Tag: rescue

June 9th, 2023

Psalm 91
* * *

Three distinct trajectories make Psalm 91 more compelling than it first appears. The first is the unfolding of a single extended metaphor: God as a raptor, God’s devotee the raptor’s fledgling. The scene is a mountain, and the vocabulary ornithological, most explicitly in verse 4: “with his feathers | he covers you / under his wings | you nestle.” The dangers facing a juvenile bird are many, as are the threats to even those grown. But, the psalm asserts, “it’s he who frees you | from the trapper’s snare” (3), that in “the trust | of his claw and embrace”

you fear no night terror | no arrow that flies by day

no virus | that moves in gloom

no ruin that wrecks | in afternoons (4c-6).

Without the literal sense, these lines dissipate to abstraction. What does a small bird fear? Fowlers, archers, beasts of prey. Dahood reads verse “terror,” pachad, as a “pack” of wild animals, but even the words for disease and decay work on a literal level, as anyone knows who has chanced on a finch or sparrow dead from no apparent cause. Raptor imagery carries through the whole psalm, through the tenderness the Lord’s emissaries show the fledgling (“upon their palms | they lift you,” 12) to its immediate inverse, the vision of the juvenile’s future: “upon lion and cobra | you tread / you trample | serpent and young male lion” (13). The vulnerable downy fledgling that will grow wide and proud because its parents brooded and fed it, those parents’ tenderness and strength, the remoteness of their nest—all are developed through the psalm by the elaborate conceit.

At the same time, the psalm is structured by a progression of verses, beginning, middle, and end, that make the metaphor explicit in several different ways. Verse 1 has the distance of an aphorism: “Whoever sits in | the shelter of the Highest / spends the night | in the shade of Shaddai” (1). Verse 2 leaps to a first-person voice, with God in third person: “I think the Lord | my nest and my eyrie / my God | I recline in him.” The main body of the psalm, verses 3-8 and 10-13 keep God in the third person, but rely on the second person to put the reader in the young bird’s perspective: “Oh it’s he who frees you | from the trapper’s snare” (3). At the psalm’s center, we shift to direct address, God now more immediately in the second person: “Oh you Lord | my nest / the Highest | you made your home” (9). The psalm’s conclusion is even more immediately God’s perspective, in the first person, with the young bird/devotee in the third person. The more we learn of God as a mother or father bird, in other words, the closer God comes: “I want to keep him safe / I set him high | oh he knows my name” (14); “with length of days | I surfeit him / I make him see | my rescue” (16).

Easily missed is the third trajectory of the psalm, which consolidates the traits and spheres of originally separate gods under the aegis of a single Lord. The first two verses and the central verse 9 noticeably rename the Lord “my nest,” but this renaming is temporary, for the purposes of accenting God’s security and fidelity, enlivening two common terms for reliability: betach, “recline” (2), and ’emet, “trust” in “the trust | of his claw and embrace” (4). Far less temporary is the psalm’s explanation of the relationship between ’Elyon (“the Highest,” 1,9), Shaddai, YHWH (2, 9), and ’Elohei (“my God” 2). The Lord, originally from Sinai, has relocated to Zion. Worship of multiple gods, or gods of different name or avatar or location, clearly must have overlapped, given the persistence of the Bible’s centralizing tendencies. Psalm 91’s first verse is more than just an instance of synonymous parallelism between two divinities or divine appellations: “the shelter of the Highest… the shade of Shaddai.” It prepares the harder work of explaining how YHWH became synonymous with ’El ’Elyon, the Highest, which the psalm does in verse 9: “Oh you Lord | my nest / the Highest | you made your home” (9). The syntax is ambiguous, but the direction is clear: the Lord has become the Highest by nesting in the Highest’s heights.

The psalm’s second half looks different, seen this way. The Lord does not just delegate responsibilities to messengers (11). As the insistent first-person singular of the last three verses reveals, “I” am the one who does all these things. One thinks of the raptor’s claws.
Share:
X
Facebook
Like Loading…
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
Newsletter

Type your email…
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.
Share:
X
Facebook
Like Loading…
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
Newsletter

Type your email…
May 20th, 2023

Psalm 71
* * *

The opening words of Psalm 71 call to mind the opening of Psalm 25: “In you Lord.” But instead of an image of reclining—“To you Lord | I lift my throat / God on you | I lean” (25:1-2)—this psalm depends on scenes of retreat. There is a beautiful and potent spilling-over of sheltering imagery in the first eight verses, pairing the mostly spatial figure of the mountain refuge, crag and lair, with the mostly temporal figure of the womb, the memory of the mother’s belly, the cut cord, the speaker’s youth. That cliff imagery is also temporal, part of a narrative of rescue, being snatched up and away after threats. And the maternal imagery is spatial as well, the inside of the mother’s body paralleling the safety of the lofted mountain.

This landscape and memory give way to the psalm’s center, the speaker fearing the loss of strength that has come with age: “Don’t throw me out | in the time of old age / as my might is spent | don’t leave me” (9). Again, in verse 18, “even until old and gray | God don’t leave me.” The nakedness of these imperatives reshapes the images from the start of the poem—the solidity of the mountain refuge, the vulnerability of the infant.

In its anxiety about waning power, the poem’s appeals become clear. The speaker wants security (4, 5) as well as power that is not his own (7, 8, 21). He asks for God’s fidelity (22) and extols God’s justice most of all (1, 15-16, 19, 24). By contrast with Psalm 69, the wish is not for revenge but for rescue and justice, not the massacre of those “who attack my neck,” just their turning white, turning red, their “scorn and shame” (13, cf. 24).

