Tag: Qorach

June 6th, 2023

Psalm 88
(a song, a lyric, of the Qorachites; director: to Mahalat, a didactic for humility, of Heman the Ezrahite)

* * *

It gets dark here near the end of Book Three (Pss 73-89) but honesty about darkness matters. Besides the biological fact that death comes for us all, acknowledgment of death’s finality is a condition of moral and psychological integrity. The wish to have a whole, unified heart (86:11) means accepting that the nefesh, the soul that is trachea, larynx, glottis, esophagus, mandible, hyoid, sternum, the carotid arteries, is not some separable eternity that floats off while only the body rots. By far most of the Hebrew Bible holds no hope in personal, subjective immortality; if you want to live forever, you’d better have a people. Even politically, for the earliest audiences of the psalms, it must have been imperative to admit, finally, that the Davidic kings were dead and buried. For these audiences and for the Persian and Hellenistic occupiers reading over their shoulders, it must have been important to show that all the monarchic imagery was just memory and figuration for the kingship of the Lord, rather than some politically subversive belief that David himself might come back from the dead. Messianic and eschatological readings of the Psalms exist, but they are mostly willful and tendentious. Book Three closes not by hoping for a new anointed, but by insisting that while Jerusalem and Yahweh remain— in Zion is birth, according to Psalm 87— the literal monarchy is buried and, as Psalm 88 graphically reveals, dead.

Psalm 88 reads like a scathing response to the naïve hyperbole of Psalm 86:13, “and you have freed my neck | from the deepest of the grave,” a line that allows literalists of every generation to imagine a bodily resurrection for King David. Literalists continue to hash Psalm 88 itself: “we cannot prove from which fatal disease the petitioner is suffering. There is no mention of leprosy… Very likely the petitioner is afflicted with a serious illness from his youth. It is possible that he lives outside the gates as an outcast” (Kraus II 192). Very likely, rather, the petitioner is dead, a persona, a poetic speaker who voices an author’s polemic against vacuous insincerities about dying and death, such as those centered by Psalm 86. The neck of the speaker of Psalm 88 “has had enough | bad things” (3): “at dawn my prayer | confronts you / why Lord | do you reject my neck” (14). Instead of freeing or rescue (88:1), Psalm 88 is all grave, whether named as she’ol (88:3, 11; cf. 86:13) or the tomb (88:5, 11) or “the pit the lowest parts / in the darks | in the deeps” (88:6; cf. 4). The psalm is a veritable thesaurus of “the dead” (5, 10), “the slain” (5), “the forsaken” (10), “the decomposing” (11), “the land of forgetting” (12), “your terrors… your fury/ your horrors” (15-16), and most significantly, darkness (6, 12, 18).

Or it could be a thesaurus if it were not arranged as a descent, ever darker and deeper. What begins with the “Lord | God of my rescue” and a cry and prayer that might come “right to you… to your face… your ear” (1-2) ends far from there: “you have made far from me | lover and friend / those who know me | darkness” (18). Instead of God’s face, or anyone’s face, it’s darkness; instead of rescue, it’s distance. In the second stanza, the speaker’s life “has reached | the grave” (3), but by the fourth stanza “over me has weighed || all your wrath” (7), and by the second-to-last stanza, “over me has passed | all your fury / your horrors | have put an end to me” (16). The psalm weighs down, a striking contrast from the metaphors of weight built into the theological terms kavod, for the heft of glory, or betach, the leaning back of trust. God begins the psalm as silence, becomes rage, and ends as terrors, the return of the waters of chaos in which the speaker drowns: the horrors have “surrounded me like water | all day / overwhelmed me | entirely” (17). These are not the held-back waters of Genesis and Exodus. They are the flooding undoing of creation.

In counterpoint with the descent is the psalm’s insistent repetition and recursion. “Over me” (7), “over me” (16), “over me” (17), the dead or dying speaker intones three times in a parody of a call to “my God” (`alai ~ a’alai). He calls to the Lord daily according to verses 1, 9, and 14, though in verse 14 the verb intensifies. “You’ve made far from me | those who know me” the speaker also says in both verses 8 and 18. “Those who know me” (meyudda`ai) calls back God’s similar participle in Psalm 87:4 (leyode`ai). It also calls to mind the question, “can your wonders | be known in the dark” (12), which itself calls back questions and statements from the beginning of Book Three: “how would God know/ is there knowing | for the Highest” (73:11), and “he will be known | as one who brings upon her / in a copse of trees | axes” (74:5). Linked with “those who know me” among the speaker’s lost friends is “one who loves,” ’oheiv, which also calls back Psalm 87, where it refers to the Lord. (Also referring to Psalm 87 is the counting of the dead in Psalm 88:4, which contrasts with the counting of births in 87:6). Likewise, the word yechad—here, “entirely” (88:17)— calls back the words “alone” and the verb “unite“ or “keep together” from Psalm 86 (86:10, 11). God’s singularity has become God’s absence, the speaker’s isolation.

