The Book of Psalms

August 1st, 2023

Psalm 142
(didactic, of David when he was in the cave, a prayer)

* * *

The dual experience of a psalm of lament is to stand in two places at once. As we read, we are the petitioner, reciting and reliving, identifying with another’s cry we make our own. And yet as we listen, we are also the petitioned, overhearing, trying to understand that cry or help. To really hear a protest or wail, we listeners attend to at least three things at once: the pathos of the voice, what exactly it laments, and what we are supposed to do about it.

The particular voice of the speaker in Psalm 142 is marked in interesting ways as perfectly lucid, thoroughly traditional, and insistently self-aware, all features consistent with derivative, performative work. There are no textual complications or semantic confusions here, just linguistic clarity and syntactical precision (as, for example, in the preposition + infinitive constructions of the superscription, 3a, and 7b). The speaker doesn’t just call; she “pours” a “protest” (2a). The diction sounds similar to earlier psalms, often psalms of David. Verse 1 sounds like Psalm 30:8 and 77:1; verse 3 like Psalm 31:4. Manos, “shelter,” in verses 4 and 5 is also in Psalm 59:16 and 2 Samuel 22:3. “Pay attention to my shout” in verse 6a recalls similar expressions in Psalms 17:1 and 61:1; “free me from who harass me” in 6b echoes Psalm 31:15, and “they are too strong for me” quotes Psalm 18:17 exactly. From these similarities, from their sheer number, and, though this is wobbly logic, from the editorial position of the psalm near the end of the Psalter, these seem like quotations that have been adapted to be more emphatic than the originals.

The psalm’s self-awareness comes from its insistent use of the first-person. Psalm 142 begins and ends with the self. “My voice,” the first verse begins, then says again (1). The final line, the second half of verse 7, begins and ends with first-person prepositions bi and alai, “with me” and [to] “me.” Every line but 7b explicitly marks the first-person singular at least once. Every line through 5a marks it twice. The reflexive stem of the word for pity or feeling (or grace or charm) in verse 2 seems particularly rich. “I implore” means, in super-slow-motion, “I make myself pitiful.” So does the self-pitying statement in verse 6a: “oh I am so low” (6a). It can be a challenge to feel for people with such a sizeable head start on their own pity.

To sympathize, it helps to know what exactly is happening. The psalm offers few clues and many clichés. There is “crying out” (1a, 5a) and there is “distress” (2b), there are a “trap” (3b) and a lack of shelter (4a), present enemies (6b) and absent friends (4). All of these are common metaphors of complaint, generic enough to apply to any situation from embarrassment to assault. The most specific images in Psalm 142 are the catching of the breath (3) that has led some to assume the psalmist lay on a literal deathbed, and the “prison” (7) that has led others to characterize the speaker as either a literal prisoner, or a figurative inmate of an anachronistic hell. We could equally imagine the speaker as an exile or refugee (4), as a bullied child, a stranger, orphan, or widow (6), or as a temple priest, one whose only “share in the land” is the Lord (e.g., Num 18:20, Deut 14:27, 18:1), or as one of the indigenous opponents of Nehemiah (Neh 2:20). The voice is as easily that of a despot as is it of someone powerless.

The most concrete detail in the psalm comes in the superscription, which grounds this allusive lament in a narrative detail from the chronicles of David’s life: “when he was in the cave,” presumably the cave of Adullam, between the glories of his youth and his accession to the throne. Reading the psalm as David’s has a curious effect, limiting our ability to identify with the speaker, who as a figure of legend cannot be us, as well as limiting our ability to do much about that speaker’s distress. The psalm’s purpose becomes Davidic— to make sense of David’s loss of breath, David’s imprisonment. The location of this particular psalm, near the middle of the final cluster of psalms associated with David, Psalms 138-145, makes clear that a main project of the psalm is legacy work, what to do with a legend and a lost monarchy.

Everything depends, then, on the prepositions in the last verse. All of the quotations and allusions, the superscription, and its context at the end of the psalter make Psalm 142 about the departure of David in multiple ways. It’s David who, like a Levite, now has only the Lord as his share in the land, the land of the living (5). In verse 7, when David, buried in a cave, asks to be led out, his stated desire is “to give thanks | to your name” (7b), not to reclaim a throne. The last two lines, framed by the self-conscious “me” and “me,” reveal how David is to be led from prison, how his neck and breath are to be restored, “With me the just | circle around / oh you reward | me” (7c-d). The word bi, “with me,” can certainly be understood as the more messianic “to me,” which changes things dramatically, from circumference to spoke. But then, the phrase “you reward | me” can also be understood less positively as “you pay me back,” just deserts. The import of the last verse, however, even through these lively ambiguities, is to suggest a fitting fate for a king whose go-to poetic image was of being hemmed in by encircling foes. His compensatory liberation, here, is not to be crowned and worshipped. His voice, rather— “my voice,” “my voice” (1), “me,” “me” (7)— becomes part of the surrounding, the circle of devotees.
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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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July 31st, 2023

