The 150 psalms found in God’s Word encompass the gamut of human experience – joy and pain, sin and forgiveness, despair and praise. With their unique, acoustic and multi-ethnic sound, Australia-based Sons of Korah offer an intriguing re-creation of the musical drama of the psalms. Family Christian Stores recently spoke with founder Matthew Jacoby about the band, their music and their inspiration.

Tell us about the inspiration for the name of your band.

How did the members of the band come together?

All of us who have been and are involved with the Sons of Korah are basically here to serve a very focused goal. It is to use music as a tool for meditating on the Word of God. This is a very traditional idea and indeed the psalms themselves were used in the ancient Jewish community as a means of imbibing God’s Word. We recognized that in our day, although most people have access to printed Bibles, it is a struggle for most people to really meditate on the Word. This is where music comes in. Music can help us to “ruminate” on God’s word in the most wonderful way – while we are driving, working, jogging etc. And music also causes it to stick. That is the project that we have stuck to since we began and it is this that defines our ministry.

One of the things that sets your music apart is the fact that you sing the Psalms. What drew you to them?

But beyond the artistic element, I think there is a very practical element to the psalms. They were given to us to use. Not just for us to admire but for us to use to shape our attitudes, prayers and our understanding of the spiritual life. Each psalm is a condensed poetic expression of truth. It is not truth in a dry abstract form but truth imprinted, as it were, upon the human heart. This is what the biblical faith looks like from the inside. This fascinates me personally. During the thickest part of the Sons of Korah activity I was writing a doctoral thesis on the nature of Christian doctrine. Over the five years it took me to do this I became more and more sensitive to the genius of the psalms. They express truth in such a concrete form and their form itself expresses the fact that biblical truth is dynamic and relational in nature. The psalms show that biblical truth resists any form of engagement that treats its words as a series of two dimensional logical propositions. In the psalms there is the invitation to experience the immanence of the transcendent God. They call us to gain knowledge through relationship.

The psalms fit so well into life because they came out of real life situations. I believe that as we allow the psalms to resonate in our minds we will learn how to respond to life’s situations, we will learn what prayer and worship really is, and we will change inwardly. This is why music is important as a frame for the psalms. Music makes the words resonate in our minds so that the Holy Spirit might use them to change our hearts. What I have wanted to do from the beginning of this ministry is to let the psalms do to people what God intended them to do. And what drives me on is seeing how much they do actually affect peoples’ lives.

Many people are probably unfamiliar with the history of the Psalms – who wrote them, how they were used or performed, the time period in which they were written. Can you provide a little background on them?

The psalms would have been originally preserved primarily for corporate use. These days the psalms tend to be seen as poems for individual reflection. We need to remember however that the average ancient Jew did not have his own copy of the Psalter. The psalms were introduced into a context where the corporate spiritual life was the primary feeder for the faith of the individual. This context is evident in the psalms themselves. Thanksgiving psalms like Psalm 40 are obviously written to be presented before the “great assembly” (see verses 9 & 10). These psalms were presented as testimonies and came to be seen as a kind of public offering. There are many psalms that are addressed from the plural “us” to God. And even those that are written from an individual point of view would have nevertheless been presented publicly and perhaps even used to re-enact their original situations in some way. Benediction psalms like psalm 67 suggest the context of a levitical blessing over the people. There is some evidence of a processional type context for some of the psalms but it is hard to say how this would have been done.

As for authorship, most of the psalms were written by David, I believe, but other people such as Asaph and the Sons of Korah were also active in their composition. Many of the psalms fit snugly into certain periods of David’s life and one thing I love to do when we perform the psalms is tell the stories. This always opens the psalms up greatly as they are heard in their historical context.

The music you perform is pretty diverse. How do you choose the instrumentation to complement a particular Psalm?

Through your music, you’ve had the opportunity to interact with the Psalms very intimately. What are some of the things you’ve learned through the process of studying them, setting them to music and singing them?

I think we can all learn so much from the psalms and I would especially like to see the psalms begin to inform our corporate worship practices. Through singing the psalms I have been able to understand genres of psalms that only offended me before. The battle psalms for example are generally discarded by Christians as Old Testament. But I have learned how to use them as tools for spiritual warfare. You see, it is only by using the psalms that you can really understand them. They are not given to inform us primarily but to transform us and they do this only when we use them. The psalms have not only taught me about God, they have shown me how to relate to God – and I am still learning.

How do the psalms speak to us today?

Another important role that the psalms play today, I believe, is to remind us of our spiritual heritage. The psalms are filled with concrete historical references; they always use specific names of the people and places that formed the context for the writing of the psalm. It is for this reason that many people see them as irrelevant and out-dated. They say that these names and places have little to do with us now. This is an unfortunate view. These places and these names are to be remembered and sung about because they symbolize key steps in the journey of God’s people of which we as Christians are heirs. This is our spiritual heritage in Christ! We tend to be very future oriented. But the patterns of God lie in the sacred histories and as we reflect on them we can become part of the pattern. The past holds the key to the future and one of the key purposes of the psalms is to preserve the memory of what God did for this and that person in this and that place.

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