by David Plotz
David
This quirky psalm breaks the mold. Instead, it’s a poem about God’s voice. Just His voice: “The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. . . . The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness. . . . The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare.” Stupendous! No wonder they always want Morgan Freeman to play God.
psalm 34
Though you can’t tell from the English translation, this is one of several psalms that are acrostics. In the original Hebrew, each stanza begins with a different letter, starting with “aleph” and going right through the alphabet. (What’s next, sudoku psalms?) The word game doesn’t do much for the poem itself, which is a workmanlike version of the usual prayer for redemption.
psalm 37
The premise of Psalm 37 is: Don’t worry about the wicked, because God is going to get back at them, big-time. Verse 11 reads: “The meek shall inherit the land.” Did you know that Jesus had borrowed from
this psalm for the Sermon on the Mount? I didn’t. Isn’t it a bit of a cheat to steal your best lines from someone else?
psalm 38
Doctors, nurses, please gather around. This patient presents with an extraordinary and alarming set of symptoms. We need a diagnosis and a treatment plan. Patient David R., please tell us how you feel.
“My wounds foul and fester.”
Really? Please continue.
“My loins are filled with burning.”
Hmm. Yes. That sounds quite unpleasant.
“There is no soundness in my flesh.”
What do you mean by that? Could you elaborate?
“There is no health in my bones.”
What about your heart? Do you have any pain there?
“My heart throbs.”
It sounds dire, colleagues. My initial diagnosis was a sexually transmitted disease. The burning loins are significant, and patient David R. has a long history of extramarital sexual activity. But I wonder if focusing on that sexual history distracts us from his other symptoms. After all, he seems to have severely infected wounds, suggesting that we may be looking at septic shock (“no soundness” and “no health”), along with damage to the heart (“throbs”). I advise a course of intravenous antibiotics, with constant monitoring in the ICU.
Update, 16:30 hours. Patient David R. has refused treatment, yet heartbeat and other vitals have suddenly returned to normal. He appears delusional, insisting that someone he calls “God” is healing him. “It is for you, O Lord, that I wait. It is you, O Lord my God, who will answer.” Hospital attorneys advise patient David R. that hospital cannot be held liable for complications, disability, pain, suffering, and death that may result from his refusal of treatment. Patient David R. insists that he understands risks, signs waiver, demands return of crown and scepter, and checks himself out.
psalm 51
A psalm attributed to David, as he did penance for Bathsheba. David begs for mercy and confesses his terrible sins. Sincere or not, David’s powerful confession is a source of remorseful language we still use today. David begs to be “whiter than snow.” He asks God to make a “pure heart” for him. Most interestingly, for those who believe in original sin, he says, “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”
psalm 53
OK, these are getting kind of dull. Reading one psalm is a joy, reading two is a plea sure, reading three is a chore, and reading a dozen or more at once is like sitting next to a desperate insurance salesman on a transatlantic flight.
psalm 58
The Bible describes violence and revenge better than any other book I’ve ever read. It’s bloodier than Stephen King, icier than Cormac McCarthy. Here the psalmist asks God to take out his enemies: “[B]reak the teeth in their mouths . . . like grass let them be trodden down and wither. Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime. . . . The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done; they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.”
psalm 65
A psalm for farmers. What a beauty! It thanks God for irrigating the land, providing grains, “softening” the soil with gentle rain, providing grass for the flocks. “You crown the year with your bounty.” Amen to that.
psalm 69
The chief theme of Psalm 69 is loneliness, which is perhaps the underlying subject of all the psalms. Again and again, the psalms give us an embattled, solitary soul, clinging to love of God even as the rest of his world crumbles around him. In this poem, he has broken with his family. In others, he is beset by enemies or disease. Always, he has no one to talk to except God. I suspect that reading the psalms on assignment, as I am doing, does an injustice to them, because it deprives them of their unique power and value. In fact, people who love the psalms tell me, the poems are best read when you’re feeling alone and seeking consolation from distress—comfort that only God can provide. Reading for obligation misses the point.
psalm 84
One day in God’s presence “is better than a thousand elsewhere.”
What is it about 1,000 to 1? It’s the magic ratio. Helen’s was the face that launched 1,000 ships. A picture is worth 1,000 words.
psalm 89
This is one of the most subversive chapters in the entire Bible. The usual narrative of the Old Testament is: we break our covenant with God, but He relents and lets us back into His favor. But here the psalmist reverses that story. The poem begins by praising God lavishly, admiring Him for His strength and wisdom, thanking Him for His goodness, and applauding Him for making a permanent covenant with David and David’s descendants. All this sounds good, right?
Suddenly, the poet turns on Him. He points an accusing finger at God. “You have renounced the covenant.” God has “exalted” Israel’s enemies and shamed the house of David. We didn’t break the deal, God—You did!
The psalmist reminds God of His younger and better days: “Where is Your steadfast love of old; which by Your faithfulness You swore to David?”