Psalm 141
(lyric, of David)

* * *

Nothing in the formulaic first verse of Psalm 141 prepares the reader for the distinctive voice and tone of the poetry to come. Not a word in the first verse is unique; every move is typical. But in verse 2, things change:

Let my prayer be steady | the incense at your face

the lift of my palms | the evening gift

It’s a rare verse that can shape its four half-lines into two patterns at once: a point-for-point parallel and a 1+3, one abstraction plus three details. There’s perfect parallelism between the verse halves, as the steadying prayer is met by the lifting of palms, while the sacrificial gift picks up the smoky incense as darkening evening meets the divine face. At the same time, however, all three details in the last three half-lines ground the first half-line’s prayer for steady prayer—wavering incense, lifted and likely quavering palms, the tendered sacrifice. The verse is nearly always read dynamically as two statements advocating replacement: “let my prayer be like incense before you, the lifting of my palms like the evening sacrifice.” Not that that interpretation doesn’t work: it works well, especially given that the word “lift” or “lifting” is used elsewhere of smoke (Judg 20:38-40) or tribute (2 Sam 11:8). But formal equivalence here displays the dynamism of the verse and voice better than dynamic translation can.

This poem’s particular voice is tricky to catch because of its subtlety, darkness, and humor. After verse 1 encourages attention to language (“perk ear for my voice”) and verse 2 sets up a prayer presumably built of language as well as gesture, verse 3 asks language to be patrolled almost to silence, “a guard for my mouth / bar the door | of my lips.” In verse 4, this control of the mouth deepens, in both what might go in— “don’t let me eat their sweets”—and what might come out— “don’t cant my heart for bad.” A call becomes prayer, which is to be protected from within and without.

In verse 5, the poem’s center, protection and discipline become punishment. “The just one beats me,” it seems to start— maybe a statement, maybe a prayer— before adding the noun chesed, “caring.” How does that parse? Is it better as “He beats me, the just one caring” or as “The just one beats me caring,” like the brutal expression “to beat sense into”? Or do we need more before we can make syntactical sense: “Justice hits; caring scolds”? It’s possible to read the line as a garble or as a witticism, as either passive acceptance of abuse or dark sarcasm: “He smacks me: this is called justice.” The very center of the center of the psalm makes this punishment an ironic crowning anointment: “and scolds me / oil for the head | let my head not refuse.” Here, too, is a mess or a puzzle or a sardonic game. R’osh ’al-yani r’oshi is as mysterious a cluster as it is musical, with a series of letters that anagram “Israel” and play on two names of God, both ’el and `elyon. The speaker appears to be taking—or trying to take—discipline as a sign of justice and care and as a signal of election or sanctification among those “doing harm” (4, 9).

What, then, is the continual (or renewed) “prayer | against their bad” mentioned in verse 5c? Is it a prayer that precedes this line or a prayer that follows? Which prayer? “Let my head not refuse” is the most proximate possible referent, but (a) it may not even be a prayer (“oil so topnotch my head can’t pass it up”) and (b) it does not sound like a prayer “against their bad,” but rather a prayer to accept something good. Verse 4 is indeed a prayer against their bad: “don’t cant my heart for bad… don’t let me eat their sweets,” but why jump backwards over 5a and 5b? Is the point to relate the refusal of criminals’ delights with the acceptance of beatings by the good?

It is possible, however, that this prayer against the badness of “them” anticipates the lines that follow, which turn the perfect-form verbs of verses 6 and 7 into prayers already or again-to-be answered:

their judges be thrown | from the tips of a cliff

they heard my words | oh they were sweet

just like the plowing | and harrowing of earth

their bones be broken | at the mouth of the grave.

