On Christain Teaching in Relation to the Pslams

The part of Saint Augustine's On Christian Teaching that immediately caught my attention was the lines "but no one disputes that it is much more pleasant to learn lessons presented through imagery, and much more rewarding to discover meanings that are won only with difficulty." This reminded me of the Psalms because the ones that were most interesting to discuss involved intense descriptions of God coming down from the heavens basically breathing fire or God giving the speaker enough strength to utterly destroy his enemies. Imagery does make the Psalms more intriguing, which in turns makes them more exciting to analyze. The second part of the quote indicates that the message is much more likely to stay with the reader when it has to be deciphered. Here the Psalms varied. Some were more straight forward, but does that then mean that they are less important and less time should be spent reading over them? Some Psalms involved understanding historical meanings and certain rituals relating to the time period. Understanding the background helped to appreciate the meaning more fully. Not only through how the Psalms can be interpreted on a personal level now, but how they might have been viewed in the time that they were written can combine to offer a meaning "won only with difficulty."

Also the question of translators comes up in Saint Augustine's On Christian Teaching, which I found to be another connection to the Psalms. Since they were written in ancient Hebrew, there are some open ended lines that may have been interpreted maybe not wrongly, but maybe not entirely correctly either. This is an interesting concept. These Psalms have been around for hundreds of years, yet, some religions may be instructing their members on Psalms that have been translated in a different way than their original intention. This brings up the question of if there was a mistake, whether it is better to not know that the translation was wrong and continue to teach the wrong message from the perspective of the original author, or is it alright to accept this varied view?