Psalms 49–51; 61–66; 69–72; 77–78; 85–86

25–30 minSession 1: What Money Cannot Buy, What Sacrifice Cannot Fix

Start by noticing that Psalm 49 does not sound like its neighbors. It is not a lament and not a hymn; it announces itself with the technical vocabulary of the sages and argues a thesis about money, which puts it closer in temper to Ecclesiastes and Job than to anything around it. Its thesis is a denial: "None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him" (49:7). Then, at verse 15, the reversal — "But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me." The verb is laqach, "take," the same verb used of Enoch in Genesis 5:24. And notice who is singing it. This is a psalm of the sons of Korah, the guild descended from the man the earth swallowed alive in Numbers 16, whose sons Numbers 26:11 pointedly says "died not." The descendants of the Bible's most famous Sheol-victim sing the Psalter's boldest claim that God ransoms a soul out of Sheol. Jewish practice put that psalm exactly where you would expect: Psalm 49 is what Ashkenazi mourners recite in a shiva house, on a low chair, next to a covered mirror.

Do not resolve verse 15 too fast. Whether Hebrew phrasing of this kind asserts a genuine hope of rescue after death or only rescue from premature death is one of the sharper divisions in the field, and Psalm 49 itself gives no hint of a resurrected body, a spirit world, or degrees of glory — while verse 19 says of the rich man that he goes to the generation of his fathers and "they shall never see light." Our honest questioner puts the cost plainly: whatever else 49:15 is doing, it isn't saying what an LDS reader hears. The Restoration answer is not to make the psalm say more than it says but to supply what it lacks — the footnote at 49:15 routes you to Mosiah 27, D&C 93:38, and Article of Faith 1:3, and Alma 40:23 fills in the mechanism the psalmist never had: the reassembly of a person, not the rescue of a ghost. Meanwhile the psalm's practical edge is sharper than its metaphysics. Verse 16 says "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich" — afraid, not envious. The psalm assumes that watching someone else prosper makes you feel unsafe, which means you have misfiled the anxiety: the security you are trying to buy is precisely the thing verse 7 says money cannot purchase.

Psalm 50 changes voice entirely. God summons heaven and earth, convenes witnesses, states a charge, and delivers a verdict — it does not behave like a hymn but like a covenant lawsuit, the form scholars call a rîb, with the deity as plaintiff and judge and the cosmos as jury. What God prosecutes is worth reading twice: not the failure to sacrifice, but a misunderstanding of what sacrifice does. "If I were hungry, I would not tell thee" (50:12) is aimed at the feeding model of offerings — which is exactly how sacrifice worked across much of Mesopotamian religion, where the gods ate. Then the indictment turns startlingly domestic. Verses 19–20 charge the defendant with sitting and speaking against his brother, slandering his own mother's son. Not shouting. Sitting. And verse 21 names the reason he thought it was fine: "these things hast thou done, and I kept silence" — you assumed God agreed with you about that person because he did not interrupt.

Psalm 51 is the week's center of gravity, and it is also the week's clearest seam. Verses 18–19 ask God to "build thou the walls of Jerusalem" and then anticipate bullocks on the altar — but under David the walls stood and the altar functioned. Most critical commentators read those two verses as a later liturgical appendix from the exile or after. Note what that does to the psalm's argument: verse 16 says flatly "thou desirest not sacrifice," and verse 19 says God will be pleased with bullocks. The harmonizing reading — God rejects sacrifice offered without a broken heart — works for 50:7–15 and works less well for 51:16, which is not conditional. What you are most likely looking at is a seam, where a later editor could not leave standing a psalm that seemed to abolish the temple. And the seam has consequences: it means the psalm we read was edited into its Davidic frame, not merely filed under it.

