curtain he saw a vibrant faith, people actually practicing these songs.

Dr. Kevin Foth: Mowinckel started a whole movement, which is a mouthful, called cult functionalism. The basic assumption is that the songs were practiced and have allusions to parts of worship. When you read him, in German or in English, he really assumes they had a very vibrant faith. I don't agree with a lot of what Mowinckel writes. I don't agree with his conclusions about which parts of the liturgy are present in the text. But I do agree that the Psalms represent a vibrant faith and were part of the worship of people genuinely trying to understand who God is, what their role in faith was and what their relationship to God was.

Johnny Ova: So the Psalms draw from real historical context: exile, temple life, kingship and so on. How does understanding that background change the way we read them today?

Dr. Kevin Foth: That is a great question. I think it's the most important question. Let me go back to my own experience. Reading through the Bible for the first time at 15, I thought, man, this is so good. I was a musician playing guitar, trying to write songs, and I thought the Psalms were all about me. They put voice to my complaints and frustrations, which at 15 felt more significant than they probably were. That's not true for everybody's life, I understand that. But all of these Psalms have to be put in their setting, as part of the faith of ancient Israel. Key themes like land show up time and time again. The land is this crucial idea, that we have to be in the land in order to worship, whether we've lost it in exile or we have it because this is where God chose to set his people and make his name known to the nations. Then the temple, this whole idea of Zion, and a theology of temple: this is how God has chosen to dwell with his people.

Dr. Kevin Foth: Then we lose that place, and that question shows up in lament. It's easy to connect to experiences of loss, or not knowing where God is when we expect him to do something. But if we think it's just about ourselves, I think we're missing the point. Psalm 74 is one of the classic psalms about the loss of the temple, and it's a loss of national identity. Who are we if we don't have our association with Yahweh? Who are we if we no longer have the place where we went to worship God? So for usefulness today, we can read these within the story of Israel. Some of the Psalms actually retell that story, mentioning Moses, David, the Exodus, the wilderness wanderings and exile. If we see them in that light, I think they have more to give us than if we see them only within what we have. Especially the individual psalms. Lord, how many are my foes? I don't have any enemies trying to break down my door. I don't know about you, Johnny, on Long Island.

Johnny Ova: It gets crazy over here.

Dr. Kevin Foth: Than in a tiny town in Alberta. But put those in the context of a threat to national identity, real nations around threatening this small nation-state. That even helps with understanding the monarchy and the role of the king with David or Solomon, since some of the Psalms are about royal kingship. Placing them in that broader structure lets us see that the people writing them are dealing with expectations that don't align with reality. To me that is a universal human thing. So when we step back and ask why their expectations weren't met, and read the Psalms through the Torah, the prophets and the later history, we see they really were struggling with something. It's not made up. It's not just somebody whining, playing their harp and kind of starting the first emo phase. It's about, you didn't show up where I thought you would, personally and for our nation.

Johnny Ova: So very relatable, and context is super important. Take exile. We might not physically be in exile, but I can think of a couple of times I felt like my decisions caused God to put me in exile, and I can relate to all the feelings and emotions going on there. We can pull things from that. But taking all the Psalms as if this is for me, this is for me, some of them just don't make sense in that capacity.

Dr. Kevin Foth: I think one of the hardest and most foreign areas that we tend not to see in the Psalms, especially from our fairly wealthy Western context, is that a lot of the Psalms are about injustice toward the poor. When we read the Psalms it's easy to read as if we're the ones speaking. But sometimes if we turn that flashlight around, it's like Nathan with David: you are the man. Sometimes we have to ask how we're actually participating in the poor being oppressed, because that's what God is against in the Psalms time and time again. Psalm 72 is a prayer that says "of Solomon," so it's probably a prayer for the king's son. Maybe it was sung at a ceremony where the son is now crowned king, so this is a prayer for him. The whole idea of his reign, may he rule from sea to sea, all of these are pretty common statements about kings in the ancient Near East. But why? Because he will deliver the needy who cry out. It's those people who are most in need.

Dr. Kevin Foth: Injustice is all around us. With the Psalms of injustice, it's easy to say, yeah, injustice bad, let's go toward justice. It's harder to read with eyes that ask, what are the systems of injustice today? Where do we see injustice, and how can we actually do something about it? There's a parallel in Job. I know we're talking about Psalms, but I'm going to go to Job. At the end of his speech, right before God steps in, he's saying he's sinless. In our Christian culture, and I grew up a little in the purity culture era, it's don't have sex, don't look at someone lustfully. Job brings that up. He says, I didn't look at a young woman lustfully. But that's like two or four lines in the whole poem. The rest of it is, when someone was hungry, I fed him. When there was a widow, I clothed her. So his justification of, I haven't been a sinner, is that he did the work of justice in his life. That's his defense.

