Tag: violence

August 8th, 2023

Psalm 149
* * *

Reading Psalm 149, every reader assumes that the “timbrel and lyre” (3) are real, that they are literal objects touched and sounded and heard. So, too, “the fresh song” sung “in the crowd of the caring” (1) readers take as literal, though with an added sense of performance: that this song being sung now is the new one identified by the song itself. Even the psalm’s language of dancing, “twirl” (2b), “whirling” (3a), and “leap” (5a), seems more likely to indicate literal joyful movement than to symbolize internal feelings of gladness. The literal anchors readers, especially when it’s easy to see.

What’s definitively figurative in the psalm is easy to see as well. “He garlands the weak | with rescue” cannot be literal because it’s abstract (4b). The image, or figure, is there in the verb “garland,” which can mean both a kind of encircling and an adorning or beautifying: divine help is thus like a necklacing of the poor, like a laying of a lei. The figurative sails the reader off in search of what is meant but not said. With no literal, the reader drifts; with no figurative, there’s only treading water or there’s no water to tread.

Poetry—psalms are no exception—layers the literal and the figurative. To continue the nautical metaphor, poetry tacks. The lines “with whirling / with timbrel and lyre | they play for him” (3) may be literal, but they borrow language from other dances with instruments. The ideal reader recalls the celebration of Miriam and “all the women” in Exodus 15:20, the untimely celebration of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11:34, and the vision of a restored Jerusalem in Jeremiah 31 (esp. Jer 31:4). The timbrel and the lyre are no less real for being richly allusive, but they mean more than one literal thing. Likewise in verse 4, both the Lord’s “liking” and the word “weak” reuse words from Psalm 147 (Ps 147:11, 147:6), words that are also found in the late chapters of Isaiah. Psalm 149 doesn’t just hold up objects and state facts about them. It figures meaning by allusion and reference; poems are about other poems, as Harold Bloom among others relentlessly showed.

What, then, is the reader to do with these other concrete objects in Psalm 149, the troublesome “beds” (5) and “sword” (6), the “shackles” and “fetters” that avenge captivity (8), the “verdict written down” (9)? Are those literal beds that the covenant faithful, “the caring,” literally bounce and shout upon, while—depending how one links verses 5 and 6—wielding a literal sword? Are the neighboring nations of verse 7 literally to be punished with literal manacles and chains, governed by a literal verdict (already or yet to be) written down? All of these things cannot be literal, unless jumping and yelling on a bed with a sword somehow facilitates revenge.

In his nineteenth-century commentary on Psalm 149, Franz Delitzsch writes,

“By means of this psalm Gaspar Scioppius inflamed the Roman Catholic princes for the thirty years’ religious war in his book Classicum Belli Sacri, a book which was not written with ink, but with blood. And within the Protestant church, by means of this psalm, Thomas Münzer stirred up the Peasants’ War” (Gunkel 366).

In our time, the bottom of the cage of the internet is lined with confident screeds that would make the second half of Psalm 149 support theologies of private militarization or armed insurrection, even theories of divine authorship for select clauses in the Bill of Rights, taking that sword literally, all too literally.

But there is every reason to read the sword figuratively. It’s a cherev pipiyot, literally a sword with two mouths. The “mouth” of a sword is the idiom for its blade edge, so the word is taken to mean “double-edged” (Judg 3:16) But pipiyot is a word that only appears here and in Isaiah 41, in a passage of consolation for those released from exile to Babylon. The Lord tells them they have been strengthened, their enemies finished off.

Now, I have turned you into a grind-board, newly sharp with teeth (pipiyot). You can thresh mountains and crush them and the hills you can turn to chaff. You can winnow them and a breath will lift them, a tempest toss them, and you will whirl in the Lord and the hallowed of Israel you will praise. (Isa 41:15-16)

By the use of that rare word, Psalm 149 invokes the entire passage, importing Second Isaiah’s message of comfort, as well as its image of leveling mountains to make the road home more smooth. That the sword has two “mouths” seems relevant as well, given the proximity of shouting and the even more proximate rare word garon, “larynx.”

