(director: don’t destroy; of David, in stone, when he ran from Saul into the cave)

* * *

Probably no biblical Hebrew word presents the challenges the word kavod presents. It appears three times in the second half of Psalm 57 (verses 5, 8, 11), twice in a refrain in reference to God. The other time, in verse 8, the word seems to refer to something of the speaker’s. The common translation is “glory,” which nearly every English version has in verses 5 and 11, and most have for verse 8. There in verse 8, some translators choose “my soul” or “my heart.” According to linguists, the word likely originally indicated heaviness and weight, the valence of which is entirely positive—the weight of one’s riches, the superabundance of bodily prosperity, a kind of fullness or saturation that comes to mean luxury or grandeur or dignity or honor.

Whether because of those abstracted qualities or for some other reason, kavod also refers to a grand, dignified presence, usually the presence of the Lord, a presence that is nevertheless not necessarily a substance, a kind of surrounding something that is visible (Exod 24:16) and shines (Isa 60:1). Glowing is part of the semantic range of “glory,” though contemporary usage of the word “glory” tends to have lost even that insubstantial substance, making it seem both pious and not really there. What’s needed in translation, then, is something both weighty and glowing, something ethereal with gravitas, or one or the other. “Ambience” calls to mind candles; “aura” conjures crystals. “Honor” gets most of the abstract qualities; “heft” gets half of the concrete meanings with most of the abstract qualities as well. It’s a big ask.

For Psalm 57, the word “nimbus” seems to work. Its etymology and meteorology give it a dark atmospheric weight, while its association with haloes keeps its register and valuation fitted for characterizing God in the Psalms: “Rise above the skies | God / above all the earth | your nimbus” (5). “Atmosphere” feels too literal here. “Heft” would be laughable in this context—though it works well in Psalm 3:3 (“my shield / my heft | the lifter of my head” ) and in 96:7 (“give the Lord | heft and might”). And while “glory” seems too much for a speaker to conjure for herself, “nimbus” colors the speaker’s imperative both gold and gray: “Awake, my nimbus | awake, ten-string and lyre / I want to wake | the dawn” (57:8).  

Compellingly, the psalm’s emphasis on the kavod maps it above the psalmist’s enemies and their “net they set for my feet” (6). Those enemies have hunted the speaker, who lies “amid the lions… the ones who consume | mortals / their teeth | spear and arrows / their tongue | sharp sword” (4). Down against those hunters, the Lord “sends | his care and faithfulness” (3, cf. 10), which descend just as the kavod rises. As the enemies who would crush the speaker (3) are laid low, chesed and ’emet descend. Kavod rises. At the same time, the weight/glow also opposes the “hungers” with which verse 1 ends, the havvot. And so the heavy light that accompanies both God and the psalmist’s music comes as compensation for the experience of internal emptiness and destruction. Against a hungry imploding, the poem posits outward explosions, weighty eruptions of glory and light.