Panel essay · Psalms · August 31 – September 6, 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.
Donald W. Parry, a professor of Hebrew Bible at BYU and since 1994 a member of the international team translating the Dead Sea Scrolls, wrote a short chapter called "Ways to Read Isaiah: Six Outlooks." It lays out six distinct things a reader can be doing with a prophetic text: reading it in its historical context, reading it as prophecy of the far future, reading it as a dual- or multiple-fulfillment prophecy, likening it to ourselves, reading it for personal reasons, and reading it to understand doctrine. The chapter is about Isaiah, and this week's block is Psalms, so what follows is a transposition rather than an application. It is also entirely my own: Professor Parry did not write, review, or endorse a word of it, and I have not put any words in his mouth. Where I quote him, the quotation comes from his published chapter, linked below.
I have chosen Psalm 110:4 — "The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek." Verse 1 is the more famous candidate; it is commonly identified as the Old Testament verse the New Testament quotes and alludes to more often than any other, and David M. Hay's study of the psalm's early Christian career found that Christian use of Psalm 110 concentrated almost entirely on verses 1 and 4. But verse 4 is the harder and more interesting of the two for this exercise. It is the only place in the Hebrew Bible outside Genesis 14 where Melchizedek is named. It sits at the structural center of the psalm. It is sworn under oath. And it is the verse from which an entire Restoration vocabulary descends — every Latter-day Saint who says the words "Melchizedek Priesthood" is standing downstream of this line. The week's other obvious candidate, Psalm 118:22 ("The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner"), has a clean near view and a clean New Testament afterlife, but it does not carry the doctrinal freight that makes the sixth outlook worth the trouble.
Psalm 110 is also the odd chapter in this week's block. The rest is praise — 116–118 belong to the Hallel sung at Passover, and every one of 146–150 opens with "Praise ye the LORD." Psalm 110 is a coronation oracle with corpses in it: "he shall fill the places with the dead bodies" (110:6). It has been argued over far more often than it has been sung.
Parry's first outlook asks what a passage meant in its own moment, and he is candid that he thinks this is where to start: "In my opinion, to better understand Isaiah, readers should begin by examining the book in its immediate context—a near view."
Psalm 110's near view depends on typography most readers skate past. In verse 1 the KJV prints "The LORD said unto my Lord." The first is YHWH in small capitals; the second is Hebrew 'adoni, "my lord," the ordinary way a subject addresses a superior. Read at ground level, this is not God talking to God. It is a court figure relaying an oracle to the king: YHWH has said to my lord the king, sit at my right hand. Everything in verses 1–3 fits a coronation — the seat at the right of the throne, enemies made a footstool, the "rod of thy strength" sent "out of Zion," a levy of willing troops on "the day of thy power."
Verse 4 then solves a specific problem of the Davidic monarchy. Israel's priesthood ran through Levi; the king came from Judah. Yet the Jerusalem king behaved priestly, and the biblical text is visibly uncomfortable about it — the Hebrew of 2 Samuel 8:18 calls David's sons kohanim, "priests," which the Church's own edition footnotes as "HEB priests; apparently, in this case, civil ministers." Psalm 110:4 grants the king a priestly office by a route that bypasses Levi entirely: the older order of Melchizedek, "king of Salem" and "priest of the most high God" (Genesis 14:18). Salem is Jerusalem — "In Salem also is his tabernacle, and his dwelling place in Zion" (Psalm 76:2) — and the pre-Israelite king Joshua faced there was named Adoni-zedek (Joshua 10:1), the same -zedek element. The near view, then: David's heir inherits a priest-kingship attached to the city itself, older than Israel and older than Levi. Matthew Emadi, summarizing the critical consensus he goes on to dispute, notes that scholars have read the psalm as "attempting to unite Jerusalem's Jebusite cult with the Israelite monarchy."
Parry's second outlook reads forward — "perhaps centuries or even millennia after" the prophet's lifetime. Two words in verse 4 make that reading almost inevitable. The first is for ever. The second is sworn.
The author of Hebrews builds four chapters on exactly these two words. He returns to Psalm 110:4 five times — quoting it outright at 5:6 ("Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec"), 7:17, and 7:21, and folding it into his own sentences at 5:10 and 6:20. His argument is that a priesthood granted by divine oath outranks one granted by descent: "those priests were made without an oath; but this with an oath by him that said unto him, The Lord sware and will not repent" (Hebrews 7:21). He presses "for ever" just as hard, reasoning from Genesis 14's silence about Melchizedek's parentage to a priest "without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God" (Hebrews 7:3).
The distant view is also, partly, a function of which text you are reading. Verse 3 is one of the most damaged verses in the Psalter. The Masoretic vocalization yields the KJV's "from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth"; the Septuagint, working from the same consonants with different vowels, reads "from the womb, before the morning star, I begot thee" — a begetting, which early Christian readers seized on. Peter J. Gentry has argued that both readings are well attested and that the Greek may preserve the older one. Whichever way that goes, it is worth noticing that a distant reading can rest on a vowel.
Parry's third outlook covers prophecies "fulfilled two or more times, or that there are two or more legitimate interpretations that may be drawn from a prophecy." He quotes Ann N. Madsen and Shon D. Hopkin's image for it: prophecy as a many-layered cake, with application "repeated again and again."
Psalm 110 is the rare case where dual fulfillment is not a theory imposed on the text but a move made inside the New Testament, in public, by Jesus. In Matthew 22:41–46 he asks the Pharisees whose son the Christ is; they answer, correctly, David's. He then quotes verse 1 — "How then doth David in spirit call him Lord?" — and closes with "If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?" Notice what the argument requires. It requires the near view to be true (David wrote it, in his own voice, about his own lord) and the distant view to be true (the one addressed is greater than David). Strip either layer and the question collapses. Jesus does not resolve it. He leaves the tension standing, and "no man was able to answer him a word."