While the repeated “don’t leave me” is the speaker at his most vulnerable, the poem’s most potent repeated phrase shows up in verses 16 and 18. “Let me enter the power | of my lord the Lord,” he says. Two verses later, after repeating the phrase “since youth,” he says, “don’t leave me / until I’ve told of your biceps | to the age / to each | who enters your power.” “Entering the power” poignantly calls back both the cliff refuge and the womb, a complicated wish. The image of the arm muscle (zer`oa) calls to mind the image of seed (zer`ua), which combines with the word “age” to suggest something more than just a return to the speaker’s own birth scene. There is the suggestion of generativity here, the speaker asking for enough power, enough life, to pass on stories of power to the next age, a fitting transition between a psalm that names David (Psalm 70) and a psalm that names Solomon (Psalm 72).
Share:
X
Facebook
Like Loading…
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
Newsletter

Type your email…
April 29th, 2023

Psalm 50
(lyric, of Asaph)

* * *

Maybe nowhere in the Bible is the idea of a covenant as simply put as in Psalm 50:14-15:

Offer God | gratitude

pay back the Highest | your vows

and call me | on a day of distress

I get you out | and you honor me.

That’s the deal, a contract between unequals, a suzerainty treaty between a lord and a vassal: “I get you out | and you honor me.” Psalm 50 stands out from other psalms for its vision of a divine lawsuit in which God indicts the people of Israel for having misunderstood something so simple.

The psalm joins other devastating critiques of empty ritual in Amos 4-5 and Isaiah 1:11:

What are to me your many offerings | says the Lord

I am stuffed with slaughtered rams | and well-fed fatlings

and the blood of steers lambs and goats | I have never liked.

The Lord’s outrage is shaded with dark humor. Why would I need your lunch? I packed my own: “all the lives of the woods / the animals | of a thousand hills” (Ps. 50:10). Do I have to check in when I want a snack? Did any of you ask if I like meat?

The problem is not the sacrificial rites themselves: “Not for your offerings | I’m convicting you / nor your ritual smoke | always right there” (8). The real problem is not in the fire but in the face: “what’s with you | reciting my rules / as you lift my pact | onto your mouth/ you | you hate discipline/ you fling my words | behind you” (16-17). Unlike in Isaiah and Amos, here the people’s mistakes have less to do with social injustice and more with untamed speech, a tongue silent before theft and adultery, a tongue both too free—“your mouth you let loose | to harm”—and too crafty—“your tongue | frames fraud” (19). As with the rich who were called out in Psalm 49, the worst consequences affect a brother: “You sit and speak out at | your brother / the son of your mother | you slander.”

These lines lead up almost all the way to God’s resting his case, his mic drop: “I convict you | and lay my case before you” (21c). In between batches of evidence of speaking against one’s own family members and the psalm’s final statement of God’s case come the most cutting lines:

you did all this | and I kept quiet

you reckoned I would be | just like you   (21a-b).

Here, it is God’s silence that opposes deceitful speech. Or rather, God’s silence has opposed wrongful speech until this moment in the courtroom. Divine silence is long gone: “Our God comes | and does not keep quiet” (2). It has been replaced not just with verbal display, God’s prosecutorial argument from verses 7-21, but with full sunlit theophanic fire: “God | shone / Our God comes | and does not keep quiet / fire at his face | consumes / and all around him | it stormed intense” (2-3). Even more biting is that sharp and distancing line, “you reckoned I would be | just like you.” The storm and the courtroom prove otherwise.

It is not clear, however, why, if God testifies against all Israel, as verses 4, 6, and 7 explicitly say, the actual charges that are detailed in the second half of the suit should be directed only at “the cheat,” the bad person (16). Is all of Israel guilty, or just this bad person? Does it matter that that obtrusive stage direction, “And to the cheat | God says,” is particularly unpoetic or that that line tames charges that would otherwise indict all of Israel? The final lines of the psalm are similarly problematic. Is the accusation suddenly that Israel—or some of its people—have been forgetting or ignoring God? (22) The issue isn’t improper gifts, or deceptive speech, but that people have forgotten God? That fiery divine appearance would be hard to forget, as would the sudden leap from articulate argument to the violent threat of ripping God’s people to shreds (22). The meaning of the final half-verse is also unclear, and its language of rescue could not have been predicted by anything else in the psalm.

To be fair, the beginning of the psalm is just as strange as the ending. The psalm starts with three divine names: ‘El, ‘Elohim, and YHWH, with nothing in between. The end of verse 2 and the start of verse 3 name both “God” and “our God,” and verse 7 ends with “God your God me.” Is this one divinity or more? Strangely, even when the Lord (or God) seems to be speaking, “God” is often referred to in the third person: “Offer God | gratitude / pay back the Highest | your vows / and call me” (14-15). The final stanza, again, confuses:

Consider this | you who ignore God

lest I shred | with no one to snatch away

who offers thanks | honors me

and there I will show | a path to God’s rescue.

Shifts of person are common in biblical Hebrew, but the separation of roles here is pronounced. The first-person seems both to punish and to reveal, while God in the third person seems to have been forgotten but to be capable of rescue. The name El, plus the fire and the storm, plus the little gaps between the speaker and God, all suggest something plural, whether Canaanite or ancient or something else. What’s perfectly clear is the covenant centered in the psalm, with its injunction to give thanks. What’s less clear stands at either end of the psalm, in the faceted, elusive God with whom that covenant is made.
Share:
X
Facebook
Like Loading…
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
Newsletter

Type your email…