The Book of Psalms

(director: of the Qorachites, a lyric)

* * *

In announcing that her music is “sense… insight… a parable… my puzzle” (3-4), the speaker of the powerful Psalm 49 challenges, even taunts. In a deepening from what the mouth speaks (sense) to what the heart murmurs (insight) to what the ear has to widen to hear (a parable) to what somehow opens on the harp (my puzzle), can hearer and reader tell which is which? Can we even find the parable and the puzzle, let alone understand or solve them?

The psalm’s gist is no riddle. The rich rely on wealth. This makes them cruel and dumb. They act like they and their possessions are immortal. They are not.

Do not fear | when someone gets rich

when his house’s | abundance grows                

for at his death | he grasps nothing at all                   

his abundance cannot | go down after him     (16-17).

Nothing is remotely unclear about this, despite the number of interpreters who stress how difficult this psalm is. The rich die and stay dead, just like their parents. “Until forever | they cannot see light” (29).

It’s not just the rich who die, of course. The psalm begins by asking everyone to listen, the sons of ’adam and the sons of ’ish: “lowborn | highborn / haves and | have nots alike” (2). Even a rich person who doesn’t want to die or see the pit understands this, “for he sees | the sensible die / the dull and dumb | together decease” (10). Everyone dies. The psalm explicitly states exactly nothing about redemption for the just or moral or rescued. There’s nothing about a second life or eternal life for the faithful or believers or the good.

It’s not that those readings are impossible to impose on Psalm 49– it’s been done– but that the psalm itself is entirely disinterested in questions about life after death. The psalm’s vision of Sheol is pastoral in its imagery:

As with sheep | set in a ditch                                

death | grazes upon them                                    

the upright tread on them | mornings                                               

their image wearing out | the ditch their mansion (14). 

The yetsarim, the upright, may “have dominion over” the dead in the morning, but there is no reason to figure this as a future arising in some speculative afterworld. Very literally, verse 14 shows the vertical putting the dead underfoot. The profundity of this verse comes from that pasturing, Death’s pasturing, in which the sheep are both actual sheep, feeding above the dead, and a figure for the dead themselves, laid out in a grave, being fed upon.

But if the psalm’s stance is that everyone dies, puzzles remain. Why single out the rich if all are grass where Death pastures his flock? And why does the speaker seem to assert that she herself is exempt from this? And, to repeat the only question the psalm actually asks, “Why should I fear | in the bad days / the wrong at my heels | that surrounds me?” (5).

The first question, the singular contempt for the rich, is answered in the psalm. “Those who lean on | their means / in the mass of their wealth | they boast” (6). Both “lean on” and the non-reflexive form of the verb “boast” are most often used for God: to rely on and to praise. Wealth warps this: the upper crust praise themselves for their affluence and rely, physically reclining, on their piles of cash. (It is hard not to think about 21st-century public figures like Cathie Wood, who blithely preach “faith in the marketplace.”) Worse, the psalm points out, riches beget callous selfishness:

A brother | he does not bail out   

not even for God | would he give ransom          

it is expensive | buying back necks               

and he will be done | forever                     (7-8).

The sarcasm is thick. It costs money to ransom those who have been kidnapped. The poor cannot choose to pay the price to save a life. The rich can, but there shouldn’t even be a choice. With ransoms, no one should waste time deliberating, nickel-and-diming. That last half-verse means many things: the brother is going to die someday anyway, so why bother paying to have him freed? God will be done with the rich. The ransoming of necks will stop. The rich man will cease forever. Wealth has wrecked him.

Why should the speaker fear encircling badness? That’s the psalm’s explicit question. It may also be its riddle. Verse 16 answers, kind of. She shouldn’t fear “when someone gets rich / when his house’s | abundance grows.” Those wrongs are as temporary as all of life, which is the deep parable, the insight that the rich just don’t get. “Someone with a fortune | cannot understand / he is as all animals | that end” (20), the psalm concludes, in a refrain that cleverly modifies its first iteration: “cannot stay,” verse 12 has instead. Understanding that she, too, will end–that is for the speaker one kind of removal of fear. She becomes a kind of Shakespeare’s Caesar:

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.

If Verse 16 offers stoicism in the mode of Ecclesiastes, verse 15 offers a different consolation. It poses a puzzle of its own. Cleverly, it reworks that brutal line about the rich man, verse 8, “A brother | he does not bail out / not even for God | would he give ransom.” Now the word “brother “(’ach) becomes “Yet” (’akh), and l`elohim moves from the second-to-last word to the second word: “Yet God | bails out my neck / from the hand of the ditch | when he grasps me” (15).

The consolation here is first-person singular, and the deep puzzle is why. Has only this speaker been exempted from death, the ditch, Sheol? Permanently or temporarily? Or is this verse better translated by the future, or in the cohortative mood, as a wish? “Yet” could be “Only” and “when” could be “if,” which would make this “Only God | bails out my neck / from the hand of the ditch | if he grasps me.” But why her? What besides singing has she done?

Two possible allusions hint at strikingly different interpretations. Besides Psalm 49:7, one verse that pairs the two words for ransom kofer and padah (admittedly in the alternative spelling pad`a) is Job 33:24. This is part of Elihu’s discussion of redemption for a dying person:

As his neck | nears the pit

and his life  | the executioners

if there is for him | a herald, an interpreter

one in a thousand | to show someone his uprightness

he will feel for him |  and say buy him back

from going down to the pit |  I have found a ransom

then his skin grown younger  | than a youth

he returns  | to the days of his vigor

he pleads to God  |   and he likes him

and he sees his face | with a shout

and he returns a person         his justice       (Job 33:22-26).

With no evidence besides a verbal similarity that allows for a possible allusion (which could even work in the other direction), the parallel here permits a reading in which the speaker of Psalm 49 sees herself as having—or being—this “one in a thousand” who points out a fountain of youth.

Just because Elihu thinks this, though, that doesn’t mean Psalm 49 asserts the same thing. Another possible allusion is to the law of redemption in the book of Numbers: “Yet (’akh) you must surely buy back (padah) the firstborn of the humans (ha’adam) and the firstborn of taboo animals (habeheimah) you buy back… but the firstborn calf or firstborn lamb or firstborn kid you do not buy back. They are hallowed. Their blood you toss on the altar, their fat you burn on the altar, for a soothing smell for the Lord” (Num 18:15-17). If, as Psalm 49 says, “he is as animals | that end,” using the verb nimshal to indicate the presence of a proverb, then the question becomes what kind of animal we are.