Canter Bridge

The pungent Hebrew word רמיה (remiyyah) gathers a world of disappointment into two and a half little syllables. Often translated as deceit or negligence, it is not a term employed by its perpetrator. He prefers more benign descriptions of his deeds, always self-interested and too often hanging out to dry people who had relied upon him and deserved better.

It is the congregation of the disappointed who turn, in texts like this, and thrust the descriptor remiyyah back in the direction of those who have failed them when failure meant consequences too painful to be endured. Deceit. Negligence. The air hangs heavy with their musky odor. The smell of death lies only steps away. Remiyyah.

Psalm 78 reads like an anti-nationalist screed. Its theodicy resolves around the response of the Israelite fathers to YHWH’s constant care. They turned back, we read. They were faithless. They didn’t notice. They didn’t care. They tested YHWH with their stunning ingratitude.

Two verses near the center of the poem have it this way:

Yet they tested the Most High God,
and rebelled against him.
They did not observe his decrees,
but turned away and were faithless like their ancestors;
they twisted like a treacherous bow. (Psalm 78:56-57)

The neat English translation of the last clause might with more rustic angularity be rendered like a bow of deceit. When the archer stands ready to take his prey or to stop the rush of the enemy upon his friend’s back, the bow fails him. It sends his arrow vainly, infuriatingly off into the wood. A family goes hungry or a comrade dies. Remiyyah.

The hand of the diligent will rule,
while the lazy will be put to forced labor. (Proverbs 12:24 NRSV)

The teacher of proverbs sees from an angle more conducive to detecting the righteous order of things, as is his wont. The diligent finds his reward in the authority that is added to his responsible performance. Yet this biblical moralist, too, has known the sting of deception, the rotted fruit of negligence, for he turns the term remiyyah with agile familiarity upon the doomed lazy man of Israel. In fact, remiyyah stands in for the man himself. Quite literally, the maxim assures us that …

 (T)he hand of the diligent will rule, but remiyyah will be put to forced labor.

The world would be a better place if one could stop his nose against the pungency of remiyyah. The landscape would hover with more shimmering beauty in the romanticist’s gaze if only the airbrush could take remiyyah’s offending blur out of the picture. Yet neither would be true to fact.

Remiyyah disappoints, disillusions, aborts, and starves. It finally destroys its practitioner.

Much like a treacherous bow.