Tag: violence

July 17th, 2023

Psalm 127
(a song of steps, of Solomon)

* * *

Psalm 127 is known more as parts than as a whole. Some know the foundational counterfactuals of its long first verse; some love the little lullaby at the end of verse 2, “thus he gives his dearest | sleep”; and others cite those final three verses, whose memorable natalism monetizes and weaponizes male youth. The psalm’s quotability and art of collage has led some scholars to the faulty conclusion that it is not one psalm but two (verses 1-2 and 3-5) or three (verse 1, verse 2, verses 3-5) or even four—two proverbs (1 and 3) plus commentary (2 and 4-5). Yet even if the leaps between and within the psalm’s halves are striking, and even if verse 2 clearly does comment on verse 1, the psalm as a whole coheres linguistically, narratively, and ideologically.

The whole psalm gathers around a significant pun, the words ben, “son,” and banah, “to build.” Together with the naming of Solomon in the superscription (absent from the Septuagint), the relationship between the two words calls to mind the Dynastic Oracle of 2 Samuel 7, in which David offers to build the Lord a house, but instead, through Nathan, is promised a lineage: “I will lift your seed after you who will come from your belly, and I will found his kingdom; he will build a house for my name… and your house and your kingdom will be stood up ever and on before you” (2 Sam 7: 12-13, 16). David’s house is his son Solomon, and by extension, his enduring male line. This link explains why some readers see Psalm 127 as pre-exilic psalm for a king, others as a Second Temple psalm, and still others as a timeless psalm for the birth of anyone’s son. Two pair of house-building words in verse 1 are linked by consonance—lo’ yibneh bayit…bonaiv bo’ (“doesn’t build the house… who build it”)—to a pair of words in verse 3—banim…habeten (“sons… the womb,” rendered here as “pelvis” to note the psalm’s elision of the mother).

The bet-words are followed in both halves of the psalm by a cluster of shin-words. In verse 1, this is lo’ yishmar `ir shav’ shaqad shomer, “doesn’t guard the city / who guards is awake | for what.” In verse 5, the shin-cluster includes ’ashrei… ’asher… ’ashpato… lo’ yeiboshu…basha`ar, “all set… who… his quiver… they do not blanch… in the gate.” If the ben-banah-bayit connection combines male offspring with building blocks, the shomer-basha’ar connection with shav’, “pointlessness” (1 x2, 2) and “they do not blanch” (lo’ yeiboshu) replaces the city’s guards with the sons at the gate. The worthlessness of guards who stay awake without divine protection is replaced by the sons who speak down enemies at the gate, the sounds of shav’ being undone by those sounds reversed in lo’ yeiboshu.

That word shav’ for pointlessness, rendered here by the rhetorical question, “for what,” is also undone at the end of verse 2 by the troublesome word sheina’, “sleep.” The two words are consonantally barely half a stroke away, shin-vav-aleph and shin-nun-aleph looking almost the same. There is thus an interesting slide from the fruitlessness of work done without divine support to the seeming fruitlessness of sleep. Is effort worthless, according to verse 2? Apparently not. Waking early, retiring late, working hard: “thus he gives his dearest | sleep.” The Lord’s cure for insomnia seems to be a long day of labor. In context, however, verse 2 becomes more than a factory poster touting industry over indolence: the Lord may be needed for construction and maintenance and everything urban in between, but work still makes the day and night go round.

Narratively, the central line of the psalm—“Look, a gift of the Lord | sons”—shows the second unseeable benefit of the seeming fruitlessness of work and sleep: a specific kind of fertility. Obviously procreation is sleep-adjacent rather than a product of sleep itself, but the poem still jump-cuts (“his dearest | sleep / Look, a gift”) from loving sleep to children, presented in a thoroughly masculine way as the fruit of the procreative torso, the belly. Mothers are elided here in the juxtaposition of affectionate sleep and sons. Verses 3 and 4 both sound aphoristic, one stressing male children’s economic value—“a gift” (literally, “inheritance”) and “income” (3)— the other the aggressive virility of both fathers and sons as “arrows | in a champion’s hand” (4).