It’s not even clear that most of the other objects are literal, either. Biblical beds suggest not just privacy (Exod 8:3, 2 Sam 4:11) and rest (2 Sam 4:5, Job 33:15) but sexual intimacy (Prov 7:17, Songs 3:1, Isa 57:8). The word mishkebotam, “their beds” (Isa 57:2, Hos 7:14) is very close to mishkenotam, “their homes” (Ps 49:11, cf. Isa 54:2). Verse 5 could then pair— whether it is a scribal error or just a near-homonym— the words kavod and mishkan, synonyms for the sanctuary (Ps 26:8). In association with revenge, the shackles and fetters of the vengeful second-to-last psalm in the Psalter call to mind the “chains” and “ropes” of the vengeful Psalm 2, making a tidy chiasm (Ps 149:8, Ps 2:3).

Even if the sword is literal, it is by no means clear whether it is grammatically linked to the sequence of infinitives that follow, “to make revenge… to cuff their kings… to make for them | a verdict written down” (7-9). Verse 9 concludes with an ambiguous pronoun in its pronouncement: “this is an honor | for all his caring.” Which? All three of the infinitives, plus the sword? Just the last infinitive, without the sword? Does the psalm’s conclusion suggest that it is glorious and honorable to wave a doubly dangerous sword intending revenge against governments and the 1% in some frothy apocalyptic vision of a verdict to be delivered? Or does it suggest that, of the three infinitives, making revenge, locking up the oligarchs, and making a written verdict, only this last is “an honor | for all his caring”? When possibilities multiply like this, certainty goes.

None of this is to kid-glove the Bible or to dispute Goethe’s conclusion that Psalm 149 may well be a “nasty” psalm (qtd. in Prinsloo 395). Nor is it to tame a psalm that, for all its confusions and discomfiting, clearly argues for a divine preference for the weak (4) over the affluent (8). It is to insist, rather, on not making texts say what we want them to say. From the second verse of Psalm 146 to the end of Psalm 150, the first-person singular has disappeared entirely from the book of Psalms in favor of a collective vision of a society built from castoffs (147:2), “making verdicts for the oppressed” (146:7), shackling others’ “affluent | with fetters of iron” (149:8). This is not a psalm that rubber-stamps gun ownership as necessarily caring or honorable, nor does it suggest God craves blood.
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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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August 3rd, 2023

Psalm 144
(of David)

* * *

Psalm 144 has as many jump cuts as a film montage or trailer. Splicing may be its most important technique: within verses, between verses, and between the first eleven verses with their mottle of quotations and the strikingly visionary poetry of the final four verses. To a greater degree than most other psalms, interpretation depends on whether we see the form as primarily chiastic, static, a series of frames around a center that makes sense of the whole, or as primarily narrative, dynamic, a sequence of moments that aims from beginning to end. Seen as a concentric structure, Psalm 144 seems like a code whose answer decoded is David, the former and wished-for king. Seen as a gradual unfolding, however, the psalm is more like a time-lapse series of stills, which revisits David’s psalms to revise and replace them, leaving behind a vision of freedom from the sword.

The middle of the psalm is marked by a refrain, a duplication that has often been dismissed as a copyist’s error:

Free me and release me | from the hand of the outsider

whose mouth | speaks nothing

their right hand | a right hand of fraud   (11, cf. 7-8).

In verses 9 and 10, between these dangerous hands and worthless mouths, is the psalm’s center, with its implied hands and mouth of music:

God, a new song | let me sing you

on a ten-string | let me play you

who gives | victory to kings

who frees David his servant | from the evil sword (9-10).

In that crucial verse 10, the participle happotseh, “who frees,” comes from the same root as the imperative petseini, “free me,” in the refrain in verses 7 and 11. These are the only three verses in the Hebrew Bible where the verb patsah, “to open,” takes on the sense of freeing, elsewhere always opening like a mouth. Framed in this way, the open mouth that sings a new song meets the dexterous fingers on the ten-string harp, both contrasting with the emptiness of the outsider’s hand and mouth.

A chiastic approach works less well for most of the rest of the psalm. The theophanic storms of verses 5 and 6 have little in common with the standing sons and daughters of verse 12, though both are vertical images, one full of wild motion, the other stillness. The wisdom theme of human evanescence in verses 3 and 4, if paired with the vision of fertility and flourishing in verses 13 and 14, lacks the kind of keyword repetition associated with tight textual frames. The beginning (1-2) and end (15) pit war against peace, but only in the broadest of ways.

