The last of the “songs of steps,” Psalm 134 picks up where Psalm 133 left off, with the “blessing | living ever and on,” which comes from “the mountains of Zion” (133:3). It also picks up where Psalm 133 began, with hinneh, the word of exclamation that is also a gesture, a demonstrative, a kind of et voilà, rendered here somewhat expansively as “Oh yes” (133:1; cf. 128:4) and “Oh yes now” (134:1). The prior psalm pointed to seated brothers; Psalm 134 points to “all subjects | of the Lord / who stand in the house | of the Lord by night” (134:1) and to its own, triple blessings. And Psalm 134 ends where Psalm 133 ended, a blessing that comes specifically “from Zion” (134:3), which is the emphatic point of the entire grouping of Psalms 120-134.
The whole sequence of songs is rich with blessings, a ringing the changes that only arrives at its fullest statement in Psalm 134. As early as Psalm 121, the Songs of Steps invoke the Lord’s protective response for those who call (120:1) or look (121:1) for help. Psalm 121 names the Lord “maker of sky | and land” (121:2) and elaborates three times on the wish that “the Lord guard”: “the Lord guard you… may he guard your throat… the Lord guard | your coming and going (121:7-8). Psalm 122 associates the “there” of Jerusalem (122:5) with the wish for peace, relying on its own elaborations: “Ask peace | for Jerusalem… may there be peace | in your bastions… I want to say | peace, peace be with you” (122:6-8). Just as Psalm 121 answers Psalm 120, Psalm 124 answers Psalm 123, celebrating past rescue (“Blessed | be the Lord” 124:6) and echoing Psalm 121 “Our help | in the name of the Lord / maker of sky | and land” 124:8, cf. 121:2). The Zion-focused psalms 125 and 126 are linked by a benediction of peace (125:5), and the son-focused psalms 127 and 128 turn from the descriptor “all set” (127:5, 128:1, 2) to the insistent (“oh yes how blessed | a man who reveres the Lord” 128:4) and liturgical blessing, which is associated with Zion for the first time: “The Lord bless you | from Zion” (128:5). Psalm 128 ends with another call for “Peace in Israel” (128:6). Psalm 129 ends with the unsaid double benediction, “the Lord’s blessing on you / we bless you | in the name of the Lord” (129:8). While Psalms 130 and 131 return to the lamenting mode of Psalm 120 and Psalm 123, the longer Psalm 132 responds with the election of Zion (with another emphatic “there” 132:17, cf. 122:5, 133:3) and another double blessing: “her food | I bless and I bless” (132:15). Psalm 133, as indicated above, ends with a blessing that links both Zion and life.
What Psalm 134 does is to bring all of this together. The “subjects | of the Lord / who stand in the house | of the Lord by night” (134:1), whether celebrants or congregants, whatever devotion is meant by the specification of “night,” are invited twice to “bless | the Lord” (1a, 2b). The Lord is invited to bless as well, with all the pieces united: “May the Lord bless you | from Zion / maker of sky | and land” (3). As Norman Habel and others noted long ago, the point is to show that the Lord, YHWH, who is the universal creator God, the “maker of sky | and land,” bestows blessings not from Hermon, but only from Zion.
It is worth pointing out that the word “kneel” would work remarkably well as a concrete alternative to the more abstract word “bless” in translating Psalm 135. It captures the gesturing, locative, and embodied aspects of a benedictory liturgy, which also include legs that stand and hands that seem to have been lifted all night. The main drawback to “kneel to | the Lord” and “May the Lord kneel to you | from Zion” is that, at least for Psalms 120-134, every other use of the verbal root brk would also need to be rendered as “kneeling” in order for the reader to experience the cumulative effect. The very idea that God could be depicted as kneeling may strike some as unthinkable. Yet there it is.
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.
