Tag: memory

May 26th, 2023

Psalm 77
(director: on Jeduthun, an Asaph lyric)

* * *

This is a sensational psalm. It is deft and layered, powerfully personal and embodied, and yet richly allusive. It transposes its first-person first half to a grand and mythic register. So much of the drama of the Asaph psalms that precede Psalm 77 is distilled here in the experience of a single speaker who wants. The cohortative mode, the “let me”/”may I” mode of wish, is crucial to the voice of the psalm. The speaker has wanted to cry out, but their body won’t let them. It won’t let them give up: “my hand at night | has stretched / but doesn’t numb | my throat has refused relief” (2); “You’ve taken hold of | my eyelids / I’ve been trembling | and cannot speak” (4).

Wants keep coming. “I want to remember,” the speaker says three times. “I want to remember God | but I’ve groaned” (3). “I want to remember my song | in the night in my heart” (6). Tellingly, right at the turn in the center of the psalm, the speaker says, “I remember | the works of Yah / oh I want to remember | your wonders gone by” (11). The desire to remember lingers even after the remembering itself. Wanting to remember keeps coming not because the speaker has forgotten, but because their desired remembering is an action, something that must be vocalized. After all, remembering in the psalm is always paired with “murmuring,” the verb used for low, meditative speech. “I want to murmur,” they say three times, twice pointing to a failure of breath: “I want to murmur | but my breath’s given out” (3); “I want to murmur | but my breath’s gone looking” (6). Murmuring, too, is at the psalm’s center:

I remember | the works of Yah

oh I want to remember | your wonders gone by

that I might mumble | all your work and your workmanship

I want to murmur God | in apartness your way

What began in verse 3 as the desire to remember God becomes in verses 12-13 the desire to murmur “God | in apartness your way.” The resolution is followed by the poem’s key question/exclamation: “Who is a god great as God | you the God who does wonders” (13-14, which are divided curiously in the Masoretic Text).

Only a few psalms earlier, it was God being asked to remember (74:2, 18, 22). Now, though God’s legendary interventions have been the subject of Psalm 74 (74:12-17), Psalm 75 (75:2-3), and nearly all of Psalm 76 (76:1-8), the speaker struggles to speak of this memory. The struggle to speak is caused by failing breath but also by God’s own silence, as verses 7-10 make clear: “has his caring | gone for good / his speech ceased | age to age” (8). The speaker’s own bodily discomfort comes from the absence of God’s body: “did he forget, God | how to feel / or shut in anger | his womb-love” (9). As always, the word for “compassion” names a part of the mother’s body, the womb, which is paired here as it is so many times, with the verb “shut.” God’s gone barren, perhaps—or the speaker just misses the womb. The speaker admits, “my sorrow is this / the sleeping right hand | of the Highest” (10). God’s sleeping hand contrasts with the speaker’s own hand, which was “stretched | but doesn’t numb” (2).

In the poem’s second half, the silence and absence of God are followed by memories. God’s arm is recalled as what ransomed “your people / the sons of Jacob | and Joseph” (15). God’s speech is recalled in deluge: “the voice of your thunder in the whirling | lightnings lit the world / the earth trembled | and it sways” (18). And, most enigmatically, hauntingly, God’s “way,” which the speaker had wanted to murmur in verse 13, is recalled as a pathway that waters erased: “by sea was your way | your winding by mighty waters / your footprints | were all unknown” (19). Did you miss God’s speech? Did you want God’s caring and womb-love, God’s tracks? These are they, the psalm says, such as they were. If it’s God’s hand you’re missing, consider this, the psalm concludes: “You led your people | like a flock / by the hand of Moses | and Aaron” (20).

The memorials of Jacob and Joseph and of Moses and Aaron are just the surface of the psalm’s allusions. The waters that erase footprints, together with the mention of clouds, the buying back of the people, all clearly gesture to the Exodus, as do close parallels between 77:13-14 and the Song of the Sea. Many scholars have cataloged these parallels and shown how they anticipate Psalms 78 and 81. But the waters and deeps of verses 16-19 allude not just to the crossing of the Reed Sea, but also the chaotic waters of creation (see also 74:12-17 and 75:3) and the story of Noah, all three of which are linked by inner-biblical reference, echo, and allusion. At the center of the story of Noah, attentive readers note, is God’s own remembering: “God remembered Noah” (Gen 8:1). Similarly, at the center of the cycle of Jacob stories, God remembers: “God remembered Rachel and God heard her and opened her womb” (Gen 30:22). This moment, too, is recalled by Psalm 77, which mentions Joseph and Jacob’s sons, and centers remembrance, and worries that a womb has shut.

