Today (25 June) is the International Maritime Organisation’s Day of the Seafarer. This fact alone puts me in mind of the setting by Herbert Sumsion of words from Psalm 107:23-30:

They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters;
These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For at his word the stormy wind ariseth, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep.
Their soul melteth away, because of the trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end.
So when they they cry unto the Lord in their trouble he delivereth them out of their distress.
For He maketh the storm to cease, so that the waves thereof are still.
Then are they glad because they are at rest; and so he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be.

Experienced cathedral musician Sumsion wrote his setting for four voices and organ dedicated to a school choir and its director; although there are technical challenges for the voices, and still more for the organist, it is not too difficult to perform. Similarly, although it sets a biblical text and is now often sung in church and cathedral settings there is a sense that it is not really a sacred choral work, but rather a concert piece. The waves and the storm are more-or-less naively painted in sound; the reeling and staggering as of a drunkard is shown up in an instance of polyrhythm, where the organ is playing in triple time and the choir sticks to duple.

Sumsion has taken his text from the authorised version, but there are enough phrases that made me wonder, so I had a look at the Hebrew. ‘They are at their wits end’ renders וְכָל־חָכְמָתָם תִּתְבַּלָּע; most literally this reads ‘and all their wisdom is swallowed up’. ‘Their soul melteth away because of the trouble’ is actually quite a faithful rendering of נַפְשָׁם בְּרָעָה תִתְמוֹגָג ‘their soul in evil is melted’. ‘They reel to and fro’ turns out to be a single word יָחוֹגּוּ. This is from the root חָגַג which means to hold a festival (indeed Jewish friends wish one another ‘chag sameach’ from the same root) and may relate to pilgrimage (possibly cognate with the Arabic Hajj). I think the verbal relation to reeling is through festival-associated dancing rather than the drunkenness implied by the second clause in the psalm verse under consideration.

Let’s return to Sumsion, fun as Hebrew philology is, and remember that the blog is about music and theology. The excerpt from the psalm ends with ‘the haven where they would be’: a calm B major, with a melody previously stated in D, brings the final diminuendo towards a safe ending, after the storm. Is that an actual spiritual safety? Can that be a present spiritual safety? Or is it only a future hope? What can we do to make one another spiritually safe now?