The last verse of the psalm reads: “Blessed be the Lord forever. Amen and Amen.” Perhaps this is a sincere attempt to soothe the Lord. I don’t know. You could also read it ironically, as a jab in the holy ribs.
psalm 90
I know nice Jewish boys like me aren’t supposed to have favorite hymns, but I attended an Episcopalian high school, and if there’s anything I learned in four years of mandatory chapel, it’s that those Christian composers sure could write a tune. All of which is to say: I’m thrilled to discover that my favorite hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” was inspired by Psalm 90. The lyricist, Isaac Watts, actually improved on the Bible text. This is the King James verse: “For in your sight a thousand years are like yesterday that has past, like a watch of the night.” Watts jazzed it up into this: “A thousand ages in thy sight are like an eve ning gone; short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun.” Now imagine it with a pipe organ.
psalm 104
This is a glorious one, a tribute to God as provider and creator. “You make springs gush forth in torrents.” You make the wind. You make the grass for cattle, trees where birds can build their nests, high mountains for the wild goats, and the crags “as a refuge for the rock badgers.” (What’s a rock badger?)
This psalm, in addition to being a thing of beauty and a joy forever, neatly encapsulates the conflict between creationists and evolutionists. For a creationist such as the psalmist, the orderliness of the world is evidence that God made it. How else would the rock badger survive, if God hadn’t made the crag for it? Where would the stork make a home, if God hadn’t kindly provided the juniper tree? But to a Darwinist, these are post hoc explanations: the crag wasn’t created by God to give the rock badger a home; the rock badger evolved to exploit the opportunity offered by the crag.
All sides, fortunately, can agree that Psalm 104 is a pretty darn spectacular tribute to nature, whether nat
ure created by God or nature left here by chance.
Another line worth mentioning: God makes the “wine that cheers the hearts of men.” Take that, my teetotaling friends.
psalm 111
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That wouldn’t be a popular sentiment today. We’d replace “fear” with “love.” Still, it’s very true to the Bible. So far, God has been much keener on scaring us than hugging us.
psalm 114
This is my mother’s favorite. We include it in our Passover seder every year, and she always likes to read it. When the Israelites left Egypt, the psalm says, “The sea saw them and fled, Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep.” My mother is bewitched by the image of mountains skipping like rams. I am too.
psalm 117
At two verses and only twenty-six words, the shortest chapter in the whole Bible. It’s too dull to quote.
psalm 118
Almost every line in this psalm is familiar. Christian pastors must have some Amway-type arrangement with Psalm 118 whereby they get a bonus each time they quote it. A couple of the greatest hits:
The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief corner
stone.
This is the day that the Lord has made.
I don’t think this psalm has as much sway over Jews, perhaps because of its heavy emphasis on rebirth, a more popular theme with Christians than with us.
psalm 119
So it’s the end of the day—a day that the Lord has made—and I can’t wait to shut my Bible and head home for dinner, when all of a sudden I encounter this psalm. It couldn’t make a worse first impression. In Hebrew, it’s an acrostic: the first word in each line of each stanza starts with the same letter. Also, it’s the longest psalm in the book of Psalms and the longest chapter in the Bible. As you can imagine, an endless acrostic is not what I want to be reading at quitting time. But after a few stanzas, I realize that this is one weird psalm. I gradually catch on that it’s a love poem, but not a regular moon-swoon-June verse. It’s a love poem, written to—guess who.
No, not Him.
Not him, either.
Give up?
It’s a love poem to God’s laws—a sweat-soaked, 91⁄2 Weeks ode to His commandments, decrees, and rules. Imagine Supreme Court Justice David Souter falling head over heels, and you get some idea of this psalm. Here is just a small sampling of the adoring verses:
I take delight in Your laws.
Your decrees are my delight, my intimate companions.
I cling to your decrees.
I prefer the teaching You proclaimed to thousands of gold and
silver pieces.
O how I love your teaching!
And in verse 131: “I open my mouth wide, I pant, longing for your commandments.” Now that’s a psalmist you’d don’t want to let too close to your Torah.
It is, of course, easy to mock this kinky legalism, but let me try to restrain myself. I want to try to appreciate Psalm 119 for what it’s trying to do. Over the weekend I listened to a CD of Leviticus in the car. As I listened to Leviticus 19, perhaps my favorite chapter in the Bible, I got chills. The Levitical laws mandating justice, generosity to the poor, and decency to the blind and deaf are as inspiring as the Bill of Rights. I don’t always keep all the commandments, but I remain astonished that my ancestors wrote down, 3,000 years ago, laws which still guide our behavior today. Those laws—whether dictated by God or merely inspired by faith—are monumental and beautiful. They are our greatest heritage. We should pant for them, longingly.
psalm 127
A poem about the blessing of having sons. “Happy is the man who has a quiver full of them.” Possibly true, but I know a family with fi ve boys, and “happy” is not the first adjective that comes to mind.
psalm 133
The last section of Psalms includes many short, imagistic poems. Their stanzas are bit like modern poetry—a metaphor or two, and not a lot of explanation. This psalm, for examples, anticipates the unification of Israel, saying that reconciliation will be “like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard, the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robes.” What a combination of strangeness and grandeur!
