Psalm 81, the psalm for Thursday, begins: “Sing aloud to God our strength; raise a shout to the God of Jacob.”
According to the Talmud, this psalm is recited on Thursday because the fifth day of the week corresponds to the fifth day of creation, when God created birds and fish. Like the new life bursting forth into the skies and the oceans, Psalm 81 also opens with noise, with joyous singing and a shout to God. It continues in this vein:
Take up the song,
Sound the timbrel
the melodious lyre and harp.
Blow the horn on the new moon,
on the full moon for our feast day.
Psalm 81 continues with this urging to praise God through song. But something weird happens in verse seven. The perspective abruptly shifts from human speech to God’s voice. Here, God recalls how he relieved Israel’s burden — a likely reference to the Exodus — and responded to Israel’s plea from the depths of suffering.
In a trope repeated endlessly in Jewish sacred text, the psalm goes on to describe how the people did not listen to God’s commands and followed the whims of their own hearts. It ends in a kind of plea: If only Israel would follow God’s way, their enemies would be defeated and their material needs met. Then comes what is, perhaps, the psalm’s most evocative line: “He fed them the finest wheat; and with honey from the rock I will sate you.”
Again, we find this shifting of perspective, only this time it happens entirely within one verse. The first half describes God in the third person, having fed the people wheat. In the second, God is speaking personally, promising honey from the rock. The verse echoes the unusual perspective shift from earlier in the psalm, and also joins two of its overarching themes: God is the past deliverer and the future savior, though maybe only if the people obey.
This sort of shifting perspective isn’t unheard of in the psalms. Because these psalms assigned to particular days were recited liturgically in the Temple, some have suggested these shifts represent the sort of call-and-response style in which they were sung in ancient times. Others suggest these are poetic devices intended to draw attention or create literary effect — the people noisily call out to God in song and praise, and abruptly the word of God intrudes on the musical cacophony with a reminder to follow God’s ways.
The image of honey from a rock that appears in the final verse shows up just one other time in Jewish scripture. Toward the very end of the Torah, Moses sings a song to the Israelites. To underscore the poetic quality of the song, the verses are rendered in an unusual two-column format in the Torah scroll. This is Moses at the peroration of the long speech that occupies the bulk of Deuteronomy. In it, he recounts the long Israelite history with God and the covenantal promise of redemption as the people stand on the cusp of the promised land and Moses prepares to die.
[God] set them atop the highlands,
To feast on the yield of the earth;
Nursing them with honey from the crag,
And oil from the flinty rock.
In the original song, Moses reminds the people of the miracles God performed in the past, nourishing them with honey from a rock. In the hands of the psalmist, this motif shifts from history recounted to a conditional promise, from narrative to liturgy.
Rocks, of course, don’t produce honey. Sweetness doesn’t normally pour forth from hard and immobile things. Thus, the promise being made in Psalm 81 has the whiff of the miraculous. Or perhaps it merely requires attention. Amid the people clamoring to sing their songs and strum their harps and lyres, the voice of God is still speaking. As the dawn of creation’s fifth day arrives and the birdsong fills the skies, a heavenly voice is still discernible. If it can be heard through the clutter, even the hardest rock can turn soft and sweet.