Two of the psalm's most-quoted lines deserve slower handling than they usually get. On 51:5, "in sin did my mother conceive me," Rashi got there before the question did: he reads David as saying, in effect, how could I not sin, given how creatures like me are made — no inherited guilt, a man confessing that he is built out of flammable material. On 51:11, "take not thy holy spirit from me," the Hebrew ruach qodshecha is a construct phrase, "the spirit of your holiness," and in rabbinic usage it names a grade of divine inspiration that can lapse — Radak says David is praying for the return of the spirit by which he composed psalms. Christian readers who hear a third divine hypostasis here are hearing a word the Hebrew does not say. That does not make the Latter-day Saint use of the verse illegitimate; it makes it an application rather than a translation, and knowing the difference is the whole discipline. Finally, the psalm's shape: it does the God-facing work beautifully — "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned" (51:4) — and the person-facing work not at all. Uriah is dead and never appears; Bathsheba appears only in the superscription, as an object. If you are using 51:4 to avoid a conversation with somebody you actually hurt, you are using half a psalm. And hold the whole question of David loosely: the Talmud preserves both the insistence that anyone who says David sinned is mistaken and the ruling that David is the man you send a sinner to learn from. Jewish tradition holds both, unresolved, on purpose.

Think deeply.

1. Psalm 49:19 says a category of human beings "shall never see light," and Psalm 49:15 says God will take the psalmist out of Sheol. If the psalm holds both without explaining either, what exactly is it that you believe when you say you believe Psalm 49 — the hope, the mechanism, or something you have imported?
2. The sons of Korah sing the Psalter's strongest claim about being rescued from Sheol, and their ancestor is the Bible's most famous victim of it. Is that irony, testimony, or editorial placement — and does it matter which?
3. Psalm 50:12 attacks the idea that God needs what you bring Him. Name one thing you currently offer God — time, money, calling, service — that you would stop offering if you were fully convinced He did not need it. What does your answer say about why you offer it?
4. If Psalm 51:18–19 was added centuries after 51:16, then the book of Psalms preserves a psalm and its own rebuttal, unmerged. Is that a defect in the text, evidence of how scripture is made, or both — and which of the two verses is scripture to you?
5. The psalm's confession takes nineteen verses; its victims get none. Build the missing half: what would Psalm 51 have to say to be adequate to Uriah, and why do you think no editor ever added it?
6. Rashi and the Second Article of Faith land in nearly the same place on 51:5, against Augustine — yet the Latter-day Saint Topical Guide has an entry called "Conceived in Sin" pairing the verse with Moses 6:55. Where, precisely, does Restoration teaching differ from original sin, and can you state the difference in one sentence without using the word "innocent"?

20–25 minSession 2: The Rock, the Balance, and the Silence That Counts as Praise

Before you read a word of these five, look at the italic lines above them. In your edition those are headings; in the Masoretic text they are scripture, and they are counted as verses — which is why the Hebrew numbering runs one verse ahead of the KJV in every one of Psalms 61, 62, 63, 64, and 65. That is not pedantry. Chase a rabbinic source and land on the wrong verse, and this is usually why. And read what those lines actually contain: Psalm 62's is addressed "to Jeduthun," one of the three guild chiefs Chronicles names alongside Asaph and Heman. Jewish tradition does not treat these as bylines. These headings are personnel files — assignments, tunes, choirs, institutional memory of who sang what.

The cluster's governing image is stone. "Lead me to the rock that is higher than I" (61:2); "He only is my rock and my salvation" (62:2, 6). Watch precisely what the rock is for in these psalms: it is a refuge, a height you get behind or on top of, a strong tower with someone chasing you. That is not quite what the Book of Mormon does with the same image. The footnote at Psalm 71:3 sends you to Helaman 5:12, and the conversion is worth noticing rather than blurring: the Psalms use the rock as refuge, something you hide behind; Helaman converts it into foundation, something you stand on. Psalm 62:6's "I shall not be moved" is what Helaman means by "cannot fall" — but the psalmist is being hunted and Helaman is building.

Psalm 62 is built on a second physical image, and it is the one with teeth. Verse 9: "Men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity." A scale. The psalmist weighs things — people, money, reputation — and finds they do not register. Verse 10 makes the application unavoidable: "if riches increase, set not your heart upon them." Then verse 8 gives the instruction most readers skate past — "pour out your heart before him." Pouring out is what you do with a container you intend to empty, and most adult prayer is a status update in complete sentences.

Psalm 63 is the block's other historical superscription, placing David "in the wilderness of Judah." Read verse 11 before you accept it: the psalm refers to "the king" in the third person, which sits awkwardly with a heading making the king its author, and internal evidence supports the late dating here for the historical headings generally. What the psalm does give you, unambiguously, is a schedule: "early will I seek thee" (63:1) and "when I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches" (63:6). The two moments this psalmist reserves for God are, for most of us, the two most reliably given to a phone.