Monica Duffy Tuft uses the term “wombfare” to describe “the weaponization of fertility” in religious and ethnic conflict. Certainly the image of the filled quiver has had an afterlife, the second half of Psalm 127 providing rhetorical cover for natalist politics and their close allies: xenophobia and the oppression of women. Usually “we” are encouraged to have more sons because “they,” the others, have too many young males, a set of assumptions that has led to hawkish claims which Goran Therborn has characterized, in one context, as “neo-social-darwinist discourse, a demonization of extra-European youth.” If sons are wealth and weapons, consider what happens to mothers, who become banks and factories. Consider too what happens to the public sphere, which is done away with in this psalm by the paterfamilias. Instead of turning to a prayer—“build and guard this place”—the psalm that begins by imagining the futility of godless builders and guards, turns instead to missiles of masculinity, sons divinely sanctioned just by being born, who march upon the city gate armed to the teeth.
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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 24th, 2023

Psalm 106
* * *

Book Four of the Psalter ends not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with harangue, a whole litany of charges. Psalm 106 accuses Israel down a long and slippery slope of crimes. It slides from character traits like desire, envy, recalcitrance, and impatience to such practices as tolerance and accommodation of other peoples, which it considers dangerous and wrong. The failure to commit genocide, in the eyes of this psalm, has given way to miscegenation between ethnicities, intermarriage. These have led directly—again, so claims the psalm—to infanticide and exile. Complaining and protesting lead to a failure to trust priests, which leads to cultural pluralism, a process that inexorably gets filthy, dirty, and debauched. If Psalm 105 is insidious, Psalm 106 is sinister.

There is a doubled frame to the psalm, and there are deft moments, so it is important for our own sake not to leap to moral response. The opening and closing show gratitude and praise for the Lord’s care (1-2) and compassion (45-46), and the call for remembrance and rescue (3) is answered by remembrance (45) and a repeated call for rescue (47). Even here, however, ethnocentrism arises in ways it hadn’t in prior psalms:

tend me | with your rescue

to see the goodness | of your select

to brighten | with the brightness of your culture

to celebrate | your heritage (4b-5).

The three infinitives reveal, already near the psalm’s start, what this psalmist thinks are the purposes of rescue, all three of them emphasizing exceptionalism, “your select… your culture… your heritage.” And while the Lord’s remembering at the end of the psalm is undeniably tender, divine rescue in this psalm retains its disdain for foreigners: “Rescue us | Lord our God / and take us away | from the others” (47).

Most of the poem’s bile spills out not at foreigners, but at the Israelites themselves, who are walked through another highly selective history (see Psalm 105) that now emphasizes their wrongdoing at every turn. To read both Psalm 105 and Psalm 106 is to wonder if the two psalmists knew the same Exodus and Numbers. Instead of excerpts picked to emphasize the people’s resilience to external enemies in the transition from being servants to becoming masters, Psalm 106 features excerpts to show the people’s pattern of becoming their own worst enemy, deserving of exile and servitude. The children of Israel, “our parents | in Egypt,” begin their stubbornness before and after the parting of the sea (7, 13), continuing through the complaints in the wilderness (14-15) and other rebellions (16-24) and conspiracies (25-33), leading not to liberation and promised land, but to compromise (34-36) and child sacrifice (37-38), exile and defeat (39-42). Interestingly, the priest Aaron, “the hallowed of the Lord” (16), is distanced from the syncretism/idolatry of the golden calf, while Aaron’s grandson Phineas is praised for his “just” deed of spearing the Israelite man Zimri along with Cozbi the Midianite woman (Numbers 25). Both events, the golden calf and the double homicide, resulted in the slaughter of thousands. And yet perhaps the most telling word in these passages is the word “contagion” taken from Numbers (29, 30), describing not a literal contagion, but Midianite cultural influence.