In this broad way, however, the sequence of themes in the psalm’s first half seems to be matched and countered by the sequence in its second half. A prayer of preparation for war (1-2) relies on a vision of human life as “days like shadows | passing” (4), which in turn gives way to cosmic intervention (5-7). In the second half, prayers are not for war but for growth and stability (12); life is not futile, but fertile (13-14); instead of divine thunder, there is “no break-in no flight / no screeching | out in our streets” (14). The wisdom is not that all is air, but that the good life makes “all set, the people,” plural (15a, 15b).

If this kind of broad pattern sounds as familiar as many of the verses from the first half of Psalm 144, it is because both come directly from Psalm 18 (||2 Samuel 22). Psalm 18 is the powerful, old, martial psalm of David which also has two halves: God’s rage, then the king’s sword. It moves from divine lightning and archery (18:14, cf. 144:6) to the king’s own bending of a bow, his hands trained for war (18:34, cf. 144:1). Psalm 144 shrewdly reverses the order of that movement, beginning with a militarism that it adjusts, increasing David’s violence and decreasing God’s. It adds “my fingers for battle” (144:1) and changes “who tramples the peoples beneath me” (18:47) to “who tramples my people beneath me” (144:2) to quotations from David, but changes God’s appellation “my cliff” (18:2) to “my care” (144:2) and leaves out fiery coals (18:13).

The first half of Psalm 144 sews together other quotations from other psalms, to be sure, which is part of what makes it feel anthological or like a montage. But Psalm 18 is the one that matters most to Psalm 144, the psalm it quotes most, the psalm whose vision of a David trained for war it works so hard to reverse, to revise. David is made to sing a new song, in which God is celebrating for freeing “David his servant | from the evil sword” (10). This freeing makes possible the gorgeously wrought image of daughters “like cornices / sculpted | temple-style” (12).

Despite the uses to which this psalm has been put, this is not a resurrected David, let alone the return in triumph of a Davidic son: it is sons rooted and daughters stood true. Its vision of peace depends not on messianic eschatology but on the opening of a mouth to sing and on the opening of a hand once trained for war to drop its awful sword.
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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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- Psalm 150
- Psalm 149
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July 31st, 2023

Psalm 141
(lyric, of David)

* * *

Nothing in the formulaic first verse of Psalm 141 prepares the reader for the distinctive voice and tone of the poetry to come. Not a word in the first verse is unique; every move is typical. But in verse 2, things change:

Let my prayer be steady | the incense at your face

the lift of my palms | the evening gift

It’s a rare verse that can shape its four half-lines into two patterns at once: a point-for-point parallel and a 1+3, one abstraction plus three details. There’s perfect parallelism between the verse halves, as the steadying prayer is met by the lifting of palms, while the sacrificial gift picks up the smoky incense as darkening evening meets the divine face. At the same time, however, all three details in the last three half-lines ground the first half-line’s prayer for steady prayer—wavering incense, lifted and likely quavering palms, the tendered sacrifice. The verse is nearly always read dynamically as two statements advocating replacement: “let my prayer be like incense before you, the lifting of my palms like the evening sacrifice.” Not that that interpretation doesn’t work: it works well, especially given that the word “lift” or “lifting” is used elsewhere of smoke (Judg 20:38-40) or tribute (2 Sam 11:8). But formal equivalence here displays the dynamism of the verse and voice better than dynamic translation can.

This poem’s particular voice is tricky to catch because of its subtlety, darkness, and humor. After verse 1 encourages attention to language (“perk ear for my voice”) and verse 2 sets up a prayer presumably built of language as well as gesture, verse 3 asks language to be patrolled almost to silence, “a guard for my mouth / bar the door | of my lips.” In verse 4, this control of the mouth deepens, in both what might go in— “don’t let me eat their sweets”—and what might come out— “don’t cant my heart for bad.” A call becomes prayer, which is to be protected from within and without.