Then Psalm 65, which opens with a line the English hides. "Praise waiteth for thee, O God, in Sion" translates a Hebrew phrase that says, more literally, to you, silence is praise — and the Hebrew is uncertain enough that modern translations flag it. Rashi took the paradox at face value: God's praises cannot be exhausted, so silence is the most eloquent form of them. Verse 7, "which stilleth the noise of the seas," is the domesticated end of a much older and wilder motif — the storm god who fights the Sea, preserved across West Semitic poetry, with YHWH taking over the imagery of a West Semitic storm god confronting the sea. One last caution as you read the temple language running through 61:4, 63:2, and 65:4. It is real temple devotion, and it is not the endowment: it is the Jerusalem temple, with its bullocks and its courts. What survives the translation is the longing, and the footnote at 65:4 catches exactly that by pointing to Enos 1:27.

Think deeply.

1. Psalm 62 asks you to weigh things and find them lighter than nothing. Do the experiment honestly: when something frightens you at 11 p.m., what do you check first? What does the order tell you about where your weight is actually resting?
2. The Psalms' rock is a hiding place; Helaman's rock is a foundation. Which of those two do you actually want from God right now — cover, or something to build on — and does your prayer life reflect the one you want or the one you say you want?
3. If Psalm 63's superscription is a later reader's inference rather than a report, does the psalm lose anything? Name the specific thing you would lose, and then decide whether it was ever in the text or only in the heading.
4. "To you, silence is praise." Most Latter-day Saint worship is verbal — testimony, prayer, lesson, hymn. What would a practice of silence as praise look like in a ward, and why do you think we have almost none of it?
5. Psalm 65:7 tames a sea that older poetry treated as a rival god. When a tradition absorbs an older culture's imagery and demotes it, is that borrowing, polemic, or revelation using available vocabulary — and how would you tell the difference from inside the text?
6. Verse 63:1's "early" and 63:6's "night watches" are a claim about the first and last thirty minutes of a day. Change one of those two windows this week and note, specifically, what got displaced. Was the displaced thing load-bearing?

25–30 minSession 3: Come and Hear — the Vow, the Duplicate, and the Drowning Man

Psalm 66 gives the week its title, and it also gives the week its clearest lesson in how a psalm is put together. Verses 1–12 are a communal hymn — plural, national, "come and see the works of God." Then, at verse 13, without warning or transition, it switches to first-person singular vow-payment: "I will go into thy house with burnt offerings... Come and hear... and I will declare what he hath done for my soul." One psalm, two genres, one seam. Notice also what the man saying verse 16 has just been through. Verses 11–12: "Thou broughtest us into the net... we went through fire and through water." He is not reporting that things went well; he is assigning the wrecking to God rather than to bad luck, and then inviting the congregation to come and listen. And verse 14 is the sharpest practical hook in the block — he is paying vows "which my lips have uttered... when I was in trouble." Everyone makes those vows. Most of us do not keep a record. If a declaration is going to be worth hearing, it requires specifics — a date, an event, a detail — and specifics can be argued with, which is exactly why "I know the Church is true" is easier to say.

Now put Psalm 70 beside Psalm 40:13–17. They are the same poem. In Psalm 40:13 the divine name is YHWH; in Psalm 70:1 it is Elohim. Psalm 40:16 ends "the LORD be magnified"; Psalm 70:4 ends "let God be magnified." This is the best evidence that the Elohistic Psalter is editorial work rather than an accident of which psalms happened to prefer which word — a controlled experiment sitting inside your reading assignment. But look at the last verse before you conclude the editor was mechanical: Psalm 40:17 has "my God" where Psalm 70:5 has YHWH. The swap runs the other way once. Whoever did this was reading, not running find-and-replace. The plain statement of what that means is worth sitting with: someone edited the name of God in the text you are studying. For a church founded on the claim that scripture passes through human hands and that revelation did not stop, this should be less alarming than it sounds — but it should not be skipped, either, because once you have seen it in Psalm 70 you cannot unsee it in Psalm 51.