Peter's use in Acts 2:34–35 runs the opposite direction: "For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith himself, The LORD said unto my Lord." Here the near reading is invoked precisely so that it can fail — David sang it, David did not receive it — which is what forces the referent forward. Same verse, two apostolic arguments, one built on the layers holding and one on a layer giving way.
Nephi's formula — "I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" (1 Nephi 19:23) — is close kin to the Qumran pesher, the running commentary that reads old prophecy as a description of the commentator's own community. The comparison is more than decorative here, because Qumran did exactly this to Melchizedek. The scroll known as 11QMelchizedek (11Q13), composed around 100 BC, takes the priest-king of Genesis 14 and recasts him as a heavenly deliverer who arrives in the final jubilee to rescue the elect and judge Belial. That is likening with the brakes off, and it should make anyone cautious about how far the outlook can be pushed.
Latter-day Saints have an unusually literal claim on verse 4: the order it names is the name of our priesthood. But likening has a discipline, and the discipline is knowing who in the passage you are. The 'adoni of Psalm 110 sits at God's right hand, is sworn to by name, and has his enemies made a footstool. Nobody reading this is that person. What is genuinely available is the oath's grammar — the LORD hath sworn, and will not repent — and it cuts in an uncomfortable direction. Set it beside D&C 121:36–37, where the rights of the priesthood are "inseparably connected with the powers of heaven" and where unrighteous exercise draws "Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man." One text says God does not take it back; the other says a man can lose it. Both are true, and holding them together is more useful than either alone.
Parry's fifth outlook is reading "for personal instruction, spiritual guidance, devotionalistic purposes, or to receive personal revelation," and he quotes Dallin H. Oaks: "the scriptures can be a Urim and Thummim to assist each of us to receive personal revelation." Parry's examples are frankly untethered from Isaiah's argument — read Isaiah 25:8 when you mourn, 41:13 when you are afraid.
This outlook is a different kind of act from the other five, and it is worth saying so. The other five make claims about the passage: this is what it meant, this is what it foresaw, this is how it applies. The fifth makes a claim about the reader. If "The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent" lands on you this week as an assurance that God does not walk back what he has told you, that reading has nothing whatever to do with Melchizedek, Salem, Levi, or the Davidic court. The failure mode is not having the experience; it is reporting it afterward as exegesis — announcing in class that the verse is about God keeping his promises to us. It is not. You received something while reading it. Those are different sentences, and the difference is worth keeping.
Parry does not rank his six outlooks; his conclusion is simply that using all of them yields "layer upon layer of truth." I am giving this one the most weight because in Psalm 110:4 it produces the largest return, and because it is the outlook where the Restoration text actually rewrites the question rather than answering it.
The rewriting is D&C 107:1–4. Read verse 4 of the psalm cold and the natural inference is that Melchizedek founded something and Christ later joined it — the order is his, and the Messiah is admitted to it. D&C 107 inverts the direction: "Before his day it was called the Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God. But out of respect or reverence to the name of the Supreme Being, to avoid the too frequent repetition of his name, they, the church, in ancient days, called that priesthood after Melchizedek." On that reading, "after the order of Melchizedek" in Psalm 110:4 is a preserved euphemism — saying after the order of the Son of God in a form that avoids saying it. This is not a Restoration novelty grafted on: Hebrews 7:3 already makes Melchizedek "made like unto the Son of God," the Son the pattern and Melchizedek the copy. D&C 107:3 says the naming ran the same way.
The second doctrinal payoff resolves a real contradiction. Hebrews 7:3 says Melchizedek was "without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life." D&C 84:14 says the opposite about the man: Abraham "received the priesthood from Melchizedek, who received it through the lineage of his fathers, even till Noah." He had fathers. He is in a line. The resolution is that the eternal adjectives belong to the office, not the officer — D&C 84:17, "which priesthood continueth in the church of God in all generations, and is without beginning of days or end of years," and Alma 13:7, "this high priesthood being after the order of his Son, which order was from the foundation of the world; or in other words, being without beginning of days or end of years." Alma applies to the order precisely the phrase Hebrews applies to the man. That is what verse 4's "for ever" is modifying.
Alma 13 also supplies what Genesis 14 withholds. Genesis gives Melchizedek three verses and no biography. Alma 13:17–18 gives him a wicked city, a ministry, and an outcome: his people "had waxed strong in iniquity and abomination," he "did preach repentance unto his people," they repented, "and Melchizedek did establish peace in the land in his days; therefore he was called the prince of peace." The title Hebrews derives etymologically — Salem, peace — Alma derives biographically.
Finally, doctrine turns the psalm's two halves into one claim. Verse 1 grants a seat at God's right hand; verse 4 grants a priesthood by oath. D&C 84:19–22 says the greater priesthood "holdeth the key of the mysteries of the kingdom, even the key of the knowledge of God," and that "without this no man can see the face of God, even the Father, and live." Proximity and priesthood are the same subject. The oath in verse 4 is what makes the seat in verse 1 permanent.
One honest note. Doctrine is the outlook where interpretive communities diverge most sharply, and Parry knows it — his chapter carries a footnote conceding that non-Christian readers hold a different view of the distant prophecies he treats. It cuts the other way too: Emadi's article on Psalm 110, cited here for its summary of critical scholarship, argues at length that Latter-day Saint priesthood theology is unbiblical. The sixth outlook is not a neutral instrument. It is the one in which you find out what you already believe, which is exactly why it repays the most care.