27 Feb 2012

Dancing his praise

As a followup to my earlier review posts of the new Canadian Reformed metrical psalter, I want to call attention to an improvement in the translation of Psalm 150:4, which runs thus in one of the English-language versions of the Bible: "Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe!" In the 1984 edition of the Book of Praise, the verse is rendered as follows:

Praise Him with the pipe and timbrel.
Praise Him with stringed instruments . . . .

Conspicuous by its absence is any reference to dancing, whose omission from the versified text appears to signal an uncharacteristically paraphrastic approach to the psalm. But this oversight has been rectified in the new edition:

Worship him in exultation
and with tambourine and dance.

Now that this correction has been made, perhaps we shall see more ventures like this taking off amongst Reformed churches:

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