These lines might narrate completed events, which would be the typical use of the suffixed forms of “to throw,” “to hear,” “to be sweet,” and “to be broken.” But what events? And why narrate them here? Most English translations resort to the future tense here for the execution of the judges executed and sometimes even for the breaking of bones (“our bones” in the Masoretic Text, “their bones” according to the Septuagint). Some kind of subjunctive makes more sense here, along the lines of the so-called precative perfect: “oh ever my prayer | against their bad / [is that] their judges be thrown | from the tips of a cliff.” The events are grim and the tone is sardonic, with the speaker’s “sweet” words (6b) and the “mouth” of the grave (7b) recalling the “sweets” (4b) of the villains and the speaker’s own “mouth” (3a). The broken bones could be our remembered bones, sticking out of the soil like planting tools, or the wished-for bones of the villains’ judges. In any event, this is the delicate, sarcastic prayer that answers the bad people’s delicacies: that foreign rulers be pitched from the rocks much like the enemies’ infants at the end of Psalm 137.

The psalm’s final three verses pull back to something much more expected: a prayer to elude the traps “of those doing harm” (9). This ending reads very much like a disguise, as does the beginning, commonplace rhetorical appeals at the psalm’s start and closure that effectively drag branches over the tracks of the verses between, verses that slide treacherously from steadied prayer and self-restraint among the “criminal occupations” of “people doing harm,” to the execution of the traitors or the sacrilegious.
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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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July 30th, 2023

Psalm 140
(director: of David, lyric)

* * *

Psalms of vengeance have range because revenge itself has range. It stretches from cries for rescue with very little interest in penalties (e.g., Pss 20, 22, 26) to the call for an ordered and just society (e.g., Pss 5, 11, 94), to the cool utilitarian logic that roots bad outcomes in bad deeds (e.g., Ps 52), to the calculated plotting of getting even (e.g., Pss 12, 64, 137), to that whetstone of the sword of Macbeth, rage, that blinding fire in the eyes (e.g., Pss 58:10-11, 69:22-28, 78:44-51, 78:58-64, 79:10-12). Speakers in the book of Psalms express all of these at times, from lines of retribution like “return to them | their recompense” (Ps 28:4), “let lips that lie be tied” (Ps 31:18), and “fight | who fight me” (Ps 35:1) to hoist-on-their-own-petard lines like “fell them | by their own schemes” (Ps 5:10), “his harm returns | to his head / on his skull | his cruelty comes down” (Ps 7:16), and “they dug me a pit / they fell inside” (Ps 57:6); from mild imprecations like “may they blanch | and blush” (e.g., Ps 40:14=70:2, and more) to curses couched in metaphors like “make them | like the whirlwind” (Ps 83:13) to terrible, murderous fury: “send them | down to the pit of the grave” (Ps 55:23), “you wipe out / their offspring | from the human race” (Ps 20:9c-10b), “let there be no one for him | to extend care / no one to feel | for his orphans” (Ps 109:12) and “let their base | be pillaged / in their tents / leave no one left” (Ps 69:25).

The second part of Psalm 139 presented, then startled back from, one of the more extreme retaliatory formulations in the book: “Oh let God kill | a cheat / you bloodthirsty | get away from me” (139:19). By contrast with its neighbor and with much of the rest of the volume, Psalm 140 shows extraordinary control. Here there is neither bloodlust nor protests of innocence nor avoidance. Three selah markers (140: 3, 5, 8) neatly divide the psalm in four sections, four six-line stanzas with a four-line coda. The first three stanzas focus on machinations, on villains’ plots and preparations for villainy, which makes the entire psalm strikingly less about retribution than about readiness. The intervention the speaker describes— or wishes for— in the fourth stanza is preventive, not punitive.

Badness and cruelty, paired explicitly twice (1, 11) have led the speaker to call for protection: “Free me, Lord” (1a) is matched by “Guard me, Lord” (4a), and each is followed by “from anyone cruel | protect me” (1b, 4b), followed by “they who’ve plotted” (2a, 4c). The first stanza features mostly intentions, “bad things in the heart” (4c) and a waiting for snakelike speech. The second stanza shows plans that have taken their first steps, “a trap and ropes… a net… snares” (5). The third stanza calls the Lord’s name four times (out of seven total in the psalm) to stop things before they can start: “don’t give, Lord | the rogue his passions / don’t permit his ploys | or they’ll take off” (8).

All of this is to say that the fourth stanza of Psalm 140 is not a call for indiscriminate slaughter or eternal punishment in a fiery or watery hell. One could be forgiven for reducing the entire book of Psalms to a four-word synopsis— “They surround us. Help.” Personal lamenting of siege mirrors the national fear of persecution by others. And so “the head of | who surround me” (9a) is as surely some foreign general, the Assyrian Rab-Shakeh, some satrap, some Herod, as it is the pate of one individual’s individual foe. The political is personal. Every other line in this stanza, in verses 9-11, can be parsed as either jussive or declarative in the imperfect form: that is, “let the harm of his lips | surmount him” could be “the harm of his lips | surmounts him” or “the harm of his lips | will surmount him.” The difference has everything to do with how actively one imagines God intervenes, which is to say, how automatically do bad consequences follow from cruel behaviors? Still, regardless of the translation, the stanza shows “coals aflame” and “trenches” (or whatever sodden pit is intended) not as figures for an afterlife of everlasting torment, but as the anticipatory flicking-off of a bug that might bite.

