Hard on the heels of the Bible’s only other single-line acrostic, Psalm 112 shifts focus from the Lord, “feeling and tender” (111:4), to the virtuous person, the upright, the level, who is also “feeling and tender | and just” (112:4). While Psalm 111 celebrates the deeds of the Lord, particularly “all his mandates / being upheld | always and ever” (111:7b-8a), Psalm 112 characterizes the ideal devotee: “firmed his heart | leaning on the Lord / upheld his heart | he does not fear / as long as he sees | his enemies get theirs” (112:7b-8). Psalm 111 ends with the rhetoric of a wisdom psalm: “the start of sense | reverence for the Lord” (111:10). Psalm 112 begins with a similar convention: “all set, one revering | the Lord” (112:1). Peas in a pod, these two poems, though it is unknowable whether the two are the work of the same hands. Whoever fashioned this second psalm took the ribs of the first: “always standing” (111:10; 112:9), “and his justice | always standing” (111:3, 112:3).
But where the first psalm links the fidelity of the Lord to the perpetuity of laws, which are to be “studied | by all who revel in them” (111:2), the second psalm turns to the person who “has reveled much” “in his orders” (112:1), linking prosperity to justice. Psalm 111 names justice once. Psalm 112 makes justice its full refrain (112:3, 9), and adds two mentions of the just person (4, 6) near the center of the psalm. This just person is characterized repeatedly in economic terms. He has “riches and wealth | in his house” (3). He is moved emotionally but not physically: “one feeling | who lends / he sustains his things | with right / oh ever | he is not budged” (5-6a). And he is generous: “he has dispensed | he has given to the poor” (9a), “his horn | is lifted with heft” (9c). This heavy horn at the end of the psalm completes the vigorous seed at the start—the promise of bounty fulfilled. It is affluence, shared.
The more it’s studied, however, the darker this psalm’s vision of a just economy becomes. Any compression of virtue and wealth into a single variable comes with inequitable consequences, especially in the implied association of poverty and depravity. The rich just person “gives” to the poor (9a) and “lends” (5), but without asking after the unevenness of wealth. Wealth comes to the good, the psalm implies, while the bad “sees | and seethes / he grinds his teeth | and wastes away” (10). This is the exact rhetoric of the so-called “politics of envy,” which paints have-nots as jealous of their moral and financial betters.
Even worse, the reader must decide what to make of this threatening line: “he does not fear /as long as he sees | his enemies get theirs” (8b). The line is ambivalent in its preposition, “as long as” could be “until,” and strange in its tying of the heart of the just person who “does not fear” (lo’yir’a) to yire’h, the seeing of the fate of the enemies. Who are these enemies? The next line has disturbing implications: “he has dispensed | he has given to the poor” (9). How does the syntax read? Is the one whose heart is firm unafraid because his enemies get theirs? Or is it that he will not fear until his enemies get theirs? Or is the sense that, until (or as long as) he sees revenge on his enemies, he will give to the poor? Are these poor in fact his enemies, or others he sees as lusting after his wealth?
It may well be true, as the psalm concludes, that “the lust of cheats | is lost” (10). We might just be talking about different cheats.
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.
In announcing that her music is “sense… insight… a parable… my puzzle” (3-4), the speaker of the powerful Psalm 49 challenges, even taunts. In a deepening from what the mouth speaks (sense) to what the heart murmurs (insight) to what the ear has to widen to hear (a parable) to what somehow opens on the harp (my puzzle), can hearer and reader tell which is which? Can we even find the parable and the puzzle, let alone understand or solve them?
The psalm’s gist is no riddle. The rich rely on wealth. This makes them cruel and dumb. They act like they and their possessions are immortal. They are not.
Do not fear | when someone gets rich
when his house’s | abundance grows
for at his death | he grasps nothing at all
his abundance cannot | go down after him (16-17).
Nothing is remotely unclear about this, despite the number of interpreters who stress how difficult this psalm is. The rich die and stay dead, just like their parents. “Until forever | they cannot see light” (29).
It’s not just the rich who die, of course. The psalm begins by asking everyone to listen, the sons of ’adam and the sons of ’ish: “lowborn | highborn / haves and | have nots alike” (2). Even a rich person who doesn’t want to die or see the pit understands this, “for he sees | the sensible die / the dull and dumb | together decease” (10). Everyone dies. The psalm explicitly states exactly nothing about redemption for the just or moral or rescued. There’s nothing about a second life or eternal life for the faithful or believers or the good.
It’s not that those readings are impossible to impose on Psalm 49– it’s been done– but that the psalm itself is entirely disinterested in questions about life after death. The psalm’s vision of Sheol is pastoral in its imagery:
As with sheep | set in a ditch
death | grazes upon them
the upright tread on them | mornings
their image wearing out | the ditch their mansion (14).