In verse 5, the poem’s center, protection and discipline become punishment. “The just one beats me,” it seems to start— maybe a statement, maybe a prayer— before adding the noun chesed, “caring.” How does that parse? Is it better as “He beats me, the just one caring” or as “The just one beats me caring,” like the brutal expression “to beat sense into”? Or do we need more before we can make syntactical sense: “Justice hits; caring scolds”? It’s possible to read the line as a garble or as a witticism, as either passive acceptance of abuse or dark sarcasm: “He smacks me: this is called justice.” The very center of the center of the psalm makes this punishment an ironic crowning anointment: “and scolds me / oil for the head | let my head not refuse.” Here, too, is a mess or a puzzle or a sardonic game. R’osh ’al-yani r’oshi is as mysterious a cluster as it is musical, with a series of letters that anagram “Israel” and play on two names of God, both ’el and `elyon. The speaker appears to be taking—or trying to take—discipline as a sign of justice and care and as a signal of election or sanctification among those “doing harm” (4, 9).

What, then, is the continual (or renewed) “prayer | against their bad” mentioned in verse 5c? Is it a prayer that precedes this line or a prayer that follows? Which prayer? “Let my head not refuse” is the most proximate possible referent, but (a) it may not even be a prayer (“oil so topnotch my head can’t pass it up”) and (b) it does not sound like a prayer “against their bad,” but rather a prayer to accept something good. Verse 4 is indeed a prayer against their bad: “don’t cant my heart for bad… don’t let me eat their sweets,” but why jump backwards over 5a and 5b? Is the point to relate the refusal of criminals’ delights with the acceptance of beatings by the good?

It is possible, however, that this prayer against the badness of “them” anticipates the lines that follow, which turn the perfect-form verbs of verses 6 and 7 into prayers already or again-to-be answered:

their judges be thrown | from the tips of a cliff

they heard my words | oh they were sweet

just like the plowing | and harrowing of earth

their bones be broken | at the mouth of the grave.

These lines might narrate completed events, which would be the typical use of the suffixed forms of “to throw,” “to hear,” “to be sweet,” and “to be broken.” But what events? And why narrate them here? Most English translations resort to the future tense here for the execution of the judges executed and sometimes even for the breaking of bones (“our bones” in the Masoretic Text, “their bones” according to the Septuagint). Some kind of subjunctive makes more sense here, along the lines of the so-called precative perfect: “oh ever my prayer | against their bad / [is that] their judges be thrown | from the tips of a cliff.” The events are grim and the tone is sardonic, with the speaker’s “sweet” words (6b) and the “mouth” of the grave (7b) recalling the “sweets” (4b) of the villains and the speaker’s own “mouth” (3a). The broken bones could be our remembered bones, sticking out of the soil like planting tools, or the wished-for bones of the villains’ judges. In any event, this is the delicate, sarcastic prayer that answers the bad people’s delicacies: that foreign rulers be pitched from the rocks much like the enemies’ infants at the end of Psalm 137.

The psalm’s final three verses pull back to something much more expected: a prayer to elude the traps “of those doing harm” (9). This ending reads very much like a disguise, as does the beginning, commonplace rhetorical appeals at the psalm’s start and closure that effectively drag branches over the tracks of the verses between, verses that slide treacherously from steadied prayer and self-restraint among the “criminal occupations” of “people doing harm,” to the execution of the traitors or the sacrilegious.
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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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July 27th, 2023

Psalm 137
* * *

No psalm haunts more than this, among the most poignant poems of the horrors of war. David may have slain his ten thousand. Achilles may have his epithets, his tent and shield. But this song sings as it says it cannot, turning tears to gruesome smiles, aching through remembered trauma, lashing out in a howl for justice. It is a psalm of mothers who relive their rape and grieve their murdered children.

The narrative situation, set in medias res in the Babylonian Exile of the 6^th century BCE, works in three temporal directions. In its present-tense scene, captives from Jerusalem are made to remember their home and forced to sing when they wanted to cry. The central narrative question for the present tense is whether they will comply with their jailers’ requests, and if so, what song they sing: “Ah how can we sing | a song of the Lord / on a land | so strange” the psalm sings, with performative irony (4). Or perhaps verses 5-6 are lines of the song they sing, “If I forget you | Jerusalem” and following.

