All your commandments Father Almighty

This uniquely-constructed and longest of all the Psalms presents commentators, congregations, and versifiers with special joys, opportunities, and decisions. It has attracted widely diverse treatment by all 3 groups, and to say that it is an alphabetic meditation on a section of Psalm 19 is only a small part of the story. Charles Bridges devoted nearly 500 pages to it in 1827; in the 1950s Artur Weiser dismissed it in a page and a half. In between come Calvin with nearly 100 pages, Dickson with 70, Kidner with 13 (in a much shorter work)—and so on. Jonathan Edwards, John Ruskin and E M Blaiklock are among many who have valued it highly; Romans 7:12 and 22 must also not be forgotten. While the main body of the Psalm is strongly personal (I, me, my) its beginning is notably plural (‘Blessed are they …’, contrast Psalm 1); these individual meditations are for us all. It seemed vital to provide variety in this selection of approaches; no version here takes us through all 176 vv, but for what amounts to a general summary see 557. Christopher Idle’s text provides an impressionist view of the whole which hints at the original alphabetical structure, where the 8 vv of each section start with the same Hebrew letter. Written at Limehouse in 1980, it appeared in Songs from the Psalms ten years later. Among others using an alphabetical sequence are Stephen Rees with his as yet unpublished text, where each letter has 16 lines in LM; e.g. ‘Keenly I look for you to save,/ Kept like a wineskin in the smoke;/ Knaves dig their traps to take my life,/ Keeping your precepts, I endure.’ His 22nd section uses ‘Y’ for ‘Yahweh’. Norman Warren’s tune SANDLING WAY was the first of 3 composed for these words, when they were sent to him by the author. The composer was then Rector of Morden, Surrey; this may be its first appearance in print, as arranged here (‘tidied up’) for piano by Linda Mawson. The name came later; 20 years on, NLW was living at Sandling Way, Chatham, Kent.

b Bromley, Kent 1938. Eltham Coll, St Peter’s Coll Oxford (BA, English), Clifton Theol Coll Bristol; ordained in 1965 to a Barrow-in-Furness curacy. He spent 30 years in CofE parish ministry, some in rural Suffolk, mainly in inner London (Peckham, Poplar and Limehouse). Author of over 300 hymn texts, mainly Scripture based, collected in Light upon the River (1998) and Walking by the River (2008), Trees along the River (2018), and now appearing in some 300 books and other publications; see also the dedication of EP1 (p3) to his late wife Marjorie. He served on 5 editorial groups from Psalm Praise (1973) to Praise!; his writing includes ‘Grove’ booklets Hymns in Today’s Language (1982) and Real Hymns, Real Hymn Books (2000), and The Word we preach, the words we sing (Reform, 1998). He edited the quarterly News of Hymnody for 10 years, and briefly the Bulletin of the Hymn Society, on whose committee he served at various times between 1984 and 2006; and addressed British and American Hymn Socs. Until 1996 he often exchanged draft texts with Michael Perry (qv) for mutual criticism and encouragement. From 1995 he was engaged in educational work and writing from home in Peckham, SE London, until retirement in 2003; following his return to Bromley after a gap of 40 years, he has attended Holy Trinity Ch Bromley Common and Hayes Lane Baptist Ch. Owing much to the Proclamation Trust, he also belongs to the Anglican societies Crosslinks and Reform, together with CND and the Christian pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. A former governor of 4 primary schools, he has also written songs for school assemblies set to familiar tunes, and (in 2004) Grandpa’s Amazing Poems and Awful Pictures. His bungalow is smoke-free, alcohol-free, car-free, gun-free and TV-free. Nos.13, 18, 21, 23A, 24B, 27B, 28, 31, 35, 36, 37, 48, 50, 68, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 89, 92, 95, 102, 108, 109, 114, 118, 119A, 121A, 125, 128, 131, 145B, 157, 176, 177, 193*, 313*, 333, 339, 388, 392, 420, 428, 450, 451, 463, 478, 506, 514, 537, 548, 551, 572, 594, 597, 620, 621, 622, 636, 668, 669, 693, 747, 763, 819, 914, 917, 920, 945, 954, 956, 968, 976, 1003, 1012, 1084, 1098, 1138, 1151, 1158, 1159, 1178, 1179, 1181, 1201, 1203, 1204, 1205, 1209, 1210, 1211, 1212, 1221, 1227, 1236, 1237, 1244, 1247, 5017, 5018, 5019, 5020.