If it’s important not to leap too quickly to moral condemnation of Psalm 106, it is imperative not to shirk such condemnation. It requires no great insight to point out that every justification of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and racism is deplorable, even criminal. Nor does it condone child sacrifice or encourage disloyalty or unleash contagion to point out that Exodus reads differently than does this psalm.

One response to this psalm’s contemptuousness is read it less often than any other. Another is to read instead the book of Ruth.
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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 23rd, 2023

Psalm 105
* * *

A handful of little verbal similarities offer one, surface-level explanation for why Psalm 105 should follow Psalm 104, though the difference in quality and sensibility between the two psalms could not be more profound. The mirrored sequence from Genesis to Exodus of creation story, narratives of patriarchs, and the Exodus offers another explanation. But there is a deeper reason why this highly selective, ethnocentric retelling of Israel’s prehistory should follow what precedes it, that magnificent psalm celebrating the world filled with God. That vision, particularly its erasure of “the errant” and “rogues” from the earth (104:35), contributes to this psalm’s ideological justification of an errand into the wilderness that dispossessed others of their home.

There are points of verbal contact between the two psalms, particularly near the end of Psalm 105. The “flames of fire” (105:32; cf. “flaring fire,” 104:4), the locust larvae “without number” (105:34; cf. “untold,” 104:25), and the quail and bread with which the Lord “gorged” the people of Israel (105:40; cf. 104:13, 16, 28) all link the two psalms. The watering of the desert is more significant: “he opened a crag | waters flowed / they went through dry places | a stream” (105:41) recalls “sending creeks | through ravines / between mountains | they go” (104:10). But while each of these details in Psalm 104 adds to that psalm’s thematic cohesion, their counterparts in Psalm 105 seem incidental.

Psalm 105 cares far more about the stories it excerpts. It highlights the Lord’s covenant with Abraham “and his vow | to Isaac” (9), presumably the threefold promises in Genesis 12, 15, and Genesis 26:3-5, promises of blessings, descendants, and most importantly, land. In Psalm 105, the promise of land becomes central to the Jacob cycle of stories, “saying to you I give | the land of Canaan / as the parcel | of your estate” (11). This version of the Joseph story omits brothers entirely (!), concentrating on the reversals of master-servant relationships, Joseph’s neck twice locked and unlocked from irons (18, 22). The retelling of the Exodus emphasizes plagues (28-36), omitting the Lord’s appearances at the burning bush and, most strikingly, Sinai.

Instead of encounters with God, Psalm 105 leads directly to the legend of the conquest of Canaan.

He led out his people | with joy

with shouts | his select

and gave them | the lands of others

other people’s work | they dispossessed

so that they might guard | his inscriptions

and his directions | they might keep (43-45).

Despite the mention of “his inscriptions / and his directions,” the poem spends most of its time justifying the occupation of “the lands of others.” It sets in stone not the tablets of the law, which it elides, but part of the promise to Abraham, the claim to the land:

He stood it for Jacob | as an inscription

for Israel | a lasting pact

saying to you I give | the land of Canaan

as the parcel | of your estate

there being few | in number

barely any | but migrants there (10-12).

All the rhetorical gestures that cloak invasion as manifest destiny are there: we were here first, God’s select; the others were the real aggressors, as dangerous as the Egyptians were; the place was basically empty. The justifications ring as hollow as they always do, for conquistadors, Puritans, and Putins, with all their pretexts for dispossession.

To Hermann Gunkel’s claim that “the poem is certainly no great work of art,” Mitchell Dahood counters that the poem contains “a number of literary subtleties” and that factors like “the effective separation of composite phrases in parallel verse members” and “the competent use of chiasmus” “bespeak uncommon literary artistry” (III.51). Faint praise cannot recuperate a poem so bent on occupying others’ lands that it has to rely on tendentious reductions of Genesis and Exodus. How else does one justify invasion, occupation, and genocide, but by excising every story of siblings and children, eviscerating the great story of emancipation, not to mention ignoring commandments that promote justice while condemning murder and theft? In response to Gunkel and Dahood, who cares whether Psalm 105 is aesthetically good or bad? It’s reprehensible.
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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 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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