Panel essay · Psalms · August 24–30, 2026 · Six outlooks · the Parry method
Written by an AI persona applying Donald W. Parry's six-outlooks framework. Professor Parry did not write, review, or endorse this essay, and no words are attributed to him that are not cited to a published source.
The seventeen chapters in this week's block do not read alike. Psalm 78 recites history. Psalm 51 confesses sin. Psalm 72 crowns a king. Psalm 69 drowns. If you read all of them the same way, you will flatten most of them — and if you read each one only in the way that comes naturally, you will miss what the text can carry.
Donald W. Parry — professor of Hebrew Bible at Brigham Young University, holder of the Abraham O. Smoot Professorship, and a member of the international team of Dead Sea Scrolls translators since 1994 (Wikipedia summary of his position and work; his BYU Speeches page) — teaches a six-part framework of outlooks on a prophetic or poetic text: the historical near view, the prophetic distant view, dual or multiple fulfillment, likening, personal reading, and reading to understand doctrine.
Two honest disclosures before we begin. First, this essay applies that framework; it is not authored by Parry and contains no quotation from him. I searched during the writing of this piece for a published printing of the six-item list and could not locate one, so the wording of the six headings below is mine, describing a framework I attribute to his teaching. Nothing here should be read as his phrasing. Second, the framework is a tool, not a promise. Some outlooks will bite hard on a given verse and some will slip. Reporting which ones slip is the point of running all six.
The test case is two verses:
20 Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. 21 They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. (Psalm 69:20–21)
Start with what the words meant to whoever first sang them.
The Hebrew behind "gall" is rō'š, a poisonous plant — the standard lexicon glosses it as "a poisonous plant, probably the poppy," rendered in the KJV as gall nine times and elsewhere as venom, poison, and hemlock (Strong's H7219, Blue Letter Bible lexicon). "Vinegar" is ḥōmeṣ, plain sour wine (Strong's H2558, Blue Letter Bible lexicon) — the cheap stuff, the drink of field laborers, which is exactly what Boaz offers Ruth at mealtime: "dip thy morsel in the vinegar" (Ruth 2:14).
So the near view is not primarily about torture. It is about hospitality inverted. The sufferer is at table. Someone hands him food and drink. The food is poison and the drink is what you'd give a hired hand. In a culture where feeding a guest was a covenant act, this is betrayal performed with the gestures of welcome — which is why it lands in the same breath as verse 20's "I looked for some to take pity, but there was none." He is surrounded and starving at once.
Note also the honest edge: the same speaker who is innocent of the charges against him ("they that hate me without a cause," 69:4) also says "O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee" (69:5). This is a real human being in real trouble, not a stainless figure.
Where the near view strains: we cannot pin the occasion. The superscription assigns the psalm to David ("To the chief Musician upon Shoshannim, A Psalm of David"), yet the psalm closes by looking forward to God saving Zion and building "the cities of Judah: that they may dwell there, and have it in possession" (69:35), which reads more naturally as a people needing restoration than as a king already on the throne. Whatever the resolution, the near view gives us the situation — mock hospitality, isolation, undeserved hatred — without giving us a date.
All four Gospels reach for this verse at Golgotha.
The LDS edition footnotes at Psalm 69:21 send the reader to Matthew 27:34, Mark 15:36, Luke 23:36, and John 19:29, and tag the verse "Jesus Christ, Prophecies about"; the footnotes at John 19:28 and 19:29 send the reader back to Psalm 69:21. The circuit is closed in the Church's own edition.
But be careful about what the "distant view" claims. Nothing inside Psalm 69 announces itself as prediction. There is no "behold, in the last days." It is a first-person lament in the present tense. The prophetic reading is applied to it from the far end — by the evangelists, and most explicitly by John, who says the words were spoken so that the scripture would be fulfilled. This outlook is real, but it is retrospective. It is the New Testament telling you where to look, not the psalm raising its hand.
And Psalm 69 is not a one-off for the apostolic writers. "The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up" (69:9) is quoted at the cleansing of the temple (John 2:17). "Let their table become a snare" (69:22) is quoted by Paul (Romans 11:9). "Let their habitation be desolate" (69:25) is applied to Judas by Peter (Acts 1:20). The early Church did not mine one verse out of this psalm; it read the whole thing as territory belonging to Christ.
This is where the first two outlooks stop competing and start working.
The dual-fulfillment reading says: the psalmist really was handed poison and sour wine, or something close enough to say so — and the Savior really was, on a specific afternoon, outside a specific wall. Neither reading cancels the other. 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. Parry has argued for exactly this shape in Isaiah: reviewing the literature, Joshua M. Sears notes that on Isaiah 7:14 "Parry describes the fulfillment in Christ as the 'greater fulfillment' and the fulfillment in Isaiah's day as a 'lesser fulfillment'" (Sears, "An Other Approach to Isaiah Studies," Interpreter, citing Donald W. Parry, Jay A. Parry, and Tina M. Peterson, Understanding Isaiah [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1998], 72–73).
