‘Mountains Moved into the Sea’: The Western Reception of Psalm 46:1 and 3 [45:1 and 3 LXX] From the Septuagint to Luther

When Martin Luther wrote his famous hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott in the 1520s, it was uncommon to understand Ps. 46:1–3 [45:1–3 LXX] as a celebration of the peace available to those taking refuge in God amidst raging hostility—as the earth shook and mountains moved into the heart of the sea. Instead, for over a millennium, Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of verse 3 held sway. These verses contained ‘hidden’ truths made known when Christ came, so the shaking earth was the Jews, the mountains were Christ and his apostles, and the sea was the Gentiles in 46:3. According to Augustine, then, 46:1–3 celebrates God’s being a refuge amidst the working out of his plan to redeem the Gentiles through the mission of Christ and his apostles. This essay recounts the reception of 46:1–3 from the Septuagint to the time of Luther in a way that demonstrates the influence of the Septuagint’s translation of the superscription (verse 1), the dominance of Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of 46:1–3 for over a millennium, and how Luther’s growing appreciation of the historical sense shifts his interpretation of 46:1–3 away from Augustine to align with most interpreters in the early church and Nicholas of Lyra.

Ambiguities of Type

This chapter describes how the reading of secular poets like Homer and Vergil came to chime with an ongoing debate about the possibility of double senses—and therefore ambiguity—in Old Testament prophecy. It centres on the mid-eighteenth-century figures William Warburton and George Benson. According to earlier Protestant scholars, every passage in the Bible must have one and only one literal sense—that intended by the writer—and some Hebrew prophecies referred literally to Jesus. However, others had a literal fulfilment in the prophet's own era, as well as a mystical sense ratified by a citation in the New Testament. Whereas Catholic scholars in the tradition of Nicholas of Lyra described both meanings of such passages as ‘literal’, most Protestants maintained that the prophetic one was mystical or spiritual. In any event, it was precisely such additional mystical senses that set Scripture apart from other kinds of text. The chapter then considers how, in the 1760s, German scholars—keen readers of Benson and other English theologians—began to reach a rationalist consensus on the unitary sense of prophecy.