This point matters because there are plenty of readers who mistake this psalm as evidence of a conception of hell, which it decidedly is not. It is, rather, a vision of an ideal society in this world in which the poor and weak, the just and the level of heart, have found an advocate and a home, protected from anyone and everyone who would do or even wish them harm.
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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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July 29th, 2023

Psalm 139
(director: of David, lyric)

* * *

Whether authored by one person at once or by dozens over time, Psalm 139 coheres around a single broad theme— the inescapable length and breadth and depth and height of God’s knowing— and by a handful of stitch-words. Because its most confusing seams occur two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the poem, in verses 16-19, the psalm feels like a whole that falls apart, making it tempting to excerpt powerful pieces, a verse or half-verse at a time. That temptation is a mistake. There are so many potent moments, it’s best to follow them through. More, the social and psychological cost, the human cost, of careless excerpting is in the case of this particular psalm immense.

At least two distinct pieces seem to have been sewn together, each with its own ways of thinking about what it is or at least what it’s like to be known and fully fathomed. The first piece, verses 1-16, works by merisms, mapping God’s complete familiarity with the speaker’s whole self by marking the maximal limits of space and time. These verses convey wonder (6, 14) and gratitude (14) for divine knowledge, which they present as already achieved.

Verses 19-24 take the more common approach of appealing to one’s innocence: the speaker pleads contempt of enemies described as God’s foes (20) as well as their own (22). Instead of celebrating divine omniscience, this second piece asks for a special inquest to determine the future: “see if there is | a painful path for me” (24a). About morality, the main concern of the last six verses, the first sixteen verses say nothing.

Between these two parts, verses 17-18 have a fabric that seems their own. They are less a bridge than another island. Verse 17 and the first half of verse 18 see God not as a knower but as unknowable. The second half of verse 18, “I have awakened | and still I’m with you,” is not easily assimilated to any of the other three parts, with no clear relationship to omniscience or ineffability or the hatred of the bad.

Nevertheless, persistent verbal connections tug the psalm’s parts together. Its beginning and end are linked by the pairing of the verbs “look for” (1, 23a) and “know” (1, 2a, 23a, 23b), the latter of which occurs three more times in the psalm for a total of seven appearances (4, 6, 14). The beginning and end are also framed by “rising” (2) and rising up against” (21), and by the common word derek (“all my paths” in verse 3; “a painful path” and “a lasting path” in verse 24), both of which reveal motion to be a key part of the psalm.

The word rei`ah, from a root (or roots) with enormous semantic range, appears in the singular with a first-person suffix in verse 2—“my tending”—and in the plural with a second-person suffix in verse 17—“your tendings.” Its precise meaning in both cases is unclear, unique in the Bible to these two verses, though derivation seems to suggest pasturing and grazing (ra`ah) or association and friendship (rei`eh) rather than badness (ra`a`), while the poem’s context implies something abstracted, even ideational: “you’ve gotten my drift,” a more colloquial draft of this translation once tried. Regardless of its meaning, the repetition of rei’ah stitches verse 17 back to verse 2.

Similar repetition of the root `atsam stitches verse 17 (“have amassed”) back to verse 15 (“my mass”), with another plural word, looping back to pick up its partner in the singular. In addition, in passing, note “your breath” (7) and “my breath” (14), “your record” (16b) and “let me record” (18a), and the pairing of indicative “leads” (10) and “saw” (16) with imperative “see” and “lead” (24). Cumulatively, these duplications and keywords show the effort of making the psalm cohere.

