The thank-you book

It opens with thank you

Psalm 107 sets the tone straight away, and then tells four short stories: people lost in a desert, people stuck in prison, people too ill to eat, and sailors in a storm that terrifies them.

All four stories go the same way. They cried out. He brought them out. Give thanks.

It's a good psalm to read when something has just gone right, because it teaches you what to do next.

The giant one

Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the entire Bible — 176 verses, and every single one of them is about loving what God says.

It's built like a puzzle. There are 22 sections, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and in the original language every line in a section begins with that letter. Eight lines starting with A, then eight starting with B, and so on to the end of the alphabet.

It's an A-to-Z of one idea, done on purpose. The person writing it wanted to say: there is no letter of the alphabet I can't use to tell you how good God's words are.

You don't have to read it in one sitting. Take one section at a time — that's how it was built.

Songs for walking uphill

Psalms 120 to 134 all carry the same label: a song of ascents. Ascent means going up.

Jerusalem sits on a hill, and three times a year families travelled there for the festivals. The last part of the journey was a climb, and these are the songs they sang on the way up — walking songs, sung by tired people with children and bundles, getting closer.

They're short. That's not an accident. They're the length of a song you can actually sing while walking.

The song with the echo

Psalm 136 has 26 verses, and all 26 end with exactly the same sentence.

That's because it was written to be sung by two groups. One side sings the first half of the line — the thing God did — and everybody else answers back with the second half, every time, twenty-six times.

Try it at home. Someone reads the first part of each verse and the rest of you answer. By about verse six you'll stop needing to look.

It ends with a party

The last five psalms all do the same thing: each one opens with praise and closes with praise, like five doors swinging the same way.

And Psalm 150 finishes the whole collection with instruments. Trumpet, harp, tambourine, strings, pipes, and cymbals — twice, because once wasn't loud enough.

Then comes the final line of the final psalm, and it doesn't narrow down to one group of people. It widens out as far as it possibly can: everything that breathes.

That's how a book which began with one person choosing a path ends — with every living thing joining in.