Psalm 69 is the psalm the New Testament quarried hardest — 69:9 at John 2:17 and Romans 15:3, 69:4 behind John 15:25, 69:22–23 at Romans 11:9–10, 69:25 at Acts 1:20, and the gall and vinegar of 69:21 across all four Passion narratives. Before you read it that way, hear how it has been read from the other side. Psalm 69 has a history, and the history has a body count. Romans 11:9–10 shifts "let their eyes be darkened" onto unbelieving Israel, and that line went on to a long career in Christian preaching about Jewish blindness. Rashi, writing in eleventh-century Troyes in the shadow of the First Crusade, read the psalm's "upon lilies" as concerning Israel, a rose among thorns — a prayer for the Jews, spoken by a man drowning in mire whose enemies outnumber the hairs of his head.

Then there are verses 22–28, which do not get read in church. The psalmist asks God to darken his enemies' eyes, to add iniquity to their iniquity so they cannot come into God's righteousness, and to blot them out of the book of the living. Read verse 27 slowly: that is not a request for justice; it is a request that mercy be withheld — in Latter-day Saint terms, a prayer against the plan of salvation. You cannot quarantine it as sub-Christian residue, because the apostles quote this section as scripture and use it. And the chapter heading in our edition calls Psalm 69 "a messianic psalm of David" while verse 5 has the speaker say "thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee." No reading has the sinless Christ saying both verse 5 and verse 27. There is a practical reading of the curse section that is worth more than it first appears: the psalmist tells God exactly what he wants done to these people — and hands it over; he does not do it himself. The distance between saying the ugly thing to God and enacting it in your kitchen may be the whole of somebody's discipleship this week.

Close the session with 69:20–21 run through six different outlooks, because this is the passage where the difference between them is checkable. Near view: the Hebrew behind "gall" is rō'š, a poisonous plant; "vinegar" is ḥōmeṣ, cheap sour wine — the drink of field laborers, what Boaz hands Ruth at mealtime. Someone hands him food and drink; the food is poison and the drink is what you would give a hired hand. In a culture where feeding a guest was a covenant act, this is betrayal performed with the gestures of welcome. Distant view: all four Gospels reach for this verse at Golgotha, and John 19:28 says Jesus spoke "that the scripture might be fulfilled." But nothing inside Psalm 69 announces itself as prediction; it is a first-person lament in the present tense. It is the New Testament telling you where to look, not the psalm raising its hand. Dual fulfillment: this is where the first two stop competing. The lesser event does not become fictional because the greater one arrives; the greater event is not diminished by having a rehearsal in Israel's history — and it explains why Acts 1:20 can take up verse 25 from the curse section and apply it to Judas while no one applies verse 5's confession of foolishness to Jesus. Likening: if you have ever scanned a room for one person who would take pity and found none, verse 20 is written in your handwriting — but Psalm 69:20 is not secretly about your ward, and the likening runs in reverse too: whose gall are you holding? Personal reading: legitimate, and the one that most needs a label, because it has no external check. Doctrine: the LDS footnote at 69:20 sends you to Mark 14:33 and Gethsemane, where He comes and finds them sleeping. The psalm supplies the interior of a scene the Gospel narrates from outside — and the doctrine that requires is Alma 7:12, that He would know "according to the flesh how to succor his people." Against the week's headline question, that is the answer: Psalm 69:21 tells you what He did for your soul — He accepted the cup that we are always handing someone.

Think deeply.

1. Psalm 66:16 asks for a declaration; 66:11–12 says God brought the declarer into the net and through fire and water. Write the sentence you would actually say aloud — with a date in it — and then ask why the specificity is the part that frightens you.
2. Psalm 70 and Psalm 40:13–17 are the same poem in two recensions, and one verse resists the pattern. What does that single non-conforming verse tell you about the person who did the editing, and what does it rule out?
3. If a scribe could change the name of God in a psalm and the result is still scripture, what exactly is it that makes a text scripture? Answer without using the word "inspired," then decide whether your answer survives being applied to Joseph Smith's revisions of his own revelations.
4. Rashi read Psalm 69 as a prayer for Israel; Paul read 69:22–23 against Israel. Both are reading the same Hebrew. What is the honest thing for a Latter-day Saint to do with a text whose Christian reading history has a body count?
5. The apostles quote the imprecatory verses as scripture. Choose one: the imprecations are recorded human anguish rather than divine endorsement; the psalmist is renouncing private vengeance by handing it upward; or the psalm is simply wrong here. Defend your choice against the strongest form of the other two.
6. Run the six outlooks on a verse of your own choosing from this session — 66:12, say, or 69:8. Which outlooks bite and which slip? A reader who can say "this claim rests on the Hebrew, that one rests on John, and this last one is mine" is reading better than one with six confident conclusions.

