in Christ: Andrew Fountain's blog

I am teaching a course on the Psalms right now, so I have been looking around to see what material is available on the internet. There are two excellent resources which I can highly recommend and they are both free.

The first is an online book on understanding the Psalms by Allen Ross. He is an excellent Hebrew scholar—in fact it was his textbook I used in my first year Hebrew class. The material is up to date and his approach is well balanced, taking the best out of the various approaches to interpreting the Psalms. His section on poetry is particularly well done, as is the one on parallelism. Although the book is written at a technical level (for a seminary course), it is still very readable. If it were published in written form, I estimate it would be a 400-500 page book. I have made extensive use of his section on parallelism in my own class notes on Hebrew parallelism, adding a few examples of my own.

The second resource is an audio series by Bruce Waltke. Waltke is one of the foremost Old Testament scholars in the Evangelical world, and during his lifetime he has been Professor of O.T. at such noteable institutions as Dallas Theological Seminary and Westminster Seminary. He is one of the editors of the NIV and was series editor for the Expostitor's Bible Commentary on the O.T. Yet he is a humble man and the sincerity of his love for God is very evident in these audio lectures.

This lecture series is actually an online course, although the notes do not seem to be available. If Ross is the bones and sinews, Waltke is the meat. His material very much complements Ross. The style is more like that of a sermon in that it is motivational as well as factual, but having said that there is still a huge amount of technical content. Plus, his accent is a joy to listen to! Somehow you don't expect such an eminent scholar to sound quite so "New Jersey".

I have put links to both resources at the end of my Introduction to the Book of Psalms.