I got up this morning at six so I could get a picture of the rising sun on the summer solstice. The fog was so thick I couldn't see beyond the shore line. Then I read that the earliest sunrise is often a few days earlier than the solstice. Maybe the sunrise that I posted Wednesday. So here's a somewhat different picture of that.
Psalm 19 is one of my favorites. I used it for meditation today. C.S. Lewis thought it was the most beautiful of all the psalms. The name used for God is El, an ancient Near-Eastern name for the high god. The Hebrew word for sun has the same root as the name of the Babylonian sun god. It may be that the psalmist has taken poetic elements about the Babylonian god to show that the Hebrew God is the creator of the sun. In other words, "Our God made your god!" Here are verses 4-6:
There at the rim of the world
God has pitched a tent
for the sun to rest and rise renewed
like a bridegroom rising from bed,
an athlete eager to run the race.
It springs from the edge of the earth,
runs its course across the sky
to win the race at heaven's end.
Nothing on earth escapes its heat.
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