At the same time, the psalm glimpses hypothetical futures even as it flashes back to snapshots of terror from the destruction of Jerusalem. “If I forget you” does at least quadruple duty, then. As an “if” it’s a worry. In Hebrew, an ’im also marks a vow: “I swear I won’t forget you.” Narratively, it seems like a line from the song the captives sing. For us, it is a line of the psalm, a song, a line that makes sure we the readers don’t forget, every time we sing.

If verses 5 and 6 anticipate the future, verse 7 recalls the past, asking the Lord (and readers) to remember Edom’s role in razing and raping Jerusalem: “that day in Jerusalem | the ones who said / strip her bare, strip her bare | to her base.” The image is unmistakable in Hebrew, with `aru `aru `ad haysod bah meaning literally “expose, expose her down to the bottom” (see Job 4:19, Hab 3:13). It may be a metaphor for the destruction of the temple or the city walls, but its literal meaning is of stripping a woman naked.

Deeply and paradoxically auditory, the psalm is equally vividly visual. It presents speech and/or music in each of its first 7 verses, not to mention tears in verse 1 and the exclamations ki (3) and ’akh (4). The sounds are frequently forceful, from sham she’eilunu shoveinu… shir lanu mishir tsiyyon in verse 3, to ’et-yom yerushalayim ha’omerim `aru `aru `ad hayesod bah in verse 7, to the cluster of zakhar (to remember 1, 6, 7), naharot (rivers or waterways, “channels” 1), nekhar (strange, 4) that runs throughout. The music of the psalm is paradoxical, like Yeats’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem” or Hayden Carruth’s “On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam.” To the captors’ demand, the psalm protests, “Ah how can we sing,” a kind of continuity and rupture, a sure sign of the ineffable. And yet to express this ineffable, the psalm relies on primarily visual imagery, “let my right hand | forget how / let my tongue clutch | the roof of my mouth” (5). The profoundly ambivalent picture of harps “strung up” “on poplars” in verse 2, conveys both silence and the readying for music. And the most vivid image in Psalm 137 is the final one, grotesque in what it makes us see, and hear, and in its silence.

Against these horrors are the psalm’s care and poise, with repetitions, for example that are meaningful and perfectly timed. Babel and Babel frame the poem (1, 8), while Zion and Zion begin it (1, 3). The name of the Lord appears twice (4, 7), the word for gladness twice (here, “smile” in 3 and 6) along with two uses of “lucky” (8, 9), “sing” twice, “song” three times (3-6), Jerusalem three times (5, 6, 7), and three times the word “remember” (1, 6, 7). Twice the psalm reports foreign speech, of Edom (7) and of the captors (3), and three times the speaker’s “if” (5-6). The patterns are thorough contrasts: the two capitals and the measure-for-measure revenge implicit in the repeated “strip her bare” (7c), with a feminine ending that is picked up in the very next line by the word “daughter,” used of cities idiomatically in the Bible and rendered here as the diminutive “Baby” (8a).

Subtlest of all, so easily lost in translation, is the insistent `al that runs throughout the psalm, the preposition that means “towards” and “up” among many other things. It begins verse 1 and verse 2 and helps conclude verses 4 and 6: “Up the channels,” “Up the poplars” (whose name `aruvim anticipates, even triggers the `aru `aru memory of assault), “up a land | so strange,” and “up top of my smile.” It may sound awkward, the “up” of this particular translation. But it is a necessary part of the psalm, that repeated direction of awkward lifting up. In verse 6, the preposition becomes the verb “to go up,” `alah, where it is negated in the causative stem: “if I can’t lift up / Jerusalem.” The payoff of all this lifting up and up arrives in the psalm’s brutal closure, where `al is revealed to be just a fragment of the word for a young child, `olalayik, “your little ones” and the final preposition changes terribly from `al to ‘el, “against.”

Of course the ending is uncharitable, horrible, and cruel. Far worse is the pearl-clutching of prim readers who wish this psalm would have ended instead with the turning of a cheek. The right response to atrocity is not to want victims not to want justice, but to want war to end, full stop. And war only ends if we all stay with its scenes long enough, hearing and seeing the pain of the orphan and the widow’s grief and the righteous rage of mothers bereaved.
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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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