Of all this psalm’s corrections of prior psalms, none is more cutting than its reframing of the claim made by the speaker of Psalm 86: `ani ve’evyon ’ani, “weak and in want | am I” (86:1). There, the speaker, allegedly David himself, claimed to be weak (`ani), and therefore asked God to `anah, to answer. The speaker of Psalm 88, by contrast, uses the verb `anah not to ask for a response, but to announce completed action, `innita, “you have made me weak.” He follows this with his own dark pun, `aiyini da’aba minni `oni, “my eye has dimmed | from my weakness” (9). When we get to verse 15, and the word pair `ani ’ani resumes, it’s clear that this speaker, in the actual grave, actually is weak.

The word the psalm seems to dance around in this profound wordplay is the word for nothingness, ’ein. It appears as the speaker characterizes himself in verse 4 as a man ’ein `eyal, of no strength. It is surely no accident that this second word, a rare word, a loan word for vigor, coming immediate after a negative, sounds like a deliberate way of naming God.
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June 5th, 2023

Psalm 87
(of the Qorachites, a lyric, a song)

* * *

Readers often miss the cohesion and singular pleasures of the taut Psalm 87. Its structure is meticulous and not, as many scholars have long proposed, a mess: “badly injured… the half-verses have been torn apart and senselessly coordinated” (Kraus II 184). The psalm depends most significantly on prepositions and pronouns, most significantly the three that nestle in Zion: “in you” (3), “in her” (5), “in you” (7).

The first stanza begins with yesudato, an exact word impossible to get fully and succinctly in English, a feminine passive participial noun with a masculine possessive suffix: literally, “his her being founded” or, better “her having been founded of him” (1). From the first word, therefore, we anticipate both a masculine and a feminine antecedent (postcedent, to be technical). It’s not necessary to wait long: both the Lord and Zion are named in the very next line: “the Lord who loves | Zion’s gates” (2a). The tendency of translations to supply the verb “to be” as a linking verb or copula in one or both of these first two lines, or to render participials as conjugated verbs, is impatience at best. The entire first stanza is constructed around a series of five participles: “founded by him” (1), “who loves” (2a) “the shrines” (2b), “glowing speaking” (3). The structure works by delay, as the long left branch of a left-branching sentence. The first stanza is a tidy chiasm, with “her having been founded by him” mirrored by “in you, city of God” at the end of verse 3. The hills of sacredness, “the hallowed hills” of verse 1, parallel “glowing speaking,” matching the two key theological abstractions of qodesh and kavod. Centered in the stanza is the centralization of worship that displaced worship of the Lord from the high places of the north, locating it in Zion.

The second stanza brings the main clause the first stanza delayed: “I make remember,” the Lord says, “for those knowing me” (4a). If you would know me, the line suggests, remember whom I have defeated: Rahab and Babel, conquests early and late. That these two names are followed by three foreign lands—”Philistia, Tyre, Cush”— allows the lands to be read both as further examples of victories and as examples of those whose peoples have come now to Zion. More, however, these peoples are brought up, here near the psalm’s middle, because of a linguistic quirk. For people from these other nations, the idiom is “this person was born there,” yulad sham—a phrase that sounds almost like “Jerusalem” (4b). By contrast, “of Zion it’s said | he or she was born in her,” yulad bakh (5a). The difference is between an impersonal adverb, one that points outside, over there, and a pregnant preposition with a personal pronoun, one is born with her, of her, by her, in her.

The final line of the second stanza does multiple things. It repeats the third-person personal pronoun hu’, which fits all genders, referring simultaneously to Zion, her, and to any person born in Zion and even potentially to any person born even elsewhere: “it is she the Most High | establishes” (5b). The second stanza thus begins and ends with clauses, active verbs, even as the word “establishes” recalls the metaphor of a foundation with which the psalm began.

