The Book of Psalms

April 21st, 2023

Psalm 41
(director: lyric, of David)

* * *

Psalm 41, the last psalm of the first section of Psalms, begins just as the first psalm did: ‘ashrei, “all set” (1:1, 41:1). Instead of simply opposing good and bad, however, the concluding psalm of this collection opposes sickness and health, good nursing of the sick versus terrible bedside manners.

The one who’s “all set,” blessed and happy both, is someone “who attends to | the frail” (1). This consideration for the weak aligns him with the Lord, who “nurses him | on his sickbed” (3). The repeated masculine pronouns blur the characters and types: the Lord, the sick one, the caregiver, and even, in verse 6, an enemy whose “heart would speak a lie” (6). The blurring amplifies the Lord’s role, divine care: “the Lord sets him free / the Lord keeps him | and revives him / so he’s all set in the land” (1-2). Who is this who is all set? “The frail” one? Or whoever looks after the frail one? By verse 3, all the blurring pays off, when the Lord’s own caring “on his sickbed” means healing the sick, present continuous, as well as healing, future tense, the one who has attended the sick.

From its third-person overview, the psalm turns to first-person narration. It remains in first person for the rest of the psalm, verses 4-12. We learn that what makes the speaker’s enemies bad is not some immoral essence, but specific acts and failures. They “speak | bad of me” (5). They “speak a lie” beside the sickbed. And then they speak differently out in the streets (6), as they “whisper” and “conspire” (7).

Not even this speech of the enemies is simplistic. It starts by wondering “how long till he dies | and his name fades” (5). It ends with the wishful lie that “having lain down | he [the sick person] will not get up again” (8). But in between, in an imagined scene, the enemies’ speech transforms: “or if one did come visit | his heart would speak a lie / would gather grief” (6).

The syntax of that verse erupts with meaning. Does the heart speak? Does it gather grief? Does it do both? Or is it the visitor who gathers grief—or trouble—to himself, or does trouble gather him? Either way, this visitor with a deceptive heart heads to the streets and spreads lies: “something wicked | flows in him” (8). The line is a quotation, the liar publicly blaming the victim. But it works, too, as a characterization of the liar, one made even more incisive by the repeated use of the root word for speech in the word “something.”

Add to all of this slander the personal betrayal by a close friend, literally “a friend of my peace,” and the whole experience cuts deep. Verse 9 is particularly poignant: “one who ate my bread | has lifted his heel at me.” The lifting of a heel signals the actively passive act of walking away. It contrasts sharply with the Lord’s compassion and pity in verse 10: “feel for me / and raise me up | so that I might repay them.” The same word, shalom, marks both the friend and the root of the verb “repay.” It’s profoundly ambivalent: the repayment of peace for unkindness, the repayment of what’s deserved for unkindness. The peace that the friend of peace should have had—it comes back with a vengeance.

The final stanza, verses 11 and 12 (verse 13 is actually the benediction formula for each of the five collections of the book of Psalms), provides a fitting end for both the psalm and the first collection of psalms, Pss 1-41. The enemy no longer gloats. The Lord is pleased. And as for the speaker, “and me, in my wellness | you have held me / that you might stand me | before your face always.” Healing and reconciliation are achieved. There is a gesture of upholding, and of being-stood. All of these resolve both the specifics of this narrative and many themes of the first collection.
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My name is Mark Minster. I’m an English and Comparative Literature professor with a background in ministry and in poetry. I teach courses on writing, reading, religion, and nature.
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April 20th, 2023

Psalm 40
(director: of David, lyric)

* * *

Psalm 40 in English is smoother than it is in Hebrew. This is largely because cadence and abstraction make a psalm seem more cohesive than it is. It’s not a coincidence that the band U2’s version, “40,” achieves its power by taking only verses 1-3 and making Psalm 40’s “new song” into a question that this psalm seems unlikely to have asked: “how long?” The whole coheres in only the broadest of ways: a speaker generically expresses confidence that the Lord will deliver as the Lord has done before. But the psalm’s leaps from verse to verse are large, its images and theme-words differ from section to section, and even the ideas are non sequiturs. Only as a retort to the darkness of the preceding psalms does it seem whole.

