The Book of Psalms

(director: lyric, of David)

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Like a kitchen sink, Psalm 31 is full. At first glance, it’s a jumble of quotation and cliché. Psalms 7, 11, 16 and 71 all start with the same image of refuge, and the first line here (1a) seems cribbed from Psalm 25:20: “In you Lord I nest.” Verse 2 seems to compile other prayers’ introductory verses. “Stretch me | your ear” shows up in 86:1, 88:2, 102:2, and in the second verse of Hezekiah’s prayer in 2 Kings 19:16. The cliff, tsur, appears in Psalm 18:2 and 28:1 (28:2 itself seems to be quoted in 31:22). In 31:3, “for the sake of your name” is also in 25:11 and, together with the third-person “..his name,” also in 23:3, a verse that includes the verb “he guides me,” while 23:2 includes “he makes me rest.” We could go on.

But if the psalm is quoting, why? It’s one thing to evaluate—“a jumble of quotation and cliché”—and another to understand. The line in verse 9, “it’s rotted with grief, my eye,” for instance, quotes a psalm where the image fits, where it makes poetic sense: “I make my bed swim | all night / with tears | I melt my couch / from grief | my eyes have rotted” (6:6b-7a). But here in Psalm 31, there has been no grief (yet), let alone overflowing tears that would make eyes waste away. Instead, the rotted eye provides only generic evidence of generic “trouble.” The psalmist continues, but diffuses the image rather than honing it: “it’s rotted with grief, my eye | my throat, my belly / for my life has been spent | with ache” (9-10). Images from Psalm 6 recur: the sighs, the bones. Again, why?

It’s impossible to answer with certainty. At one extreme, we could conclude that this is sloppiness and disinterest, a rough draft, a scribe trying to remember other psalms, a third-rate writer cobbling something from others’ music and verbal pictures. At the other extreme, we could assume the psalm and writer are accomplished and adjust our aesthetics to match it. After all, a chunk of this psalm itself appears to be remade as Psalm 71—or vice versa—and there are other psalms that include, or are, wholesale copyings and borrowings. In between, we might imagine strategies of quotation, revision, and commentary that writers and musicians expected reciters to notice. This is more than allusion, but without our cultural stigma of plagiarism.

It’s tempting with a psalm like this to take out scissors as Jefferson with his gospels or Pound with Eliot, excerpting only the fresh and new, freeing it from all the all-too-familiar. There’s that image of the speaker handing over her breath to the Lord God of faithfulness, as opposed to those who guard the worthless, “keepers of empty air” (5-6). And when the speaker who’s compared herself to a dead person “forgotten… from the heart” pairs herself with a “broken jar” (12), the effect is shattering. Even more powerfully, there’s the vivid idea that the Lord keeps those who seek shelter “secret | with the secret of your face,” an image only the book of Job has the inventiveness to match (Job 13:10, 24:15). That pause to wonder: where are the secrets of the face? Oh.

As a whole, the psalm attempts to process an experience of siege. “His care for me | in a city besieged” (21) is not the central line, but it might be the most telling. Whether siege is literal or figurative, collective or individual, hardly matters. Quotation, at least in this psalm, is not a careful collage of found images that fit together, recollected in tranquility, but a kind of emotional rush of a flipping through a catalog. To be beset and surrounded is to nest, to hide in a fort, to hide from a net in a fastness—a kind of acknowledgment that the word metsudah means both “net” and “stronghold” (1-4). It is to be closed in, though yearning for space (7-8). It is to witness a cityscape in which enemies mock and friends flee and forget, and terror encloses (11-13). And it is to return again and again to whatever works, “feel for me Lord | for I am in trouble” (9) and “free me from the hand | of my enemies and my hunters” (16)  and “for I said | in my panic / I’m severed | from before your eyes / and you heard | the voice of my pleas” (22). The process is not linear, the experience not about originality or about convention, but a jumble, a blur of panic and praise.

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31:2 be my cliff fastness / a fort of defense  Consonance here in English tries to replicate the effect of consonance in the Hebrew: hatsileini… litsur… metsudot, “free me… cliff… defense.”

31:5 To your hand I hand over… you ransomed me  Here, too, repetition attempts to keep wordplay, though it’s actually “you ransomed” (paditah) that chimes with “your hand” (beyadikha) and shares consonants with “I hand over” (aphqid). The punning in Hebrew connects the divine act of rescue with the speaker’s own devoted response.

31:6 the keepers of empty air  The speaker pledges opposition to those who guard or watch havlei–shav’, a term that pairs two euphemisms for idols, “breath” (hevel) and “worthlessness” (shav). See also Jonah 2:8.

31:7 have known my neck | through troubles  Following the verb “to know” (yada`) with the preposition b- (“with” or “in” or “through”) creates an expression both literal and idiomatic. The Lord has perceived the troubles of the speaker (“neck” is a synecdoche) and has known the speaker, even through distress.

31:9 it’s rotted with grief, my eye | my neck, my belly  Those (e.g., NIV, ESV, NASB, and more) who take nefesh to mean “soul” see this verse (likely an expansion of Psalm 6:7) as concluding with “soul and body,” reading a kind of dualism into the text. The more literal, more vivid, and more defensible reading is to understand here a grief so eviscerating that tears destroy the entire body as they fall from eye to throat to gut.

31:13 the hearsay of many  Dibbat implies subtle slander.

31:18 let lips that lie… what’s brash  The verse’s syntax relies on increasingly outraged apposition, while its rhythm moves from three carefully measured four-syllable semantic units to a unit of five and a unit of six.

