Almost certainly the Buddhist Katsushika Hokusai knew nothing of the Psalms. When he created this woodblock print, Christianity had been banned in Japan for two centuries. The ban remained in force (1615–1868) until after his death. Earlier poets and painters had made waves central to the national imagination—viewed as both a protection against intruders and a danger, discouraging foreign travel. Yet within a few decades, this image from the ‘closed country’ would begin to instruct the Western imagination about Japan. Over the last century at least, Hokusai’s Under the Wave has attained the status of a global icon, a boundary-crossing image capable of communicating with viewers in multiple religious traditions and cultures.

In Israelite and Japanese religious cultures, mountains and the sea are viewed as awesome in the true sense—life-giving and fearsome—and thus evocative of divinity. Although they come from the eastern and western extremes of the Asian continent, respectively, Hokusai’s image and Psalms 42–43 (originally a single psalm) share two elements of their landscapes: mountains and deep waters.

Japanese and Western viewers are likely to read the print differently from one another. For Westerners, reading left to right, the towering wave is first and foremost. Asian viewers, trained to read from the opposite direction, might focus instead on what stands ‘under the wave’ (Hokusai’s own title): Mount Fuji, the sacred volcano, both dangerous and revered.

Refocusing on Fuji as a sign of divinity may yield a better understanding of the watery paradox central to Psalm 42: the psalmist yearns for God’s presence in the midst of troubles that also seem to come from God. God’s ‘waves and billows’ threaten to overwhelm, but still ‘deep calls to deep’ (42:7 own translation), the depths of affliction to the depths of faith. God is present here. A Christian viewer might press further. The three-lobed cloud hovering over Fuji’s peak—could that be a cruciform figure with arms outstretched, a sign of divine presence to those in distress?

References

Guth, Christine. 2015. Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press)

Terry, Charles S. 1959. Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mt. Fuji (Tokyo: Toto Shuppan)

‘My tears have been food for me day and night’ (Psalm 42:3)—the psalmist’s surprising image of being fed by tears inspires this visual midrash (imaginative scriptural commentary in Jewish tradition). The twin architectural panels on the once conjoined Psalms 42–43 follow designs Diane Palley originally developed in the Jewish folk-art medium of papercut.

In the first panel, fructifying rain shaped like tears falls to earth. In response, the terraced hills yield the legendary seven fruits of the land of Israel: figs, grapes, dates, pomegranates, olives, wheat, and barley. Adapting that biblical and Jewish tradition for a Christian worship space, Palley frames this panel with the growth cycles of wheat and grapes, the elements of the Eucharist.

The figure of the deer is highlighted by converging lines, where the ridge of hills meets the billowing waters. Head down, it approaches a stream filled with eighteen fish, representing the most important prayer of the synagogue, the Shmoneh Esrei (‘eighteen’), which praises God in a lengthy series of blessings. In this context the fish symbol is deliberately ambiguous; for Christian worshippers it may recall the acrostic of one of the earliest Greek affirmations of faith: ICHTHYS: Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour).

Following the fish down the turbulent stream, the eye moves to the strong affirmation of hope in God that is the psalm’s refrain (Psalm 42:5, 11; 43:5). In the second panel, three fish—a reference to the Trinity—swim in a now-calm stream through the fertile land. The visual movement is upward, to David’s harp (symbolizing praise), which is framed by wheat and grapes, blooming roses (a transcultural symbol of divine love), a crown, and the rising sun: ‘They will bring me to your holy mountain…’ (43:3). Praise persisting through tribulation leads to life in abundance. Hence the composition is framed by the growth cycle of the many-seeded pomegranate, a biblical symbol for God’s gift of life (and, for Christians, of resurrection).

The thirsty deer of Psalm 42 stands at the foot of the cross in the Apse Mosaic, the crown jewel of the twelfth-century church of San Clemente in Rome. In fact, three deer constitute the foundation of the glowing composition, which offers a condensed visual account of all salvation history and the work of the three Persons of the Trinity.

At the bottom, two deer slake their thirst from the four rivers that flow from Eden (Genesis 2:10). Just above, one deer, encircled by a red serpent, drinks from a great body of water. Is this the primeval deep (Genesis 1)? Or the river of the water of life (Revelation 22:1)? The image may recall an ancient belief that deer eat venomous snakes, neutralizing their poison with copious quantities of water. Psalm 42 figured prominently in baptismal liturgies, and medieval viewers would have recognized in the scene allusions to the soul’s thirst for God’s grace and deliverance from deadly sin through the sacrament.

Above the lone deer spreads an acanthus plant. Greeks associated its thorny, aromatic leaves with victory over suffering, and Christians with resurrection; in John’s Gospel (19:2), the soldiers plait a crown of akanthos for Jesus. Here the cross rises from the plant and stretches nearly the height of the apse, to where a divine hand reaches down to crown him with a victory wreath. The cross is surrounded by thorns and studded with twelve doves, symbolizing the apostles in their innocence (Matthew 10:16).

The gold background that fills the apse represents the divine glory that fills the world through the discrete actions of the Triune God: the original creation (Eden), Jesus’s victory on the cross, and the renewal of creation through the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ.

References

Oakeshott, Walter. 1967. The Mosaics of Rome: From the Third to the Fourteenth Centuries (London: Thames & Hudson)