Psalm 133 is as solid as it is liquid. Its hardness comes from simple structural strength— it is one argument (1) plus two analogies (2, 3)— as well as the firm rhetoric of sitting together in a specific place, “there [where] God ordered / the blessing | living ever and on” (3b-c). Its fluidity comes, not by contrast but by continuity, from the “sweet” goodness of gathered brothers (1), which becomes the “sweet oil” that spills down Aaron’s spilling beard, becoming the dew, becoming the blessing, becoming life. Powerful features of the psalm’s sounds, rhymes, repetitions, plays on words, are both wet and dry, keeping the psalm moving while holding it in place.
Poems are not often about what they say they’re about; they’re about what they do. (Eliot famously describes meaning as the meat a burglar throws a watchdog.) The ostensible argument of Psalm 133 concerns the aesthetic and moral beauty (“how stunning | how sweet”) of the reunion of brothers. This thesis sends us down to the psalm’s two comparisons in search of similarities: in what ways is the sweetness of the communion of brothers like the anointing of a beard, particularly, and strangely, the oil on the beard of a priest? In what ways, then, are fraternal unity and beard oil like the dew on some mountain far from Zion “running down over / the mountains of Zion” (3b)? Are the brothers of Psalm 133 united by sensuous viscosity, like Melville’s Ishmael squeezing whale sperm “till I myself almost melted in it… till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it” (“A Squeeze of the Hand,” Moby-Dick)? The comparisons of the psalm are a logical stretch, we must conclude: sibling harmony is really not all that similar to dripping oil or falling dew.
The logical stretch of the analogies raises the possibility, I think a likelihood, that the psalm’s similes are not there to clarify or develop anything about the unity of brothers. Rather, the unity of brothers is given in verse 1 as good. Sweet oil and dew are not figures that elucidate brotherhood. Rather, brotherhood is the figure that elucidates anointing, which is the real substance of verses 2 and 3: the anointing of the Aaronic priesthood and the anointing of Zion. The discourse of brotherhood grounds the valuation of Aaronic priests as equal to, and yet greater than, their Mosaic and Levite siblings. Brotherhood likewise supports the passing of the blessing from Israel’s other sacred sites, Mount Hermon, to Zion alone. If the point of Psalm 133 is to encourage sibling unity, its moral is pat and its methods messy. If, on the other hand, Psalm 133 presumes the beauty of sibling unity, its real work is to transfer the register of brotherly love to the temple priests of Zion, sanctioning their work as perpetually anointed and permanently giving of life. The psalm is easily misread as a priestly blessing of brothers. It’s the other way around.
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.
Readers of ancient texts have to be especially alert to the time axis, that horizontal arrow that traces the production and reproduction of cultural memory. In hymns about foundational figures, for example, there is the t=0 of the moment of writing, a point that stretches to a line segment for songs with complicated composition histories. To the left or negative side of t=0 lie those events and motives that hymns half-remember/half-create, as well as the distance (the time) between those moments and composition. We ourselves lie to the right or positive side, celebrants, preservers, students, critics, analysts of tradition, since our readings, too, take place in time. To understand Psalm 132, in other words, the axis of time helps distinguish the unknowable actual King David from the David of the books of Samuel and Kings; the David of Chronicles from the David of Psalms; David in the centuries before, during, and after the Babylonian Exile of the 6th c. BCE, as opposed to the Davids of Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity or the Davids of the mercantile and monarchical European Middle Ages, or those Davids invoked by defenders of 21st century theocracy and kakistocracy. Always the question: who makes what memories to what ends?
So, when Psalm 132 begins by asking the Lord and thus the audience to “remember Lord | for David / all | his humblings” (1) and to remember David’s promise not to rest until Israel God’s can rest (2-5), who is reminding whom of what, and why? With no clear referent, David’s alleged abasements could indicate almost anything in his biography, from fugitive folk hero to King of Judah to King of Israel as well, watching so many of his enemies and sons die. David’s comedowns could be personal failings or political setbacks, or they could be successful displays of public humility (most recently imagined in Psalm 131).