If we try to assemble the psalm on its own logic, challenges arise. Verse 3 fits verses 1 and 2 just fine as a comment on the experience of being lifted from harm. But verse 4 seems almost to start over, with the generic third-person singular of the typical wisdom verse: “all set, the hero,” which echoes Psalm 34:8). It is primarily the stitching of “lean” in verse 3 and “leaning” in verse 4 that hooks those pieces together. Verse 5 shifts yet again, now to the second person address of the Lord. It even interrupts itself: “your considerations of us” (a mouthful in the original: umachshevotekha eileinu) followed immediately by “nothing compares to you | let me announce / let me speak / they’ve surpassed numbering.”

These leaps are just the beginning. Verse 6 critiques the insufficiency of ritual in the language of prophets. “Slaughter and grain | did not please you” is paired with “burnt gifts and sin gifts | you did not ask,” but interrupted by “my ears | you opened for me.” How did we get from 5 to 6? Is this the new song? So far we have, to paraphrase, I was rescued and given a new song, people will see and lean on the Lord, the strong person who leans on the Lord will do well, the Lord has done countless wonders, let me speak, and sacrifices are not necessary, my ears are open. Verses 7 and 8 compound the confusion:

                    And so I said                       I have come now

                    in the scroll of the book   it was written about me

                    To do what you like           my God I have been pleased

your direction                     is in my very core

More interruptions, more tenuous connections. In the scroll of which book what was written? That the speaker has been pleased to follow the instructions of Torah? Or the line “I have come now,” which in fact is written in other books: in the voice of Balaam in Numbers or at the offering of the first fruits in Deuteronomy 26? If this is an allusion, is quotation really what’s going on with the other interruptions, the lines “let me speak” and “my ears | you opened for me,” all three of which seem like dropped hints? A thoroughly textual poem, Psalm 40 comes to seem less like music and more like midrash, like commentary on other texts.

Seen as a response to other psalms, in fact, Psalm 40 starts to hold together. It works to correct the psalms of lament and protest that came just before. To the sinking experience of the speaker in Psalm 38:4, “my wrongs [avonotai] | have come up over my head / like a heavy weight | they weigh more than me,” the first two verses of Psalm 40 respond, “he bent to me… and hauled me | from the pit of clamor/ from the muck of slime | hoisted my feet.” Later, Psalm 40 actually replaces Psalm 38’s vertical scene of jeopardy with a horizontal one: “my wrongs [avonotai] have reached me … they surpassed | the hairs of my head” (40:12). To this replacement threat, the “new song” of Psalm 40 presents a more traditional series of prayers and assertions: “I, weak and poor, | my lord considers me/ my help | and my rescuer” (40:17).

Importantly, this is not a denial or erasure of the claims and experiences of Psalm 38 and 39. It’s a different, competing testimonial. Psalm 38 presents a distant God in the face of pain. Psalm 40 describes a God of “considerations” (40:5, 17), and prays, “your care and steadiness | may they continually keep me close” (40:11). Psalm 39 is an experience of speaking through closed lips—“I was bound in silence” (39:3) and “I have been bound | I won’t open my mouth” (39:9). Psalm 40 interrupts itself to emphasize by contrast the openness of communication: “He gave my mouth | a new song” (40:3), “let me announce / let me speak” (40:5), “my ears | you opened for me” (40:6), and “look I don’t shut my lips” (40:9), “I have spoken / I have not hidden” (40:10). Even little things from Psalm 39 are challenged by Psalm 40. Near the end of Psalm 39, having wondered, “now what | have I held out for” (39:7), the speaker asks in the traditional manner (see 5:1, e.g.), “Hear my prayer Lord | to my cry perk ear” (39:12). The very beginning of Psalm 40 takes up both of these points: “I held out and held out | for the Lord / he bent to me | and heard my cry” (40:1). It is as if to say, that’s what you held out for. At the end of Psalm 39, the speaker wants to smile before the abyss (39:13). Near the end of Psalm 40, the new speaker responds: “may they laugh | and smile in you / all who seek you | may they ever say/ God be great | who love your rescue” (40:16). Psalm 40 even completes, inverts, and clarifies the open-ended “for you [’attah]| you did [`asita]” from 39:9: “So much you did [`asita] | you [’attah], Lord my God / your marvels | your considerations… they’ve surpassed numbering” (40:5).