20–25 minSession 4: The Prayers of David Are Ended

These three chapters are grouped here because together they stage the single strangest thing in the week: a book announcing that a collection is finished, and then continuing. Psalm 72 ends "The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended" (72:20). That is not a line of the poem. It is a scribal colophon closing a collection — and it is flatly false as a description of the book you are holding, since Psalm 86 is titled "A Prayer of David" and more than a dozen further Davidic psalms follow in Books IV and V. The editors did not delete the seam; they preserved a fossil of an earlier, smaller Davidic collection and built around it. Jewish commentators saw the same thing and said so: Ibn Ezra canvasses explanations, one credited to Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi — a scribe's colophon closing a book. Then Psalm 86 arrives titled a prayer of David anyway.

Start with Psalm 71, because it is the block's quietest anomaly. It is the only psalm this week with no superscription at all, and one of only a handful in Books I–II. The Septuagint, uncomfortable with the gap, invented one. The Dead Sea evidence points elsewhere: in the oldest substantial Psalms manuscript, Psalm 71 follows Psalm 38 directly, as though it circulated as the continuation of another poem. And the psalm itself is built out of other psalms — verses 1–3 rework Psalm 31:1–3, verse 6 reworks Psalm 22:9–10, verse 13 reworks Psalm 35. Psalm 86 does the same thing more extremely; Delitzsch observed that almost everything in it echoes earlier psalmic and legal language, and it is the only psalm attributed to David in Book III, most likely a later insertion linking back to the collection that Psalm 72:20 declared closed. This is how Israelite prayer worked: by re-collating inherited language. It is also, incidentally, what Nephi does in 2 Nephi 4:16–35. While you are in the neighborhood of manuscripts, sit with the prose paragraph at column XXVII of the Great Psalms Scroll, which credits David with 3,600 psalms plus 450 songs plus four for healing — 4,050 in all. Whoever wrote that did not think the Psalter was closed or complete. For readers who accept the Ninth Article of Faith, that is an ancient Jewish community saying, in its own idiom, that God gave more than we have.

Psalm 72 is a coronation prayer, titled lishlomoh — a preposition that can mean "of," "for," "belonging to," or "concerning" Solomon. Read what it asks the king to do: judge the people with righteousness, save the children of the needy, break in pieces the oppressor, rescue the one that has no helper. This is the standard advertisement of Mesopotamian kingship — the prologue to the Laws of Hammurabi says the same, and in the Ugaritic Kirta epic a prince tells his failing father he has not judged the widow's case and should therefore step down. "Dominion from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth" (72:8) is imperial titulary. A psalm modern readers hear as uniquely eschatological was, in its own century, intelligible court literature. That does not cancel the messianic reading; it explains its mechanism. Jewish tradition also found the Messiah here — the school of Rabbi Yannai derived his name Yinnon from 72:17 — but notice what the psalm asks a messiah to do. Not one word about forgiving sins or dying for anyone. Judaism did not fail to notice a spiritual messiah here; it read what the text says the man is hired for. Meanwhile the LDS footnotes route 72:8 and 72:19 to D&C 45:66, 65:2, and 88:104 — the kingdom rolling forth until it fills the earth. The prayers ended; the reign has not begun.

Psalm 86 is where the week's uncomfortable question about David surfaces in the text's own footnotes. Verse 13 says "thou hast delivered my soul from the lowest hell" — and the LDS footnote on that verse points to Acts 2:34, where Peter says "David is not ascended into the heavens." That is an editorial invitation to read David's confidence against Peter's correction, and D&C 132:39 says David "hath fallen from his exaltation." The Restoration distinction between salvation and exaltation holds both: a soul can be delivered from hell without being enthroned. Which means the week's model of repentance comes from a man whose own outcome the canon treats as limited — and the lesson still, rightly, makes Psalm 51 its primary repentance text. One more thing before you close the session. On the eve of Yom Kippur, Ashkenazi congregations pray Psalm 51:11, then Psalm 71:9 ("cast me not off in the time of old age"), then Psalm 86:17, in sequence — three verses from this week's reading, pulled into the plural, so that David's private wreckage becomes the community's. Two of those three verses are in tonight's chapters.