Can’t you see the oil glistening, the beard shiny and matted with it, and the joyful smile on Aaron’s face as he is anointed as God’s priest? The prayer captures God’s blessing, Aaron’s gratitude, and—most of all—the physical sensation of that oil: slick, golden, glorious.
psalm 137
A very important psalm for Jews. Even an ignoramus like me knows its opening line, “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” A mournful song of exile, the poem insists that we never abandon Israel: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you.” The psalm, as you can imagine, is beloved by Zionists. In his book Prisoners, Jeffrey Goldberg writes wonderfully about how Psalm 137 made him decide to move to Israel. Actually, Goldberg had his revelation when he listened to the Melodians’ reggae version of the psalm, “Rivers of Babylon,” which is on the soundtrack of The Harder They Come.
But the Melodians omit the last verses of Psalm 137, and I suspect most modern readers do the same. That’s because the last verses are monstrous. After the heartfelt versifying about Zion, the author addresses the poem’s fi nal lines to the Babylonian enemy: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.” This juxtaposition of personal sorrow and grotesque revenge—infanticide! with rocks!—perfectly captures the cognitive dissonance of the psalms. These poems appeal to the best in us, and the worst, often at the same time.
psalm 150
The book ends with a romping, stomping hoedown of a psalm. It lists all the instruments that we should play while honoring God. “Praise Him with trumpet sound; praise Him with lute and harp! Praise Him with tambourine and dance; praise Him with strings and pipe! Praise Him with clanging cymbals; praise Him with loud clashing cymbals!”
EIGH TEEN
The Book of Proverbs
Chicken Soup for the Hebrew Soul
In which Solomon writes the first self-help book.
chapters 1–3
ccording to the opening verses, Solomon wrote Proverbs in order to teach “wisdom” to his people. It’s the world’s first self-help book, and it offers surprisingly sensible advice throughout: practice prudence, never panic, don’t quarrel “without cause,” don’t plot against your neighbor, “do not envy the violent.” Why doesn’t some sly publisher put this between covers, throw a catchy title on it (The Way of the King: The Timeless Wisdom of Solomon), and rake in the bucks? It couldn’t possibly be worse than The 48 Laws of Power.
Proverbs 1 includes a superb after-school-special moment. Solomon advises kids that if a gang of roughnecks should ask for help in mugging passersby, just say “No!” That’s because such thugs will get their comeuppance. In the most after- school- special moment of all, Solomon says that the would-be muggers have “set an ambush—for their own lives! Such is the end of all who are greedy for gain.” (Can’t you hear the basso narrator, pausing pregnantly before saying, “for their own lives”?)
chapters 4–5
The code of behavior in Proverbs is monkish in its self-denial: wisdom comes from talking little and minding your own business. The word “discipline” appears in chapter after chapter. In a typical passage, Solomon advises: “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Keep straight the path of your feet, and all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left.”
It’s odd to hear this call for self-restraint coming from our putative author Solomon. He was a king notorious for excess—too many wives, too much gold, too big a house, too much talking. And you could argue that those very excesses—his swerves off the straight and narrow, his flirtations with other gods and other women—we
re what gave him such an active mind and curious spirit. In other words, his own wisdom came from habits exactly the opposite of those he is teaching. He didn’t look directly forward. He didn’t avoid the adulteress. He denied himself nothing. And yet he grew in wisdom.
Another example of the Solomonic paradox is this passage about marriage: “Rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. May her breasts satisfy you at all times; may you be intoxicated always by her love.” May you, indeed! But wouldn’t Solomon’s plea for uxorial satisfaction be more convincing from a man who didn’t have 700 wives and 300 mistresses?
chapter 6
I must quote the following passage in full, because (1) it’s great advice; and (2) it captures something fundamental about Proberbs:
There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomi
nation to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed
innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that hurry
to run to evil, a lying witness who testifies falsely, and one who
sows discord in a family.
Don’t get too hung up on those numbers—is it six or seven hatreds, Lord? Instead, let’s talk about the first fi ve abominations—haughty eyes, lying tongue, bloody hands, wicked heart, evil feet. Solomon is reminding us that the physical is the moral. Again and again, Proverbs uses images of the body to describe moral behavior. (“Let your eyes look directly forward”; “turn your foot away from evil”; etc.) Our age celebrates the supremacy of the mind and holds that morality is founded in thought and feeling. But I like the model in Proverbs, which recognizes that it is the body that sins, not the vague, incorporeal mind.
chapter 7
Solomon watches a sexy young thing seduce a dumb guy walking down the street. Her husband’s away, so she has tarted herself up and decorated her house like a bordello, and she proposes to the stupid buck: “Let us delight ourselves with love.” He follows her home “like an ox to the slaughter.” His sin will “cost him his life.” It’s not clear if the romp will literally get him killed, because the cuckolded husband will murder him, or if he only dies a moral death, losing God’s favor.