31:20 you keep them secret | with the secret of your face  The normal biblical idiom is to hide one’s face (e.g., Exod 3:6, Ps 13:1). This line turns the idiom around: they (the ones “who revere you… who nest in you” from verse 19) are not hidden from the Lord’s face, but by it.

31:20 from another’s trammels  This noun only appears here. The Hebrew root rokes appears to derive from the Assyrian word riksu, a binding strap, such as the mark­asu, the strap that binds the cosmos. (See Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute 347-55) A precise, slightly difficult word seemed in order.

31:22 I’m severed  Another hapax whose meaning seems clear enough from context.

31:23 the true the Lord | preserving / requiting… the doer of pride  “Preserving” is a singular participle, so it’s the Lord who protects the faithful. It’s also the Lord who makes things even—the verb is shalom—with the proud, a point of considerable ambivalence.

31: 24 Stay stout  The word chizqu is used in benediction by both Moses (Deut 31:6, cf. 31:7,23) and Joshua (Josh 10:25, compare the words of the Lord and the people in Josh 1:6-9, 18), both times in combination with the verb ’amats. See also Psalm 27:14.

(lyric, a dedication song for the house of David)

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A defining dynamic of lyric poetry runs between the speaker’s world and the reader’s. One I speaks, many I’s read. As I recite, “Lord | my God / I cried to you | and you healed me” (2), there is a tension. I am not actually the speaker of Psalm 30 and yet, through a range of possible responses, I come to identify with her, pulling her close, or evaluate her, holding her at arm’s length. This dynamic of identification and distance allows for absolute immersion—how many people over millennia must have said, deeply personally, “I cried to you | and you healed me,” in how many languages. Yet at the same time, that lyric “I” allows for scholarly critical analysis: who is she, where, when, how, why, even whether?

In Psalm 30, this general readerly dynamic is stretched even farther in one direction by the context, a public commemoration in or of the temple, and by the opposing pull of the psalm’s many appeals to private feeling. Psalm 30’s superscription and the plural imperatives of verse 4 tug our experience of the psalm towards the ceremonial and liturgical, a collective historical memorializing that dedicates the “house of David” through the singing and worship of the chasidav: “you, his caring / be thankful | for his hallowed memory.” Which house of David? The dynastic line? Solomon’s temple? The Second Temple? How different this psalm looks without the superscription or without verse 4.

On the other hand, most of the psalm is shaped around either pleading for or gratitude for healing. Healing from what we don’t know, but not knowing tips us towards identification. No single narrative sequence is clear, but the speaker seems to have felt confidence (6-7a), then fear (7b), which has led to pleading (8-10). Injury or desperation is figured as the edge of death, in a pair of verses that refer to the pit or “the ditch”: “what good is my blood | if I’m going down in the ditch” (9); “you’ve given me life | from going down in the ditch” (3). Other verses reflect on the experience of healing, which the psalm presents overwhelmingly as a fait accompli (1-5, 12). Being healed results not from the speaker’s innocence or goodness, nor even from the speaker’s fidelity, but from the pathos that is the Lord’s fidelity. The Lord likes the speaker. “A lifetime | his liking” is complemented by “Lord at your liking | you stood my mountain strong,” both times the word ratson (5, 7). And the Lord feels. The root chanan appears twice as well, in “plead” (8) and “feel for me” (10). The terms touch, each translatable by the word “favor,” though the word rendered here as “liking” has more to do with pleasure, while the second is more like pity, compassion, one’s heart going out to someone.

This psalm, then, is not a singular thing. What song or poem is? It is instead a dramatic range: quiet begging, communal celebrating. Holding it far enough away to see it through lenses of curiosity or analysis, we notice how it personalizes collective memory in an experience of gratitude, how it makes feeling-better recapitulate liturgical practice. Coming close enough to identify with or feel like the speaker, we are brought near a near-death experience to join the joy of the morning, “weeping | spends a night / at dawn | a cry of joy” (5). And reading somewhere between assessment and absorption, we are able to sympathize. Maybe most dramatically, in so doing, the role we take on is the Lord’s: “Hear Lord | and feel for me” (10).

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30:1 exalt… exult  As with “hauled” and “healed,” this instance of verbal play is not in the Hebrew. This particular poem’s own connective devices (or moments of pleasure) are harder to replicate—the semantic alignment of verbs on the vertical, the play of ’elohei and ’eilekha, “my God” and “to you.”

30:4 be thankful | for his hallowed memory  It’s not clear what it means to thank or praise, literally, “the memorial/memento of his apartness/holiness.” Possibilities include a specific object of ritual value and cultural memory, a personal memory the speaker has, or the act of gratitude itself, which recalls as it gives thanks.

30:5 The blink of an eye.. a cry of joy  A treasure of a verse, both for the precision of its oppositions and for its potent hope, this aphoristic quatrain maps bodily images of sorrow and anger, pleasure and joy, against experiences of different duration. The NIV waters down the poetry, supplying four verbs for a verse with only one.  

30:7 I got scared  This stanza (verses 6-7) reverses the preceding one. Instead of moving from grief and divine wrath to divine favor and joy, it moves from ease and favor to the speaker’s being “shaken” and frightened by God’s disappearance. Parallel to the false sense of security in verse 6, this second half of verse 7 relies on a verb + participle of process: literally, “I became frightened.”

30:11 my keening  The context is obviously not Irish, but the Irish caoineadh means much the same as the Hebrew mispeid (here: mispedi), the crying out for the dead.

30:12 so respect might hymn you  In a curious circumlocution, the speaker imagines the music of praise from either the Lord’s kavod, or his or her own, or from glory itself.