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Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Thanksgiving hymns are a number of centuries old, tops – but biblical psalms of gratitude and praise return 1000’s of years

Thanksgiving doesn’t ring within the ear for months on end, unlike one other holiday that lies just ahead. Yet readers may remember a few hymns that roll around each November in church, across the dinner table, and even – for readers of a certain age – at school. One I remember well is “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come.” Then there’s “We Gather Together,” or “We Plough the Fields and Scatter.”

Interestingly, for songs related to a distinctly American holiday, none have American origins. “Come, Ye Thankful People” was written by Henry Alford, a Nineteenth-century English cleric who ascended to turn into dean of Canterbury Cathedral and supposedly rose to his feet to offer thanks after every meal and on the close of day-after-day. “We Gather Together” is way older, written in 1597 to have fun the Dutch victory over the Spanish within the Battle of Turnhout. “We Plough the Fields” was written by a German Lutheran in 1782.

As someone who studies American culture and spiritual music, I’m concerned with the backstory of the songs that now we have come to take with no consideration. Someone wandering right into a church and picking up a hymnal will likely discover a handful of hymns filed under “thanksgiving,” but many more express a general sense of gratitude, similar to “Now Thank We All Our God” and “For the Beauty of the Earth.” Even more hymns fall under the related category of praise – in any case, a typical response to feeling blessed or rescued is to supply praise to the upper being thought to bestow those gifts.

None of those impulses are uniquely Christian, and even religious. But hymns of praise and gratitude have been central to Jewish and Christian worship for millennia. In fact, they return to one in all the best-known scenes within the Hebrew Bible.

Fleeing Pharaoh

The earliest musical performance mentioned within the Hebrew Bible is “The Song of the Sea,” referring to 2 songs Moses and his sister Miriam sing to have fun the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. As Pharaoh’s army pursues the fleeing slaves to the sting of the Red Sea, God opens a dry path for them before closing up the ocean to swallow the soldiers, in response to the Book of Exodus:

Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the ladies followed her, with timbrels and dancing. Miriam sang to them: ‘Sing to the Lord, for he is extremely exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the ocean.’

Jewish singer Debbie Friedman, who died in 2011, wrote “Miriam’s Song,” adapting these lines from Exodus into a contemporary favorite.

‘The Chludov Psalter,’ a book of psalms, shows ‘The Song Of Moses and Miriam,’ from around A.D. 850. Found within the Collection of State History Museum, Moscow.
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Temple worship

One research project took me deep into the world of the Hebrew Psalms, which originally were sung mainly during rituals on the temple in Jerusalem. Scholars have speculated for hundreds of years over the composition and sequencing of those Hebrew poems that form one book of the Bible. The 150 psalms include an important many laments, expressions of praise and gratitude, and quite a number of texts that mix each.

Hermann Gunkel, a pioneering Bible scholar on the turn of the twentieth century, developed a system of classifying the texts within the Book of Psalms by genre, which experts still use today. What Gunkel called “Thanksgiving” psalms are texts that commemorate God’s actions to bestow blessings and alleviate affliction particularly times and places: healing from a serious illness, for instance. Gunkel’s categories also include psalms that confer with gratitude for more general divine actions: creating the cosmos and the wonders of the natural world, or protecting the traditional Israelites from foreign enemies.

It’s hard to seek out a text more brimming with gratitude than Psalm 65, which incorporates verses very suitable for Thanksgiving Day:

  The streams of God are full of water
      to supply the individuals with grain,
      for thus you could have ordained it. 
  You drench its furrows and level its ridges;
      you soften it with showers and bless its crops.
  You crown the yr along with your bounty,
      and your carts overflow with abundance. 

A latest idea: Songs about Jesus

Though the unique tunes of the psalms have been long lost, their words are still a mainstay of non secular singing for each Jews and Christians.

Their key role in Protestant churches today owes partly to the Reformation of the sixteenth century. During the Renaissance, Catholics had developed more ornate musical forms for the Mass, including the usage of polyphony: songs with two or more simultaneous interwoven melodies. Protestants, alternatively, decided that unadorned psalms, put into standard musical meters that matched existing tunes, were optimal for church.

Reformation leader Martin Luther loved music and wrote his own hymns with original words which can be still popular today, similar to “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” As far because the more austere reformer John Calvin was concerned, nevertheless, the plainer the higher. Unharmonized a cappella psalm singing was plenty good for the sabbath, he insisted.

Calvin’s judgment carried the day in New England, which was settled largely by Puritan Calvinists. In fact, the primary book published in North America was “The Bay Psalm Book,” in 1640. It took a century for hymns with latest words to begin finding acceptance in churches, and even longer for organs to make an appearance there.

A black and white illustration shows a woman helping four children sing from hymnals.
An illustration from an 1866 edition of hymn author Isaac Watts’ ‘Divine and Moral Songs for Children.’
Bridgeman/Culture Club/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Gradually these restrictions began to melt, even in New England. During the 1700s, hymns began to compete with psalms in popularity. The key innovator was Isaac Watts, a talented poet who wondered why Christians couldn’t sing worship songs that referenced Jesus Christ – for the reason that Book of Psalms, written before his birth, didn’t. John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism, were also inveterate hymn writers.

Praise yesterday and today

To modern ears, the difference between psalms and hymns is barely perceptible. Hymns often draw heavily on the photographs and tropes of the psalms. Even a simple-sounding Thanksgiving hymn like “We Gather Together” incorporates no fewer than 11 allusions to particular psalms.

Watts, the Wesley brothers and a number of other other hymn writers were a part of movements that helped birth modern evangelical Christianity. Some of probably the most famous hymns of thanksgiving and praise have been popularized by evangelical revivals over the centuries: “Amazing Grace,” by an 18th-century English curate, and “How Great Thou Art,” the theme song of world-famous preacher Billy Graham’s revivals.

Over the past 30 years, the booming genre of contemporary worship music, often referred to easily as praise music, has turn into the usual heard in megachurches and other evangelical congregations the world over. Not surprisingly, praise and gratitude are inescapable themes on this genre – whether or not they evoke a Thanksgiving feast.

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