In this light, seen as a critique of Psalm 39 and, to a lesser extent, Psalm 38 and even Psalm 35 (which 40:14 quotes), the interruptions and asides of Psalm 40 make sense. “It is written of me” (40:7) suggests that it might not be written of you, just as “I have not kept secret… I have not hidden” (40:10) now reads like a dig, as does the literally digging in the verb “to dig” in “my ears | you opened for me” (40:6). Psalm 40:4, which turns from first-person experience to third-person generalization, now reads not as a non sequitur, but as the most direct accusation of all: “all set, the hero | who has set the Lord as his leaning / and not turned to monsters | or those who fall to lies.” The word rehabim may not literally mean “monsters”—it’s used only here— but it wears the plural of Rahab, the great sea beast, and connotes storms as well as pride. Even the word “turned” seems loaded in this context. In the Hebrew, the verb is panah, “faced,” not as in “confronting” or “facing down,” but as in “turns to look at full on.” The point of the verse seems to be that, unlike certain nameless someones, the writer of Psalm 40 feels you’ll be better off not facing down beasts that lie deep, not falling into or falling for lies.
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My name is Mark Minster. I’m an English and Comparative Literature professor with a background in ministry and in poetry. I teach courses on writing, reading, religion, and nature.
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April 19th, 2023

Psalm 39
(director: of Jeduthun, lyric, of David)

* * *

As the first book of the Book of Psalms nears its end— Psalms 40 and 41 are its final pair— things get bleak. Psalm 39 is as dark as it gets, a protest psalm, a prayer of outrage. The physical suffering and psychological torment of Psalm 38 have given way to resignation, the end of the rope. This is the mode of Job and Ecclesiastes, a speaker with no time for pieties, who can’t keep her mouth shut.

The introductory verses, best read as two tercets with the last line of verse 2 marking the turn to a second stanza, establish a complicated dynamic at the very edge of speech. “I said,” says the speaker, talking ironically about having tamed the tongue and gagged the mouth. But pain and its contemplation boil over, and again she speaks: “I spoke | with my tongue” (3). The effect is paradoxical, speech that doesn’t want to be spoken, the clenched teeth of an outburst.

  And what an outburst!

          Make me know, Lord         my end                                                  4

          and the hem of my days     how it is

          I want to know                  how fragile I am

In Hebrew, too, the syntax is interruptive, with expressions that waver between statement, question, and exclamation. The doubled mah, rendered here as “how,” can be interrogative, but also means “what” and “oh.” It even means “why.” How long do I have left? How is it my life is so short? The line “I want to know” reframes “make me know,” an insistence on being told. It works backward—“what is it that I want to know?”—as well as forward: “I want to know | how fragile I am.”

That irony cuts deep. If the speaker knows anything, it’s how fragile she is, as evidenced by answering her own question: “Look, palms wide | you made my days / my lifespan | as nothing to you” (5). Those palms are a gesture of prayer, which the lyric address to the Lord achieves. It is a prayer, an extraordinarily bold one. It indicts God for the injustices of pain and mortality. The term that comes next is straight out of Ecclesiastes: vanity, vanity, all is vanity. The word is hevel, a puff of breath, a lifespan measured not by hands but by the single exhalation it takes to speak or pray. Existence itself is empty: standing, walking, blowing around, “just air” (5-6). And more, life is cut off, leaving behind all the unnamed things a life accrues: “she piles but doesn’t know | who gathers up” (6).

There are gestures at modesty and piety in Psalm 39, to be sure, but even these feel hollowed out. “From all my wrongs | deliver me,” the speaker cries out in verse 8. But this line follows the desperation of verse 7: “Now what | have I held out for, my lord,” a question that’s answered, limply, by “my hope | is in you.” If we have been reading verses 1-6, we have the sense that life is simultaneously too short and too long, that our lifespan is “as nothing to you” (5). Even the traditional language of verse 12—“Hear my prayer… do not hush”—manages to sound both deeply felt and empty of heart. Again, the gesture is emptied by what precedes it: “you rub off as with a moth | what makes them lovely / just air | all of us” (11).