Dr. Kevin Foth: We can talk about whether he was actually innocent there. That's not the point I'm trying to make. The point is that for the ancient writers of Job, the most important things were not the sins of what have I done, but more what have I not done. His defense is the things he actually did, which are all about justice toward the people who are not at the center of the community, those who don't have wealth, access and resources.

Johnny Ova: We're here with Dr. Kevin Foth today, chatting about the Psalms on the Dig In Podcast. I want to steer this ship toward another part I find fascinating: the rawness and realness of the Psalms. It's a striking element, how honest they are. You see rage, despair, doubt, joy and everything in between. Why was it important for Israel's worship to include that full spectrum of human emotion? As a pastor, to pull the curtain back a little, it's almost like the church expects suppression in some areas, where it's not okay to rage when you're feeling rage, and I feel like that's damaging. Yet we read Psalms where some of these guys are flipping out. Listen, we wrestle with doubt. I'm sure you've wrestled with doubt and fear before. I have. They're not fun times, but they're real, raw times. So why include the full spectrum?

Dr. Kevin Foth: That's another really interesting question. With the emotion, what we see is not just a range but a depth. You mentioned rage, and it really speaks to the actual experience of people. If you feel like God has abandoned you, that hurts. I've been there. You've probably been there. There's this gut-wrenching piece. So I think it's important that the Psalms have this range of emotion, from anger to, why? How long, God? Will you neglect me forever? Maybe the psalmist, in the logic center of his brain, isn't thinking it's actually going to be forever. But it's that expectation versus reality again. Why does it need this range of emotion? Because it expresses everything humans feel. And it's not just the Psalms. The prophets have a range of emotion too, maybe a little less on the joy. Overall, humans are emotional beings.

Dr. Kevin Foth: The Psalms give us language to express our frustration and anger toward God, whether or not we have enemies actually at our door, which some people in the world do. That's easy to miss. Some people live with the fear of somebody around the corner threatening their life or livelihood. That's not my experience, and I recognize that. But the Psalms give language and a kind of permission to cry out to God, both for help and for him to act where I need him to act. With the negative emotions, it can be cathartic just to know Psalm 88 exists. I have a friend who, after losing a child, went to one of the Psalms, and I was in my academic room thinking, this isn't what that psalm is about. I didn't say that, don't worry.

Dr. Kevin Foth: But poetry has this power to be applicable to different situations. When we read the Psalms in their historical context, there's a history of a people dealing with whether God is with them because of the temple, or without the temple, or because of the military campaigns they were experiencing or taking part in. But we can also use these for our own lives, because it's poetry, and poetry allows that. Most of the time, the descriptions of distress in the Psalms are pretty general. I'm thinking of the psalms that say, I have been crying out to you all day long, I've lost my voice from crying, I eat my tears day and night. Scholars from the late 1800s into probably the 1960s often tried to find specific situations in life or in worship that these spoke to. But when you look at them, there's war, then suddenly there's hunger, then it's just, I'm crying out to you, and the distress is literally, I'm distressed. That's the point. So those descriptions of distress play a role in our own worship and our understanding that God can hear that, and they match our distress as well. The feelings are the same even if the history or the story is not exactly the same.

Johnny Ova: Can you walk us through how the lament Psalms in particular functioned for Israel, and why lament seems to be missing in modern worship? I know we don't like lamenting, but some of the most important lessons we've ever learned have come from seasons of lament, suffering and trial and error, where you make mistakes and learn, all right, I'm not going to do that again. Walk us through some of them, and tell us if you feel lament is missing from modern worship.

Dr. Kevin Foth: I should add that I'm a worship leader. I've been a worship director and worship pastor at a couple of different churches, so this is something I've been asked about and thought about beyond the scholarly perspective. There are all sorts of parts to the lament Psalms, and in ancient Israel's worship I think they really allowed people to address things that were apparent problems. Going straight to modern worship, I once catalogued the top 100 songs on CCLI, the ones we're actually singing in church. Almost all of them had the same general shape: there was a problem, God solved it, I'm happy. A couple got deeper into the theology and actually explained what was going on, the more hymn-style ones, but this problem, solution, praise pattern covers most of what we have. And it doesn't always even say exactly what God saved us from.

Dr. Kevin Foth: Now, lament does have a place in a lot of the non-Western world. We need to keep that in mind, that it plays a role in places where things are maybe not so easy. I do agree we can recover lament. One way lament helps us is to see things from the perspective of someone whose experience is different from ours, and to call out to God on behalf of those who are suffering, who don't have the same goods or resources we do. To have praise without lament, I think, cheapens our understanding of why we're praising in the first place. If we're just saying, thank you God, God is good, God is good all the time, I think we're missing that, yes, but life isn't. I hear this in how Christians talk: I'm so busy, this and that is happening, but God is good, God is good. There's a sense in which that's good. You want to tell yourself the truth, and there's truth behind it. But there's also a sense in which you're cheapening your experience, and it's okay that you aren't landing there emotionally.