Those stories of Jacob and his son Joseph are significant to this psalm as well. In verse 2, three words in a row allude to these two. The only biblical character to be “numb” (tapug) is Jacob, when he finds out Joseph is still alive (Gen 45:26). The only character to “refuse relief” (ma’anah hinacheim) is also Jacob, when he is told that Joseph has been killed (vayma’ein lehitnacheim, Gen 37:35). Later, Jacob “refuses” Joseph while reversing the blessings of Joseph’s sons, preferring Ephraim (Gen 48:19; see also Ps 78:9ff, 78:67). These allusions pinpoint key moments of father-and-son intimacy that also touch on the generativity of the family line— not just the two characters themselves but their lineage, and importantly, the lineage at the end of Genesis, which leads to the captivity in Egypt at the beginning of the book of Exodus. Even the wordplay in verses 7 and 8— both yosif, “he will (not) do again,” and he’aseif, “has it gone,” link Joseph (both roots are used multiple times in Genesis 37 and 47) and Asaph in their sound clusters— reminds readers that Joseph’s hopeful story, itself a story of remembrance, may have been followed by the terrible oppression of Pharaoh, but it was followed, almost immediately, by the hands of Moses and Aaron.
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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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May 23rd, 2023

Psalm 74
(didactic, an Asaph)

* * *

The destruction of places dedicated to Israel’s God is at the heart of Psalm 74. It is impossible to tell whether these special places are all part of one place, “Mount Zion | here you lodged” (2), Solomon’s Temple, razed in the 6^th c. BCE by the Neo-Babylonians, or whether there were multiple places— “they set fire to all | the assemblies of God in the land” (8). It’s therefore also impossible to tell when exactly this psalm might have been composed or compiled, recited, or remembered, and whose needs it met first. But the date matters far less than the sense the psalm makes of catastrophe by retelling tragic collapse as an event that keeps coming to life. It flanks this retelling with appeals to even older foundation stories. And it frames all these narratives with unanswerable questions, less questions than outcries, and with a series of instructions for God, comprising eight imperative commands and four petitions slightly more polite.

The ruins commemorated and lamented in the psalm are what remains from intentional destruction by an enemy armed with flags, torches, and axes. The sequence of verses from 4 through 9 is concerned not with the slaughter of people, though there are “no more prophets” according to verse 9, but with the desecration of places: “your foes snarled | in the heart of your assemblies” (4), “they burned | your sanctuary to the ground / they hollowed | the tabernacle of your name” (7), “they set fire to all | the assemblies of God in the land” (8). Into these perfective verbs are set two verses that rely on imperfect forms, an effect that mirrors the English historical present: “and now her carvings | all together / with hatchet and hammer | they shatter” (6). That word “now” (`attah) works marvels, making timeless the moment of the destroying of figures carved to be timeless themselves, while also invoking by opposition its own near-homonym, “you” (’attah), used of God seven times in verses 12-17. The destruction is complete; its immediacy persists in a repeated now.

Against this panel of historical fact (4-9) is positioned a panel of prehistorical legend (12-17), the people’s memory followed by what should be God’s memory. The explicit second person sharpens the point. If anyone has the power to defeat enemies and lay foundations, it is you, God: “you broke | with your might the sea / crushed the dragons’ heads | on the waters” (13), “you ripped open | the spring and the stream / you dried up | rivers of lasting” (15), “you erected | all earth’s bounds / summer fruit and fall rain | you formed” (17). In the first narrative, God was the “you” in the object possessive: “your foes… your assemblies… your sanctuary… your name.” In this second account, God is primarily a subject, controlling verb after verb of action.

The first narrative is flanked by questions for God. The poem opens by pulling no punches: “What, God | have you been mad for so long | your nose fumes | at the flock of your field” (1). Both the interrogative lamah (what? why? how?) and lanetsach, the word rendered here as “for so long” return in verses 10 and 11:

how long, God | does a foe taunt

does an enemy scorn | your name for so long

what, do you take back | your hand, your right hand

from the heart of your chest | destroy

“How long?” The opening question has multiplied and become the psalmists’ cry. More, the passage reads like a stutter, especially when paired with the end of verse 9: “not one of us knows | how long / how long, God | does a foe taunt.” How curiously, how doubly, the question about God having taken away God’s hand becomes the imperative, “destroy.” The hand that has been inexplicably taken back into the folds of the robe retroactively becomes, through the final imperative, a hand being taken out from the folds of the robe.

The imperative kalleh, “destroy,” which was used notably in a different verbal stem in the previous psalm (kallah, in “my body ends” 73:26), is the third in a remarkable series of twelve orders that order Psalm 74. “Recall,” God is instructed three times (2, 18, 22). Most of the instructions are clustered at the psalm’s end, from verses 18-23: “recall… do not give some animal | the neck of your dove… do not forget for long (lanetsach) / Consider the pact… do not let the oppressed | return ashamed… Rise up God | plead your case / recall how the fool | taunts you all day / do not forget | the voice of your foes.” This burst of insistence blends appeals to memory with calls for action. The “Rise up” of verse 22 and “Recall” of verse 23 return to the opening imperatives, the “Recall” of verse 2 and “Lift her your footfalls” of verse 3. A poem that begins with God’s nostrils flaring and hinges on God’s hand has perhaps its most poignant moment in this image of God stepping up “to what’s been ruined so long,” yet another line that uses the word netsach, a word for what lasts.
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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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