If Paul Simon could find only fifty ways to leave his lover, the writer of Psalm 119 clearly trumps him. Verse after verse of this acrostic poem—meaning that the first letter of each line follows the alphabet in a clearly identifiable pattern—lauds YHWH’s word, law, and promise with language usually reserved for romance.
I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil.
Although specific lines from this resolutely focused psalm have found their way into Jewish and Christian spirituality, the psalm itself strikes many modern readers as tedious and—dare one say it—a bit obsessive. A poem like this places a premium on form and then works its content to fit. Even a sympathetic reader is likely to conclude when watching the writer reach for say, a fifth line that begins with the letter ‘ayin’, that the dude should give himself a break.
Yet it is worthwhile to push through modern impatience with form, repetition, and law just enough to ask what sort of soul generates an epic celebration of divine instruction. Who, for example, could without a wry smile say this?:
Your decrees are my heritage forever; they are the joy of my heart.
Who, without irony, affirms this?:
My soul is consumed with longing for your ordinances at all times.
Several aspects of such a profile come quickly to mind.
First, the writer is deeply aware of his own fragility. He inhabits a world where threat and treachery abound, one where his feet appear to be slipping from under him unless he can place them firmly on the bedrock of divine instruction.
Second, he believes that YHWH creates and sustains the world. The Lord’s word to him is a subset of his world-sustaining project. Chaos and order are not theoretical to him, but rather articulations of his daily existence.
Third, he finds YHWH’s instruction to be life-giving. Time and again, he counterposes a demand for the Lord’s vivifying instruction to the disintegration of life and hope.
Fourth, he has found rich reward by dedicating formidable energy to the mastery of YHWH’s precepts. His approach to that body of learning that he labels as precepts, law(s), promise, and word(s) is anything but passive. He energetically pursues their bounty and longs for them when they seem distant.
The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has taught us that the psalms speak into our lives to the degree that we have been shattered or dis-oriented by events. One might not expect a nomistic psalm like this one—with its unbending concentration upon what is established and true—to fit well in Brueggemann’s grid. Yet, surprisingly, it seems to do just that.
In all of its synthetic artificiality, Psalm 119 asks us to consider whether the most shattered and threatened of human beings might need, more than anything else, a word.
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