Dr. Kevin Foth: As a pastor, you're not expecting someone to end with, okay, I'm good now, I've talked about it, I've processed. It takes time. It takes years sometimes to think through what God is like now that I'm suffering with a chronic illness that's not going away. What does it mean to be a Christian in a world with wrongs around me that I can't really do anything about, where I feel helpless? What if someone is actually after me or my job, or I have problems with anger because I can't deal with them, and now it's wired into my brain, and I know God can heal me, but I'm not there, and I'm still struggling to figure out how to process it? Lament gives us voice, and not just in a cathartic way, like when you're angry and you just yell. I tried not to yell into the microphone, sorry. It actually makes a difference to cry. Sometimes, from a purely physiological standpoint, you can't move past something you're feeling unless you cry. If the Psalms give you the power to cry, then they're doing something good for us and for our experience of God, because it opens us up to what he has to say to us.

Johnny Ova: That goes back to what I was saying about suppressing the emotional side. So many people think that if they admit they're struggling really badly right now, it means they don't have faith or don't believe in God's power. Like you said, they'll go through all the negative things in their life and then end with, but God is good. It's like, okay, take the end cap off for a second and let's deal with this, so you don't have to try to, and I don't want to use the word convince yourself. You're right, God is good, and sometimes life isn't, and it gets hard. I feel like it's okay to get raw and real in the presence of God. If you're feeling miserable, tell him you're feeling miserable, and allow God to work through your brokenness, because that's where I feel the true healing comes.

Dr. Kevin Foth: I agree. And I think the Psalms, especially the lament Psalms, give us an actual pathway to recognizing God again. All but one of the Psalms end in some sort of praise or affirmation of God's identity. The one that doesn't ends with, darkness is my only friend. So that's a helpful caveat. But the people who wrote these Psalms were ordinary people living ordinary lives. They were written originally by people to God or about God, or really to other people, and they become words from God to other people. That gives us a model for processing these things. Maybe we don't end a ten-verse poem with happy feelings like some of the psalmists seem to, but it's a process. You have to go through that valley. You walk through the valley of the shadow of death, where fear is actually there, but there is this sense that God is with me even in that.

Johnny Ova: I want to go to another topic off of lament: absence and silence. You did a great job walking through lament, and I feel that's so important. But some of these psalms also wrestle with God's silence or apparent absence. What does that reveal about Israel's theology, and what can we learn from it?

Dr. Kevin Foth: I think silence is the failure of God to act. They weren't necessarily expecting God to speak, but to act in a situation. It connects with ideas we've already gone over, lamenting about silence: why are you far off? Where is my help? I expected you to do this and you haven't done it. That silence, waiting for an answer, is not necessarily verbal, even though the complaint is verbal and the praise that may come is verbal. This is one of the ways I've personally benefited most from studying the Psalms: thinking through what it means to live in a world where I believe God exists and I believe he is with me, but sometimes I just don't see the evidence of that. I call to God, and in hindsight I can say, wow, I can see where he was, but in the moment he is literally invisible. We just have to deal with that as Christians, and maybe have some compassion on people who don't believe in God simply because we can't see him.

Dr. Kevin Foth: We can see the evidence of him in different ways. We have our own stories of faith, where we each come to the conclusion that this is real and I actually believe it deep down, not just on a piece of paper. But when God isn't speaking to us directly, and that hasn't been my experience, I think it's so helpful to know the same thing was going on at the time the stories of God's faithfulness we read were written.

Johnny Ova: That's the expectation versus reality thing again. I expect him to answer everything I want right away, and if he doesn't, I've done something wrong. He's silent. That's the mold most Christians today understand. God, why are you silent? Haven't I done A through G? I go to church, I serve, I do this and that, and you're still silent with me. What am I doing wrong? But you're right. The people we read about, teach on and use as models went through the same exact stuff.

Dr. Kevin Foth: I want to add one other thought, in agreement but to take it a step toward clarification. I don't know that God being silent is the sense of feeling like he's not there, so much as not seeing the evidence of his presence. I think we tend to be a little overly emotional in our practices: when I feel good, I feel God's presence and I know he's there. But you can feel good and not be walking in what God has for you. Seeing the evidence of things only God could do is how you know he has answered definitively. When we step back, a lot of the descriptions of distress are about this: there are enemies, and I'm probably going to die unless you help me. Again, I think it's reapplicable to new situations, but where is God when I actually need him to show up so I can live? That's the model we're shaping our prayers on.