Because the first two stanzas fold back so nicely on each other—“establishes” picks up “founded by him”; Zion is named twice (2a, 5a); Jacob’s shrines parallel the names of other nations (2b, 4); “mention… for those who know me” parallels knowing and memorializing with “glowing speaking” while centering “city of God” (4a, 3)—the psalm’s third stanza feels at first like a coda. But that coda transforms our experience of the psalm. We change our mind about the center and the edges of the structure. The foundations and hills from verse 1 now become “fountains,” as do the people born “in you” (7b). Now, too, the “glowing speaking” becomes both counting and writing (6a). It even becomes the singers and the pipers (7a) who shatter the fourth wall, leading to and commenting on the scene of worship. By the end it is Zion who is centered, as the poem’s center has shifted. Its closing word repeats the psalm’s most important preposition + pronoun from the end of the first stanza, “in you.”
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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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June 3rd, 2023

Psalm 85
(director: of the Qorachites, a lyric)

* * *

If the frequency of keywords matters to a psalm’s meaning, Psalm 85 cares most about “turning.” So do many biblical narratives– from Jacob and Joseph to Moses and Balaam, to Ruth and David– and poetry throughout the Prophets and Writings. The root shuv is used five times here, all in the first four of seven stanzas. Having “turned back | the capture of Jacob” transitively and intransitively “turned back | from the heat of your rage,” God is urged in an imperative to “turn us back” (1, 3, 4). The final two uses of shuv are wishes, one for God, one for the people, introduced by adverbs of negation: “will you not turn back | and revive us” and “let them not turn back | to foolishness” (6, 8). In other words, a central biblical story is retold here in brief: past rescue leads to a call for present and future rescue—a call, a hope, a fear, a “will you not”—all of which is followed by an obligation that seems spoken by God: I will turn if they will turn. And so it fits that the fivefold use of “turn” in the first two sections of the psalm, stanzas 1 and 2, and stanzas 3-5, is woven through with the threefold use of “people” (2, 6, 8) and of “rescue” (4, 7, 9).

From the middle of the psalm to the end, however, the keywords that repeat are abstractions like “care” (7, 8, 10), “peace” (8,10), “faithfulness” (10,11), and “justice” (10, 11, 13). These words don’t just repeat. They are actively, vividly brought together as they will be several times towards the end of Book 3 of the Psalter (Psalms 86, 88, and 89):

Care and faithfulness | have touched

justice and peace | have kissed

faithfulness | from the land sprouts up

and justice | from the sky leans down (10-11).

Care and peace, chesed and shalom, have been named already in the psalm’s central stanza. There is care, which the speaker wants the Lord to make visible. And there is peace, which she wants the Lord to speak, not just “to his people” but to “his caring ones” (8). The beauty and power of chesed and shalom is that they are relational: the Lord’s care is visible and audible in the chasidav, the ones who care and are cared for. In other words, when “care” and “peace” drop out of verse 11, in Psalm 85’s second-to-last stanza, it’s not because we don’t know where they come from but because we already do. If care and truth/fidelity/faithfulness touch, and faithfulness “from the land sprouts up,” then care must come down from above. If justice and peace kiss, and justice “from the sky leans down,” peace must operate from the bottom-up. What began as a psalm of turning becomes a psalm of encounter. What began as a request for rescue becomes a wish to see care and hear peace, which becomes a meditation on horizontal and vertical axes of fidelity and justice.

Of these four principles, it is justice that the last stanza focuses on. While verses 10-11 move from the horizontal to the vertical plane, verses 12-13 reverse course. Verse 12 is down and up: “Yes the Lord gives | the good / and our land gives | its yield.” Verse 13 returns to the horizontal as it returns to the image of walking from the previous psalm: “justice walks | in front of him / to make a path | of its footprints.” The psalm ends with that singular possessive pronoun attached to “footprints,” an ambiguous pronoun that can refer to the Lord or to justice, which deepens (lengthens?) its power. The Lord walks behind justice, his footprints justice’s. In a psalm that calls for the Lord to rescue people and to reveal care and peace, the arrival of justice anticipates and signals.

Similarly open-ended is the center of the psalm, the turn itself, the wish: “I want to hear | what the god speaks / the Lord | when he speaks peace” (8). Everything from “what” to “when” is strange: mah yedabber ha’el YHWH ki yedabber. The construction ha’el YHWH is unique, “the god the Lord,” a kind of backwards version of the common “Lord God,” YHWH ’elohim. Because the interrogative mah and the conjunction ki always have tremendous semantic range, the speaker’s desire to hear extends from how or what the God Lord speaks, to oh how he speaks, to whether he speaks. It’s a remarkable stretching of meaning that includes everything from a confident assertion (“I want to hear the powerful Lord speak for oh! he speaks peace!”) to a textual garble to a wonder or worry (“how does El speak the Lord if he speaks?”)