Think deeply.

1. A scribe wrote "the prayers of David are ended," and later editors kept the line while adding more prayers of David. Why keep a note you know is now false? What does that decision suggest about how ancient editors understood their job — and how does it compare to how we handle our own chapter headings?
2. Psalm 71 has no title, so the reader cannot know who is speaking. Read it once assuming it is David in old age and once assuming it is an anonymous elderly Levite. What changes? If nothing changes, what have you learned about how much the superscriptions were doing?
3. The Qumran colophon credits David with 4,050 compositions. Is that a historical claim, a statement about status, or a theological one — and what would it cost you if it were simply extravagant praise?
4. Psalm 72 asks a king for justice for the poor, not atonement for sin. If the Jewish reading is that the messiah's job description is a working sovereign who fixes the world's arrangements, what is the Latter-day Saint account of the Millennium actually claiming — and is it closer to Psalm 72 than we usually admit?
5. Our own footnote at Psalm 86:13 points to the verse saying David did not ascend. What is an editor doing when he directs you to the text that undercuts the one you are reading, and would you have made the same editorial choice?
6. Psalm 86 is a mosaic of borrowed lines — including 86:15, which lifts God's self-revelation from Exodus 34:6. Is a prayer assembled entirely out of other people's words less sincere, more sincere, or is the question wrong? Test it against how you actually pray.

25–30 minSession 5: Not Moses, but David — Memory, Polemic, and Truth Out of the Ground

Psalms 77 and 78 belong to the Asaph collection, and the collection has a temper of its own: prophetic oracle in the mouth of God, and a preoccupation with national history. Chronicles calls Asaph not merely a musician but a seer. Start with Psalm 77, which is the most honest chapter in the block about what it is like when prayer stops working. "My sore ran in the night, and ceased not: my soul refused to be comforted" (77:2) — refused, a decision, not a failure. Then verses 7–9 fire accusatory questions directly at God: will the Lord cast off for ever? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Those verses were preserved, set to music, and sung in public worship, which means at minimum that accusation is a permitted form of prayer. And watch the pivot at verse 10, because it is not a feeling. He never reports that God showed up. He reports a decision to rehearse specific past events — the sea, the cloud, Moses and Aaron. Memory is the tool he uses when consolation is unavailable. The rehearsal in 77:16–20 is worth reading as poetry rather than summary: it breaks into a storm theophany — waters that see God and writhe, thunder, arrows, a path through the sea, closely related to Habakkuk 3 and to much older West Semitic imagery. Note also what the psalm never does: it asks whether God has forgotten to be gracious and gets no answer. If the book can leave that question standing for three thousand years, it can survive us leaving a few standing too.

Psalm 78 then tells the same history at length, and it is not a neutral chronicle. It is a maskil, a teaching piece, whose opening move is a command to transmit — tell the children, so the next generation will tell theirs (78:5–6). Jewish practice took that literally: in the Passover Haggadah, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiva's famous dispute about how many plagues struck Egypt is a word-by-word parse of Psalm 78:49. The psalm does not describe Jewish memory-practice; it is a beam holding it up. Now read what the psalm actually recounts. It gets seven plagues, not ten — blood, flies, frogs, locusts, hail, pestilence, firstborn, with flies before frogs, reversing Exodus. Psalm 105 gives yet another selection and sequence. These are not errors; they are evidence that the exodus circulated as living tradition, told differently for different arguments, before it was fixed in the form we read. And here is the omission that reframes everything: it never names Moses — not once, across seventy-two verses of exodus and wilderness. The preceding psalm ends "thou leddest thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron" (77:20). Then Psalm 78 tells the same story with the human mediator excised, and with the mediator gone the narrative's endpoint is not law but dynasty: "he chose David also his servant."

