(director: of David)

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Psalm 14 and Psalm 53

Not quite the same psalm, Psalms 14 and 53 should be discussed together in broad strokes before being distinguished. They share a theme: the world is stuffed to the gills with wrongdoers and fools. (Our news says much the same.) The two psalms share a basic conflict: as at Sodom and Gomorrah, as before the flood, God spies no good in people at all. And the psalms share the same resolution, a wish for the Lord (“God,” in Psalm 53) to turn the turning, to bring back captives, restore fortunes. Each psalm also has the same challenges of camerawork and perspective. We are located in God’s point of view, divine free indirect discourse, but for how long? Every verse except the first and last? And where—when—does the nearly central locative word sham, “there”/“then”, point? To Zion? But that’s where the rescue is coming from, no? Who says “you” in 14:6 (plural) || 53:5 (singular)?

Both psalms also share difficult lines and differ exactly at the logic’s weakest point. If everyone is awful, why rescue Israel and Jacob? Is it that God is “with the cohort of the just” as Psalm 14 has it, or that God “has scattered the bones of the besieger” as Psalm 53 says? The same formulation of dread/awe/reverence in the psalm’s key moment (pachdu pachad: “they dreaded a dread,” something FDR might have said) seems to differ between the psalms as well, signifying reverence in Psalm 14, but terror in Psalm 53. Every part of this assertion could be wrong.

There’s no shortage of attempts to explain how the two psalms relate, or why both appear in the book of Psalms, appearing where they do. A range of explanations is theoretically possible: that, given the preference of Psalm 53 and the rest of the Elohistic Psalter for “God” instead of “Lord” (changes in 53:2, 4, 5, 6, for a total of seven namings), the two lyrics come from different regions or time periods; that Psalm 14 revises 53 (few claim this), that 53 revises 14, or that both revise a lost original, perhaps by the same editors, who fitted them to different parts of the Psalter. Perhaps it’s just variations on a theme. There is compelling slippage of language between the two: 14:6 has ets-ani tavishu… machsehu, while 53:5 reads atsmot chonakh hevishotah… me`asam. The sounds are close enough to each other to suggest a desired consistency, but far enough away to suggest neither slavish copying nor mere accident. What the differences and similarities do show is a living tradition, not fixity but flux.

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14:1 no God / they’ve ruined  It’s not clear where the quotation starts or where the voice of the narrator begins again. Much depends on what is meant by “no God.” Is this a lament about an immoral world? A declaration of atheism? The internal voice of the idiot, the fool, may just be saying “no God,” or it may be thinking the rest of the whole verse, that “no one’s doing good.” What’s particularly compelling is that 14:1 anticipates the Lord’s assertion— or the narrator’s— in 14:3 that no one’s doing good. Does this mean that the clueless person is right and is echoed by the Lord? Or is this the narrator both times?

14:4 eating my people / as they ate bread  There’s no “as” in Hebrew, which energizes the meanings of the line. My people were just (or ritually) eating bread together when they were consumed by the villains. The villains ate my people the way one eats bread. To eat my people is to eat bread that is not your own.

14:5 There they trembled | trembling  The phrase pachdu pachad is only part of what makes this line the crux of the poem—they, the wrongdoers, were in terror? Or they, my people, were reverent? The real hinge is the word sham which clearly points to some location, but the location shapes the meaning.  

14:6 The council of the weak | you mock  Who are the you and they? The blocking and the stage directions are blurred. Dahood is good here: perhaps this should read: “the council of the weak will shame you.”

14:7 when the Lord brings back | his people’s captivity  The words are beshuv and shevut, from similar roots: when he turns his people’s turning. Both words resonate meaningfully with yeshuat, rescue.