In this powerful prayer of outrage, there are two truly exceptional moments. The first comes in verse 9 where the speaker, having reluctantly broken her desire to keep quiet, tries again to keep quiet. It echoes the scene at the psalm’s beginning: “I have been bound | I won’t open my mouth.” But look at that next line: “for you | you did.” Did what? What did the Lord do? Opened the speaker’s mouth for them? Already made the speaker “a taunt for dolts”? Did something else? Is the text fragmented here, or is the speaker, whose mouth is a volatile border, just unwilling or unable to finish the thought?

The other standout moment is the ending, which begins with the speaker’s last imperative. Nothing about her is cowed or craven. Maybe that’s because there’s nothing left for her to lose. “Look away from me” is an aching command, a gut-punch prayer. It bears the weight of both shame and indignation: “avert your eyes!” as well as “what are you looking at?” as well as “stop looking at me!” And why this? Because, the speaker says, “I would like to smile / before I walk away | and am nothing.”

The echoes of Job’s speech in Job 10 are unmistakable. It’s not that the psalmist or speaker wants to “curse God and die,” as Job’s wife unhelpfully suggests (Job 2:9). It’s that her mouth wants to do something other than keeping it all inside.
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My name is Mark Minster. I’m an English and Comparative Literature professor with a background in ministry and in poetry. I teach courses on writing, reading, religion, and nature.
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April 18th, 2023

Psalm 38
(lyric, of David, to keep in mind)

* * *

Psalm 38 is a lament as vivid in its depiction of bodily suffering as it is elusive about the causes. The speaker sees her pain first as a result of divine wrath: “your arrows | have come down into me / and your hand | comes down onto me” (2). In the second quatrain, most of the psalm’s themes arrive:

        There is no skin unbroken  in the face of your fury

no bones whole                   in the face of my error

      for my wrongs                     have come up over my head

like a heavy weight              they weigh more than me (3-4).

Paralleled, the Lord’s “fury” gives way to the speaker’s “error,” the word usually translated as “sin.” This unnamed mistake grows plural in “wrongs.” These wrongs themselves proliferate, continuing the downward movement from the punishment of the first two verses (“have come up over my head” in verse 4, see also 6 and 8) as they spread a contagion that dominates the psalm. Likewise, the repeated phrase “in the face of” recurs in the poem, both penei (3, 5) and its synonym neged (9, 17), creating an immediacy that is confrontational, face to face, even as it accentuates the speaker’s distance from her loved ones, friends, family, and God.

By far most of the psalm emphasizes the ache that spreads within, across, and beyond the sufferer’s body. “My lacerations | have reeked and rotted / in the face of | my folly” (5). But what folly? Even in verse 18, the crime she feels punished for goes unstated: “my guilt | I confess / I suffer | from my error.” Did the error cause the lacerations? When she describes how “there is no skin unbroken” (3, 7) and how “my flanks have filled | with inflammation” (7), are these injuries rather a consequence of the angry, physical “discipline” of Lord? Or are her wounds the work of those enemies who show up for the first time in verse 12: “those who seek my neck | struck me”? The outward movement of pain and its consequences reaches those who mock the speaker and beyond: “my foes are lively | they have grown strong / they have grown great” (19). These foes introduce another possibility, that the speaker’s pain comes less from divine punishment than from terrible people’s abuse: “they block me | for my chasing the good” (20). Maybe the speaker just suffers, period, certain the pervasive pain is real, and this suffering is compounded by uncertainty, and by worry about its causes as well as its effects.

The superscription indicates that this is a psalm for memorial purposes. But who is to keep what in mind? Are we supposed to agree with the sufferer’s supposition that her physical anguish stems from something she did or didn’t do, something she is or was? Are we to keep right there in mind the disappointing family and friends who distance themselves from the sufferer at the worst possible time? Or the reprobate foes who mock the sick? Or is the superscription a reminder to keep suffering itself in view, the sufferer closer to mind than anyone else in the psalm, God or family or friend or foes?
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About Me

My name is Mark Minster. I’m an English and Comparative Literature professor with a background in ministry and in poetry. I teach courses on writing, reading, religion, and nature.
Recent Posts
- Psalm 150
- Psalm 149
- Psalm 148
- Psalm 147
- Psalm 146
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