By contrast, the first sixteen verses hold together on their own. This is especially true when we track how much of the diction here is drawn from a pastoral register. That is, most of this psalm works remarkably well if it is understood, just as Psalm 23 is understood, to be the song of a sheep to her shepherd. Psalm 139 begins with the Lord searching for what the Lord already knows by familiarity: the speaker’s movements: “my resting and my rising… my roving and dozing” (2a, 3a). As noted above, the etymology of lerei`i in verse 2b, “my tending,” suggests a more literal meaning of “my herd instincts” or “my grazing intentions,” “my pasture tendencies,” which a shepherd could doubtless mark “from afar” from familiarity with sheep tracks. The word tsartani in verse 5 literally means “you put me in a paddock” or “fenced me in.” A pastoral reading reveals vividly and concretely the Lord’s palm (5), the “marvelous knowing | beyond me” (6), the sheep’s experience of proximity to the shepherd’s “breath” and “face” (7), the scaling of crags and napping in glens (8), the left hand that “leads me / your right hand | [that] takes hold of me” (10), and even the “light | on my behalf” (11).

If the speaker is understood as a well-known and cared-for sheep and the Lord a caring, knowing shepherd, verses 13-17 take on nuances most readings miss. Ever since the domestication of livestock, a shepherd knows a lamb well before its birth, from the ruddle of the ram that tups a ewe in heat, to the visual and behavioral cues of gestation on through to lambing, imprinting, and beyond. The verb “acquires” in verse 13 captures both ownership and generativity: Eve “acquires” Cain in Genesis 4:1 (almost as if she doesn’t know how it happened); in Genesis 25:10, Abraham “acquires” a plot to bury Sarah. A shepherd breeds ewes (13a), “protects” them (13b), helps during birthing by cutting the newborn lamb’s cord (“how reverently I was made distinct” 14a) and ensuring he can breathe his first breaths (14b). During gestation, a shepherd sees the mother’s belly swell, sees her colostrum, and sees and feels and knows the outline of the fetal lamb (“my mass… my embryo” 15a, 16a). Good shepherds write this all down, recording days and values (16b-17). Even a lamb might want to keep track in the only way it can: we count sheep in ledgers and late nights; sheep mark our attending with their hooves in the dirt (“greater than sand they grow” 18a). Understood this way, even the curious verse 18b makes sense as imprinting, a newborn lamb, eyes on its shepherd: “I have awakened | and still I’m with you.”

Not even this sheep-and-shepherd reading of Psalm 139 knows quite what to do with verse 19, however. If 18b is a leap, 19a is a lurch: “Oh let God kill | a cheat” comes so far out of nowhere it seems rather to belong in vocabulary and theme to Psalm 140. Dahood gamely celebrates verses 18b-19 as three varieties of wish, parsing the lines as “I want to awaken… Let God kill… may you bloodthirsty get away,” which is as grammatically wily as it is semantically weird. My solution here, dissatisfying though it may be, is nearly the opposite of Dahood’s, seeing 19a as a line of quoted speech, a curse uttered against enemies by “you bloodthirsty,” hateful not just because it takes the Lord’s name too lightly (20b echoes Exod 20:7 or Deut 5:11), but because it treats life and divinity too carelessly, with only partial knowledge (cf. Ps 16:4). Many other readers, however, barely register the rupture, as if sliding from meticulous perinatal compassion to lethal imprecation were common or made the slightest sense.

Squinting, however, or looking from afar, it is possible to reconcile the psalm’s parts by seeing the broadest of shared themes—the sublime unknowability of divine intentions, the infinitude of divine knowing, the fierce loyalty the lamb shows his shepherd. If Psalm 139 is turned, and its metaphor is not necessarily knowing pastures and each individual sheep over all terrain and through all time, but knowing by sounding deep waters, then maybe what happens in verse 19 is a kind of sinking down through innermost thoughts, until we come at last to such grim thoughts as killing and cheats and enemies. If so, verse 19 becomes an example of the trial the speaker asks for in the psalm’s last lines: “and know my heart…and know my hesitations” (23a, 24a).

The crucial takeaway of this psalm, however, is that the mortal first-person singular, the part, comes with hard epistemological limits in a way that the limitless second-person singular, you, the whole, does not. In 1 Corinthians 13:12, Paul asserts in a midrashic rereading of texts like Psalm 139 that “now I know in part, yet then I will know well, exactly as I have been known well.” What this psalm itself emphasizes is that first part, the partiality of human knowing.

This fact alone, the limits of knowledge, ought to radically curtail the use to which this psalm is too often put, in anachronistic claims that verses 13-16 argue against a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body. Jewish and Christian traditions have made any number of claims about the moment a life begins. Life only ever continues, according to this psalm, a psalm utterly disinterested in identifying a single point of origin. This is not a reasoned case that life begins at conception, nor that life begins at the breathtaking moment the umbilical cord is cut and in terror and wonder everyone waits for that first gulp of air. Woe to you, who clip prooftexts in bad faith! This is not a psalm of moments.
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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
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- Psalm 147
- Psalm 146
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