(director: on the Gath harp, of the Qorachites, lyric)

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This psalm lurches interestingly. It’s so caught between different verse patterns and readymade phrases that it would be tempting to call it a hodgepodge or even a mess rather than “a lively exchange of various forms, motifs, and themes” (Kraus II 166). But the psalm’s uneven rhythms mirror its deepest concern, the tension between residence and mobility.

It is as if the Ark of the Covenant itself were speaking, the seat of power of YHWH Sabaoth, the Lord-in-Battle-Gear, having just been relocated from bloody theaters of war and high places like Shiloh and Shechem to what will become Solomon’s Temple. Or maybe what we hear is the voice of the sixth-century BCE architects of the Second Temple, returned from exile, nostalgic for militarism and monarchy. Either way, Psalm 84 works by recognizing both the desire for movement and the desire for a home. Its longing for Zion is less a conventional piety and more a scene of conflict between the longing for a dwelling and memories of walking around.

The psalm seems to be arranged first around a sequence of places belonging to the Lord of Armies: “your quarters” (1), “the Lord’s enclosures” (2), “your altars” (3), “your home” (4), Zion (7), “your enclosures,” and “the gate | of the house of my God” (10). In tension with these locations— really, all are just metonyms for a single location, implying variety within unity— are two key passages about mobility.

The first is the misunderstood stanza in verses 5-7 about the person with “highways in his heart.” Often this is construed as a love for pilgrimage or it’s amended willfully to “trust in their heart” (Kraus) or “from whose heart are your extolments” (Dahood). Hermann Gunkel writes thickly, “Even with the best intentions one cannot carry highways in one’s heart.” (Surely he never drove Highway 1 south from Santa Cruz through Big Sur, nor the Flaggy Shore that Seamus Heaney describes in “Postscript,” let alone the Dingle Peninsula or Donegal, never hiked the Appalachian Trial nor Offa’s Dyke. Nor, more to the point, did he walk hundreds of miles as a pilgrim or nomad or refugee.)

The psalm’s images are strange but precise. People, plural, who pass over a vale of tears, water it. This passing-over momentarily inverts the story of the crossing of the Reed Sea— instead of having waters held back, they add to the flood. And yet, these tears become “a spring / and even blessings | which the first rain sheathes” (6). How could highways not be in one’s heart, to see a grievous crossing make the wilderness fertile? Are these people the children of Israel coming to the promised land, or pilgrims forced from the shrines of the northern kingdom, or refugees from Babylon, or willing pilgrims or tourists, visiting station after station? Either way, highways are indeed in their heart, as each is either “seen before God,” yeira’eh ’el ’elohim, as the circumspect Masoretic vowels say, or yir’eh ’el ’elohim as the consonantal text says, “sees the God of Gods” (or even “El sees God in Zion”).

Verse 10 frames movement and stasis as a comparison, which would seem strange if there were no tension between the two. The contrast pits being stationary at the temple (“a day in your enclosures… standing at the gate | of the house of my God”) against traveling around with the military. The phrase “sweeter than a thousand” sends some translators in search of a substantive to anchor “a thousand”—“a thousand at home” (Kraus), “a thousand in the Cemetery” (! Dahood, banging on again about Death). But ’eleph contains its own substance; more than a numeral, it designates a military unit, a regiment, a battalion. It’s better to be closed in for a day than to spend a thousand days with a thousand soldiers, in other words, and better to stand like a bouncer outside the temple than to bivouac, “wandering around | in the tents of wrong.” The Assyrian loanword dur seems to indicate circular motion rather than “dwelling.” What makes the tents “wrong”? Again, the reference could be either to the Exodus or to the Exile or to the northern shrines shunned by the centralizing Yahwists. 

Though verse 10 clearly prefers rooting in Zion to circling about with the military, the psalm concludes with blessings for a particular kind of movement and a particular staying in place. The Lord gives both “sun and shield,” both openness and protection, both “favor and glow,” according to verse 11. And to whom? “He holds back nothing sweet | from those who walk soundly… all set, the one who leans on you” (12). The reclining movement of trust is motion within stillness, while walking soundly requires a kind of stillness within motion. These same paradoxes are visible in the birds of verse 3, emblems of both liberty and domesticity, wing and nest, who have nested charmingly, ironically, precariously in the altars of the Lord of Armies.