The yetsarim, the upright, may “have dominion over” the dead in the morning, but there is no reason to figure this as a future arising in some speculative afterworld. Very literally, verse 14 shows the vertical putting the dead underfoot. The profundity of this verse comes from that pasturing, Death’s pasturing, in which the sheep are both actual sheep, feeding above the dead, and a figure for the dead themselves, laid out in a grave, being fed upon.
But if the psalm’s stance is that everyone dies, puzzles remain. Why single out the rich if all are grass where Death pastures his flock? And why does the speaker seem to assert that she herself is exempt from this? And, to repeat the only question the psalm actually asks, “Why should I fear | in the bad days / the wrong at my heels | that surrounds me?” (5).
The first question, the singular contempt for the rich, is answered in the psalm. “Those who lean on | their means / in the mass of their wealth | they boast” (6). Both “lean on” and the non-reflexive form of the verb “boast” are most often used for God: to rely on and to praise. Wealth warps this: the upper crust praise themselves for their affluence and rely, physically reclining, on their piles of cash. (It is hard not to think about 21st-century public figures like Cathie Wood, who blithely preach “faith in the marketplace.”) Worse, the psalm points out, riches beget callous selfishness:
A brother | he does not bail out
not even for God | would he give ransom
it is expensive | buying back necks
and he will be done | forever (7-8).
The sarcasm is thick. It costs money to ransom those who have been kidnapped. The poor cannot choose to pay the price to save a life. The rich can, but there shouldn’t even be a choice. With ransoms, no one should waste time deliberating, nickel-and-diming. That last half-verse means many things: the brother is going to die someday anyway, so why bother paying to have him freed? God will be done with the rich. The ransoming of necks will stop. The rich man will cease forever. Wealth has wrecked him.
Why should the speaker fear encircling badness? That’s the psalm’s explicit question. It may also be its riddle. Verse 16 answers, kind of. She shouldn’t fear “when someone gets rich / when his house’s | abundance grows.” Those wrongs are as temporary as all of life, which is the deep parable, the insight that the rich just don’t get. “Someone with a fortune | cannot understand / he is as all animals | that end” (20), the psalm concludes, in a refrain that cleverly modifies its first iteration: “cannot stay,” verse 12 has instead. Understanding that she, too, will end–that is for the speaker one kind of removal of fear. She becomes a kind of Shakespeare’s Caesar:
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
If Verse 16 offers stoicism in the mode of Ecclesiastes, verse 15 offers a different consolation. It poses a puzzle of its own. Cleverly, it reworks that brutal line about the rich man, verse 8, “A brother | he does not bail out / not even for God | would he give ransom.” Now the word “brother “(’ach) becomes “Yet” (’akh), and l`elohim moves from the second-to-last word to the second word: “Yet God | bails out my neck / from the hand of the ditch | when he grasps me” (15).
The consolation here is first-person singular, and the deep puzzle is why. Has only this speaker been exempted from death, the ditch, Sheol? Permanently or temporarily? Or is this verse better translated by the future, or in the cohortative mood, as a wish? “Yet” could be “Only” and “when” could be “if,” which would make this “Only God | bails out my neck / from the hand of the ditch | if he grasps me.” But why her? What besides singing has she done?
Two possible allusions hint at strikingly different interpretations. Besides Psalm 49:7, one verse that pairs the two words for ransom kofer and padah (admittedly in the alternative spelling pad`a) is Job 33:24. This is part of Elihu’s discussion of redemption for a dying person:
As his neck | nears the pit
and his life | the executioners
if there is for him | a herald, an interpreter
one in a thousand | to show someone his uprightness
he will feel for him | and say buy him back
from going down to the pit | I have found a ransom
then his skin grown younger | than a youth
he returns | to the days of his vigor
he pleads to God | and he likes him
and he sees his face | with a shout
and he returns a person his justice (Job 33:22-26).
With no evidence besides a verbal similarity that allows for a possible allusion (which could even work in the other direction), the parallel here permits a reading in which the speaker of Psalm 49 sees herself as having—or being—this “one in a thousand” who points out a fountain of youth.
Just because Elihu thinks this, though, that doesn’t mean Psalm 49 asserts the same thing. Another possible allusion is to the law of redemption in the book of Numbers: “Yet (’akh) you must surely buy back (padah) the firstborn of the humans (ha’adam) and the firstborn of taboo animals (habeheimah) you buy back… but the firstborn calf or firstborn lamb or firstborn kid you do not buy back. They are hallowed. Their blood you toss on the altar, their fat you burn on the altar, for a soothing smell for the Lord” (Num 18:15-17). If, as Psalm 49 says, “he is as animals | that end,” using the verb nimshal to indicate the presence of a proverb, then the question becomes what kind of animal we are.
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.
The Book of Psalms 