David’s oath, for its part, is an evident invention, an elaboration rather than a recollection. Both the Deuteronomistic History (1 Samuel 4-7 and 2 Samuel 6-7) and 1 Chronicles 13-17 follow the movement of the Ark of the Covenant, culminating with David’s role in establishing what David in Psalm 132 calls “a place | for the Lord / a tabernacle” (5). According to both of the narrative works, David took Jerusalem for his capital, then moved the ark there from Kiriath-Jearim. And only then, “when the king sat in his house, and the LORD had given him rest round about from all his enemies” (2 Sam 7:1; cf. 1 Chron 17:1), did David say to the prophet Nathan, elliptically “See now, I dwell in an house of cedar but the ark of God dwelleth within curtains” (2 Sam 7:2; cf. 1 Chron 17:1). In both 1 Chronicles and 2 Samuel, however, God rejects David’s implied offer to build a temple, instead deferring that responsibility to “one of your own sons… He is the one who will build a house for me” (1 Chron 17:11-12). Psalm 132 inverts both sequence and emphasis. In the psalm, David is determined not to rest until he finds “a place | for the Lord / a tabernacle” (5). If the Lord’s place is Jerusalem as a whole, David’s mission has already been accomplished, according to the narratives. Yet if “a place | for the Lord” means the temple in particular, nevertheless the narratives state that David has already rested in his palace and that God demurs at David’s desire to build a temple. This remembered vow in Psalm 132 idealizes David even more than Chronicles does, even more than strands in Samuel do, aligning him almost entirely with God’s desires. To do so, the psalm asks God to remember words David never said.
The attentive reader will note with interest that the verbs in David’s oath here all appear in the David narratives of Samuel and Kings, just not in ways one might expect. “I mount,” ’e`eleh (2 Sam 2:1, 19:34), “I give,” ’ettein (2 Sam 5:19, 21:6; 1 Kgs 3:5), and “I find,” ’emtsah (2 Sam 15:25, 16:4), all show up in both psalm and stories. The word ’abo’, “I go into” (3), is used by David once in the Deuteronomistic History, in the negative, when he tries to persuade King Achish of the Philistines to let him enter battle against King Saul (1 Sam 29:8). The same word is used in two other significant places. First, by Uriah, David’s loyal soldier, as he foils David’s attempt to cover up his crime with Uriah’s wife Bathsheba by sending Uriah home:
Uriah said to David, “The ark, and Israel and Judah are sitting in tents, and my lord Joab and the subjects of my lord are camping on the ground in the field, but I should go into my house to eat and drink and lie down by my wife? By your life and the life of your breath, I will not do this thing.” (2 Sam 11:11)
Later, when David is old and probably senile, the prophet Nathan uses ’abo’ in conversation with Bathsheba, orchestrating the scene with David that will land her son Solomon on the throne:
“Go on and go into King David. You’ll say to him, ‘My lord the king, did you not vow to your subject saying, oh, Solomon your son will be king after me, and he will sit on my throne? Then how is Adonijah king?’ And while you’re still there talking with the king, I will go in you after you and fill out your words.” (1 Kgs 1:13-14)
If these are three coincidences, they are certainly meaningful. None of them shows David at his best. All of them turn on dishonest vows—David’s double-dealing with Achish and Saul; his violation of both Bathsheba and Uriah, contrasted with Uriah’s vow of loyalty; and Bathsheba and Nathan’s manipulation of David, which, while not technically a lie (“did you not vow?”), nevertheless asks David to remember words he never said, a promise he appears not to have made.