Johnny Ova: I've got a few more questions if you have a few more minutes. Let's take this in a more modern direction. In the modern setting, worship is often about preference or personal taste. I love this song, this song strikes the right chord. What do the Psalms teach us about worship that goes beyond our favorite songs or the things we like to sing about?

Dr. Kevin Foth: Two thoughts come to mind. First, to actually experience the Psalms, you have to read them all, and read them in different ways. If somebody wants to really get into the Psalms and understand them, sit down and read the whole book in a week. Then right afterward, read one a day. Then at the end of that time, read the whole book in a week again, because there is so much variety there. Music and worship are very closely connected, and music is definitely mentioned in the Psalms. A good number, probably a bit over half but not much more, have some explicit connection to music, whether in the superscription or a mention of singing, playing, dancing or instruments. But when you see worship as a big idea in the Old Testament, it's not about singing. It's about obeying. It's about how you walk with God. It's not even exactly about believing the right things, though that's important. It's about believing that God is saying the right things and doing them.

Dr. Kevin Foth: So on taste and music, I don't really think the Psalms speak directly to that at all. I think they speak about the world God has made, and the mirror the Psalms hold up, if we read them all together, slowly and quickly, is that we get to see the heart of God, we get to see the world, we get to see everything more clearly. It's a cheesy metaphor, but it's like putting on glasses. We see everything else better, including creation. We haven't even talked about that: the birds praise God, the trees, all of it. The Psalms actually invite us to be outside, to touch grass.

Dr. Kevin Foth: Second, the Psalms really get at justice, conflict, the threat of our enemies, and they retell the story of Israel. They bring us into worship through content more than style. The content of the songs is a comprehensive view of the work of God in the world. So more than, I like this song, they give you a huge range of songs, not just songs to God but songs to each other. My PhD supervisor, Mark Boda, did a surprising thing for an article. He counted the number of times the psalmist speaks up to God versus horizontally to others, and it's about the same. It's slightly more up than horizontal, but almost 50 percent of the time the phrase is directed at other people, which tells you something about worship. So my second idea is that the content needs to be much clearer about what story we're telling and how we shape our lives in light of that story.

Johnny Ova: To wrap up, you hit on a bunch of things. The up versus horizontal, which I thought was powerful, and the singing versus obeying, also very powerful, because when everybody thinks of worship today they think of the music before the word begins. So if a listener wanted to recover the way ancient Israel used the Psalms, how might they begin to pray, sing or even hear them differently?

Dr. Kevin Foth: I think the number one thing is just get into them. Just read them. Read them with other people, read them out loud. Going back to that last point, the content is more important than the way it's done. So get into them deeply. Don't assume you are in the story the way you think you are. Don't assume they're necessarily about personal problems. Look for the story of Israel in them, because that's so much a part of it. If somebody really wanted to get into the Psalms, I'd say read the whole Bible over and over again and keep the Psalms right there, because this is the process of shaping us. Reading the Psalms the way I think the ancient Israelites did means giving voice to them and making them our prayers, but also making them true for us, allowing the imaginative world of the Psalms to enter our hearts.

Dr. Kevin Foth: Use our emotions, our imaginations, our minds, the resources God gave us, to experience them, so we can more closely align ourselves with the world as God understands it. That takes a lot of steps and a lot of effort. It takes coming before the same thing over and over, a lot of reminders and exposure. So for how people experience them, I'd just say experience them. Spend time with them, memorize them, think about them, pray them, turn them into your own prayers. That's always going to be my answer: get into them, read them, read them well and look through all the different lenses, because that will get us closer and closer to the mentality people had when they were using them, praying them and thinking about them originally.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Kevin Foth, thank you for your time today and for digging in with me on the Book of Psalms. Do you have anything coming up? Any books coming out, or anything you want our audience to know about?

Dr. Kevin Foth: It's not quite ready for pre-order, but in about a year I've got a book on wisdom coming out with IVP Academic. So if your listeners hear this in about a year, they can look it up. And just recently published is Semantics and Poetics of the Righteous and the Wicked in the Psalms, my book on the Psalms. It's an updated version of my dissertation, and it gets at the idea of justice and the role it plays in the Psalms. That's on Amazon.

Johnny Ova: And people can go there and order it right from Amazon. I'm going to put the link in the YouTube description and the Apple and Spotify descriptions as well, so definitely check it out and keep digging deeper with Dr. Foth. Thank you again for your time today. I truly appreciate it, and when your book comes out I'd love to get you back on to chat about it.

Dr. Kevin Foth: Sounds good, Johnny. Thanks so much.

Johnny Ova: All right, take care.