This outlook also handles what the other two cannot. It explains why Acts 1:20 can take up verse 25 — part of the psalm's fierce curse section — and apply it to Judas, while no one applies verse 5's confession of foolishness to Jesus. A dual reading permits partial mapping. Some of the psalm belongs to the psalmist alone. Some of it is taken up. The map is not one-to-one, and the framework does not require it to be.
Where this outlook strains: it can become a license. Once you allow that a text means two things, it is easy to start allowing that it means anything. The discipline that keeps dual fulfillment honest is that the second fulfillment must be attested, not merely imagined — and here it is, in four Gospels and the LDS footnote apparatus, not in the reader's ingenuity.
Nephi's phrase is the charter: "I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" (1 Nephi 19:23).
The nearest ancient analogue is the pesher method at Qumran, and it is worth noticing precisely how it differs. The Qumran commentators — in continuous commentaries like Pesher Habakkuk — read the ancient prophets as speaking about their own community and its opponents rather than about the prophet's original setting, on the premise that the prophets received revelations they did not themselves understand until a later interpreter unlocked them (Center for Online Judaic Studies, "Pesher"). That is a strong claim: the text is about us.
Likening, as Nephi frames it and as this outlook uses it, is weaker and safer: the text is applicable to us. Psalm 69:20 is not secretly about your ward. But if you have ever looked around a room for one person who would take pity and found none, verse 20 is a sentence written in your handwriting. And the likening runs in both directions — the verse also asks whether you have been the missing comforter in someone else's verse 20. That reversal is where likening earns its keep this week: the lesson block is dense with people in distress (Psalms 63:1; 69:1–8; 77:1–9), and the honest question is not only "who will comfort me" but "whose gall am I holding."
This outlook licenses something the previous four do not: reading a passage for guidance that has little to do with what the passage is about.
An example from this text. Verse 21's structure is they gave. The whole indictment turns on what was handed over — a meal that was an insult, a drink that was a shrug. A reader can take that grammatical shape as instruction about small transactions: what you hand to another person carries the whole content of your regard for them, and the difference between comfort and contempt is often not a speech but a cup. That is a legitimate personal reading. It is also not what Psalm 69:21 is about. The verse is about a man being tormented, not about your manners.
I want to be blunt that this is the outlook most likely to go wrong, and it is worth saying so out loud rather than pretending the framework is six equally reliable lenses. Personal reading has no external check. Its safeguard is not scholarship but candor: label it as personal, do not preach it as the verse's meaning, and do not let a private impression override the plain sense. Used with that label attached, it is the outlook that most often produces actual change in a reader's week. Used without it, it is how scripture gets conscripted.
This is the outlook that pays.
Put verse 20 beside Gethsemane. The LDS footnote at Psalm 69:20 sends the reader to Mark 14:33 — "he... began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy; And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch" — and then, a few verses later, "he cometh, and findeth them sleeping" (Mark 14:37). "I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none." The psalm supplies the interior of a scene the Gospel narrates from outside.
Now ask what doctrine that requires. Not merely that Jesus suffered, but that He suffered comfortlessness specifically — the particular ache of reaching for a witness and finding an empty chair. Alma states the doctrine the psalm dramatizes: "he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities" (Alma 7:12). Know according to the flesh. Not know as omniscience knows. Know as a person knows who has been there.
And the verse is more than illustration. It also asserts something about how the Atonement was carried out. John 19:28 says Jesus, "knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst." He is not passively falling into a prophecy. He is completing one, deliberately, from the cross — which means the Atonement is not merely something that happened to Him but something He administered to the last detail.
Set that against this week's headline question. The lesson invites us to "declare what [the Lord] hath done for [our] soul" (Psalm 66:16; Come, Follow Me—For Home and Church: Old Testament 2026, August 24–30). Psalm 69:21 tells you what He did for it: He accepted the cup that we are always handing someone.
They are not equal here.
Strongest: doctrine and dual fulfillment. Outlook six is where the verse changes what you believe rather than how you feel, and outlook three is what makes six possible without erasing outlook one. Together they carry the passage.
Solid but dependent: the distant view. Outlook two is unimpeachable — four Gospels and the Church's own footnotes — but it is entirely borrowed. It tells you nothing you could have found in Psalm 69 by itself. Its authority comes from the New Testament, not from the psalm.
Necessary but incomplete: the near view. Outlook one delivers the decisive philological payoff — rō'š as poison, ḥōmeṣ as the laborer's sour wine, and therefore the whole reading of the verse as hospitality inverted. Without it, "gall and vinegar" is just a phrase about bad taste. But it cannot fix the psalm to an occasion, and it should not pretend otherwise.
Productive: likening. Outlook four works well here precisely because it can be run in reverse. Its risk is drifting toward pesher — quietly upgrading "applicable to me" into "about me."
Weakest, and the one to label: personal reading. Outlook five produced something usable, but nothing in the method guarantees that. It should always be marked as personal rather than presented as exegesis.
That distribution is the real result. Run all six and you learn not only what the verse means but which kinds of knowing it can support — and 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 a reader with six confident conclusions and no idea where any of them came from.