Through the first half of the twentieth century, most scholars argued that the archaic language of Psalm 132 meant an early date of composition. But like many things, monarchies are idealized when they no longer exist. The David of this psalm really only makes sense, most scholars now would agree, as a product of post-exilic cultural imagination, as a signifier of unity, centralization, and as an alternative to some “scepter | of wrong.” A key question, Kraus writes of Psalm 132, is how the Ark of the Covenant came from Sinai to rest at Zion. That does indeed seem to be something that pre-exilic audiences might want to hear answered, alongside questions like these: where was David when Saul was killed? How did David come to hold Saul’s crown? How exactly did Solomon gain the throne? If David was chosen, why did he not build the temple? Later audiences, after the destruction of Solomon’s temple, must have asked what happened to the ark and to the divine presence in Jerusalem? After the return from the exile, by contrast, audiences must have wondered why, without a monarchy, centralized worship in Jerusalem still mattered. Psalm 132 seems disinterested in all of those questions except this last: why still visit Zion without a king to compel us? Maybe no question matters more to the book of Psalms.
Why? First, it was David’s vow and his disposition that led the Lord to promise, the psalm answers, presenting two parallel vows, David’s in 1-5, the Lord’s in 11-12 and 15-18. Second, the Lord loves Zion (13-14) and promised to take care of her (15-16). And finally, there is the Lord’s promise to perpetuate David’s lineage, which was both unconditional (“The Lord swore to David | fidelity / he does not turn | from it,” 11) and conditional (“the fruit of your pelvis | I set for your throne / if your sons keep my pact” (11c-12a). That means, for its earliest audiences, the psalm invoked and invented memories of David for the sake of Zion’s centrality, something it could do only if David was already the subject not of memory but lore and if monarchy was a matter of the past.
Indeed perhaps the most telling lines in the psalm are those that deal with the priests and the chasidim, the ones who care and are cared-for: “May your priests | dress in justice / may your carers | cheer” (9) and “her priests I dress | in rescue / and her carers | cheer and cheer” (16). The psalm may dangle a symbolic messianic hope at the end, a horn, a lamp, and a flowering crown, but the true heroes of the psalm are not future kings, but present-tense priests, the makers of memories.
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.
It matters very much whose voice we hear, reading Psalm 131. Overall its gestures of obeisance seem deferential and docile to the point of wincing and cringing. However literally we take the heart (1a), eyes (1b), throat (2a, 2c), and legs (“have not walked around,” 1c) in this brief poem, the speaker seems determined to make herself small. Repeatedly, she levels herself: “my heart | is not tall / my eyes | are not stuck up.” She is not greater-than, but lesser: “I have not walked around | with what’s too big / or too marvelous | for me.” She reduces herself, the throat that stands for her, to a “toddler | up against her mother.” In emphasizing that this child has been weaned (for gamul, “a weanling” is too barnyard; “a wean” too dialectal), even as she silences herself, she stresses separation, the throat weaned from and separated from the self that stills it.
There is a mother’s voice in this psalm as well a toddler’s, not quieted but quieting, not cowed or cowering but calming. To be “up against” (`alei could alternatively be “beside” or “upon” or “toward”) her mother, a weaned child may be young enough to be lifted (held, bobbed, and swayed) or old enough to be stood alongside in an instructive embrace. What the mother teaches her child in these gestures is not deference but discipline, self-control. The older infant or very young child knows noise but cannot speak sentences. It takes closeness to learn silence and speech.
The superscription transforms the voice of the psalm yet again. Is this really the prayer of a king, claiming to know his place? Again, how literally are we to take the assertions that the speaker’s heart or mind is not lofty, his eyes not lifted up (cf. Prov 30:13), that he has not trafficked with people or concepts grander or more wondrous than he himself? The psalm means differently if a monarch expresses modesty—or lack of curiosity—than if a devotee, reciting, speaks herself into submission. Up in the stratospheres of society, public demonstrations of obedience are largely merely performative, CEOs calling themselves servants, while for Morlocks, statements of humility are a survival mechanism, a ritual profoundly self-perpetuating. There is a place for knowing one’s place, perhaps, as tales from Genesis 11 to Frankenstein to Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand” have implied. And yet there is a whole world between Psalm 131 and, say, lines from Browning’s “Andrea Del Sarto” about reach and grasp. Maybe the place to end is as the psalm does, with that deep and overdetermined imperative, “Ache” (3).
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.
The Book of Psalms 