That is the psalm's argument, and it is stated in the open at 78:67–68: God "refused the tabernacle of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of Ephraim: but chose the tribe of Judah, the mount Zion which he loved." Ephraim is indicted at verse 9 before a single detail of the story has been told. What is not in doubt is that Psalm 78 is an argument, made by someone, against someone, about who legitimately holds the sanctuary. The historical hinge is verse 60, "he forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh" — and the excavations at Khirbet Seilun found the Iron I settlement destroyed by fire around the mid-eleventh century BCE, with no domestic architecture but substantial public building: a cultic center that burned, precisely as the psalm implies. Dating is contested — tenth century, eighth century, or a Judahite monarchy explaining to northern refugees why Shiloh fell and Jerusalem stood — but the polemic is not. Latter-day Saints should sit with the resulting tension rather than dissolving it. Psalm 77:15 blesses "the sons of Jacob and Joseph," a verse our own footnote routes straight to 2 Nephi 3:4 and the Joseph-of-Egypt prophecies at the center of Restoration self-understanding. One Asaph psalm elevates Joseph; the very next rejects Ephraim. No harmonizing makes them one argument. And Latter-day Saints, whose restoration narrative is Ephraim-centered, may find verse 67 stranger than they expect. Two further things Psalm 78 does that a devotional reading tends to skip: the story it tells the children makes their ancestors look appalling — forgetting, doubting, flattering God with their mouths while their hearts were elsewhere (78:36–37) — so the transmission model is not a highlight reel. And 78:34, "when he slew them, then they sought him," names crisis-only religion as a pattern and puts God's own fingerprint on the diagnosis. Restoration practice institutionalizes the psalm's remedy weekly: the sacrament is the ordinance built against that exact failure.

End the week in Psalm 85, and notice first that you have walked out of the Elohistic Psalter. Psalm 85 is a Korahite psalm using YHWH in verses 1, 7, 8, and 12 with no self-consciousness at all — the boundary that was invisible in Psalm 70 is visible here by contrast. The psalm's famous verse is 85:10: "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other." Genesis Rabbah builds a whole scene on it — when God moved to create the first human the ministering angels split into factions, Kindness for and Truth against, and God seized Truth and hurled it to the ground, answering the protest with the next verse of this psalm. God overruled Truth in order to make us; Truth had to be buried before it could grow. Alma 42 stages the same collision in Nephite grammar and names the meeting place: justice exercises all his demands and mercy claims all which is her own, at the Atonement — read Psalm 85:10 and Alma 42:24 back to back and they are not merely compatible, but the same sentence in two grammars. Then verse 11, and the discipline the whole week has been teaching. Our chapter heading glosses "Truth shall spring out of the earth" as the Book of Mormon. In its own context, 85:10–13 is covenant-and-harvest imagery: mercy and truth meet, the land yields her increase. But the Latter-day Saint reading is not arbitrary, and its source is traceable — Moses 7:62, received in December 1830, rewrites the verse, inverts its halves, and adds the purpose clause the psalm lacks: truth sent forth out of the earth "to bear testimony of mine Only Begotten." The heading is not exegesis of Psalm 85; it is an application of Moses 7 to Psalm 85. Knowing which is which is the whole discipline.

Think deeply.

1. Psalm 77 asks "Hath God forgotten to be gracious?" and never receives an answer — it receives a memory instead. Is a memory an answer? Write down five things, with dates, that you believe God did — not five things you believe about God — and then decide.
2. Psalm 78 tells the exodus with Moses removed and Psalm 77 tells it with Moses named, back to back, by the same guild. What is the most charitable account of that, and what is the most honest one? Are they the same account?
3. Seven plagues here, ten in Exodus, another selection in Psalm 105. If the exodus was told differently for different arguments before it was fixed, what does that do to the way you read any scriptural retelling — including retellings in the Book of Mormon and general conference?
4. Verse 67 rejects Ephraim; Latter-day Saint patriarchal blessings overwhelmingly declare Ephraim. Sit in that for a full minute before you reach for a resolution. What is the resolution you reached for, and is it exegesis or application?
5. Psalm 78 hands the next generation a story in which their ancestors come off badly. What have your children or the youth you teach actually heard from you about a time you were wrong, scared, or faithless — and what happened next? If the answer is nothing, whose model of transmission are you following?
6. Our chapter heading reads a nineteenth-century revelation back into an Israelite harvest image, and it is the only reason most Latter-day Saints know Psalm 85:11. Is that a legitimate way to read scripture, a legitimate way to read this scripture, or something we should label as we do it? Answer as though you had to defend it to someone who reads Hebrew.