In addition to the keywords named already, both “the Lord” (1, 7, 8, 12) and “the land” (1, 9, 11, 12) are named four times. It may not be possible to pin down a single meaning at the heart of Psalm 85. It is possible, however, to see and hear pervasive significance in the meetings of the Lord and the land, from the favor shown in the past (1) to the desired “glow,” the kavod that the speaker hopes “may settle | in our land” (9), to the visionary sprouting up and pouring down of fidelity and justice as the Lord gives and the land gives and in between a path is made.
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June 2nd, 2023

Psalm 84
(director: on the Gath harp, of the Qorachites, lyric)

* * *

This psalm lurches interestingly. It’s so caught between different verse patterns and readymade phrases that it would be tempting to call it a hodgepodge or even a mess rather than “a lively exchange of various forms, motifs, and themes” (Kraus II 166). But the psalm’s uneven rhythms mirror its deepest concern, the tension between residence and mobility.

It is as if the Ark of the Covenant itself were speaking, the seat of power of YHWH Sabaoth, the Lord-in-Battle-Gear, having just been relocated from bloody theaters of war and high places like Shiloh and Shechem to what will become Solomon’s Temple. Or maybe what we hear is the voice of the sixth-century BCE architects of the Second Temple, returned from exile, nostalgic for militarism and monarchy. Either way, Psalm 84 works by recognizing both the desire for movement and the desire for a home. Its longing for Zion is less a conventional piety and more a scene of conflict between the longing for a dwelling and memories of walking around.

The psalm seems to be arranged first around a sequence of places belonging to the Lord of Armies: “your quarters” (1), “the Lord’s enclosures” (2), “your altars” (3), “your home” (4), Zion (7), “your enclosures,” and “the gate | of the house of my God” (10). In tension with these locations— really, all are just metonyms for a single location, implying variety within unity— are two key passages about mobility.

The first is the misunderstood stanza in verses 5-7 about the person with “highways in his heart.” Often this is construed as a love for pilgrimage or it’s amended willfully to “trust in their heart” (Kraus) or “from whose heart are your extolments” (Dahood). Hermann Gunkel writes thickly, “Even with the best intentions one cannot carry highways in one’s heart.” (Surely he never drove Highway 1 south from Santa Cruz through Big Sur, nor the Flaggy Shore that Seamus Heaney describes in “Postscript,” let alone the Dingle Peninsula or Donegal, never hiked the Appalachian Trial nor Offa’s Dyke. Nor, more to the point, did he walk hundreds of miles as a pilgrim or nomad or refugee.)

The psalm’s images are strange but precise. People, plural, who pass over a vale of tears, water it. This passing-over momentarily inverts the story of the crossing of the Reed Sea— instead of having waters held back, they add to the flood. And yet, these tears become “a spring / and even blessings | which the first rain sheathes” (6). How could highways not be in one’s heart, to see a grievous crossing make the wilderness fertile? Are these people the children of Israel coming to the promised land, or pilgrims forced from the shrines of the northern kingdom, or refugees from Babylon, or willing pilgrims or tourists, visiting station after station? Either way, highways are indeed in their heart, as each is either “seen before God,” yeira’eh ’el ’elohim, as the circumspect Masoretic vowels say, or yir’eh ’el ’elohim as the consonantal text says, “sees the God of Gods” (or even “El sees God in Zion”).

Verse 10 frames movement and stasis as a comparison, which would seem strange if there were no tension between the two. The contrast pits being stationary at the temple (“a day in your enclosures… standing at the gate | of the house of my God”) against traveling around with the military. The phrase “sweeter than a thousand” sends some translators in search of a substantive to anchor “a thousand”—“a thousand at home” (Kraus), “a thousand in the Cemetery” (! Dahood, banging on again about Death). But ’eleph contains its own substance; more than a numeral, it designates a military unit, a regiment, a battalion. It’s better to be closed in for a day than to spend a thousand days with a thousand soldiers, in other words, and better to stand like a bouncer outside the temple than to bivouac, “wandering around | in the tents of wrong.” The Assyrian loanword dur seems to indicate circular motion rather than “dwelling.” What makes the tents “wrong”? Again, the reference could be either to the Exodus or to the Exile or to the northern shrines shunned by the centralizing Yahwists.

Though verse 10 clearly prefers rooting in Zion to circling about with the military, the psalm concludes with blessings for a particular kind of movement and a particular staying in place. The Lord gives both “sun and shield,” both openness and protection, both “favor and glow,” according to verse 11. And to whom? “He holds back nothing sweet | from those who walk soundly… all set, the one who leans on you” (12). The reclining movement of trust is motion within stillness, while walking soundly requires a kind of stillness within motion. These same paradoxes are visible in the birds of verse 3, emblems of both liberty and domesticity, wing and nest, who have nested charmingly, ironically, precariously in the altars of the Lord of Armies.
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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.
Recent Posts
- Psalm 150
- Psalm 149
- Psalm 148
- Psalm 147
- Psalm 146
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