Canter Bridge

The visual profile of a piece of Hebrew poetry laid out on a page is occasionally striking. It is no wonder that the aniconic tradition of Hebrew letters develops an artistic whimsy that sets it to playing with the shapes and potentialities of Hebrew script.

Like a teacher’s strong arm on the wrist of a young pupil as he sits before a drawing, Psalm 136 directs the reader’s eye from one corner of its modest shape to the other. She teaches him to see this and then that, to glimpse the magical order in the jumble.

At the top and to the right, the eye catches the repeated …הודו ל (‘O, give thanks to …’), a beginning that becomes an ending when at the bottom right corner of the page it opens the psalm’s final summons. The English presentation looks like this:

O give thanks to the Lord …
O give thanks to the God of gods …
O give thanks to the Lord of lords …
O give thanks to the God of heaven … (Psalm 136: 1-3, 26 NRSV)

The exuberant psalm is not only framed conceptually by this call to gratitude. Its visual profile is shaped by the same.

Down the left side of the psalm, a jagged uniformity suggests an ordered chaos rather than an order for order’s austere sake.

Twenty-six times the psalm’s claim ends with the Hebrew Bible’s strongest, quasi-credal claim: כי לעולם חסדו. The different lengths of the poem’s lines locate this persistent claim and its visual shape across the left side of the page with a jaggedness that resolves into a undulating curve if the eye allows.

For his steadfast love endures forever …

The claim is in the Hebrew Bible an observation of how YHWH has been. It is also a consolation, a hope, even a promise.

For all this conceptual and artistic consistency, one tiny particle stands out as unique and disjunctive. It is the relative particle שׁ, usually taken to arrive late to the inventory of classical Hebrew, becoming a standard for ‘which … ‘ or ‘who …’ only in the postbiblical era.

The particle appears near the end of the psalm, in the 23rd of 26 verses. From the time that the psalm was translated into Greek up to the perennial struggle of modern translators with their complex text, it has been recognized as marking a significant shift in the psalm’s regularized recital of YHWH’s way with his world and his people. The NRSV offers up the words ‘It is he who …’ to gloss this enigmatic relative particle.

It is he who remembered us in our low estate, for his steadfast love endures forever; and rescued us from our foes, for his steadfast love endures forever; who gives food to all flesh, for his steadfast love endures forever. (Psalm 136:23–25 NRSV)

Something, indeed, changes at verse 23. The particle is the linguistic crystallization of that shift.

It seems that שׁ marks the point where the recital of God’s mighty acts crosses over into our own moment. Mighty acts seem irreducibly mighty when they mark the given contour of olden days, fixed in space and time. Those things seem almost predetermined to have turned out in exactly the way they did. The only power we hold over them, the only flexibility that might be coaxed out of them takes place in the minor embellishment and personal turns of phrases we employ when we recite them one more time.

To hearts anchored in the menacing challenges of our day, those old, large things seem like they were always going to happen. It was only a matter of waiting for them.

Not so the acts we would long to see flow from the too invisible movement of YHWH’s hands today. The remembering us in our lowly estate. The rescue from our foes. The provision of bread, peace, and rent money for today.

This, our small but poignant and inescapable little drama, is introduced by שׁ:

It is he who …

At the very least שׁ reckons with our need to know that YHWH—whose steadfast love has until now endured forever—is the one whom we are to invoke in plea as we ache under our need and then in gratitude when he has acted.

The beat, in a manner of speaking about a strikingly rhythmic psalm, goes on.

There is no cliché in the persistent repetitions of Psalm 136. What might be mistaken for such is instead the subtle invitation to understand for a moment that those people back then didn’t know any better than we whether YHWH would act.

But he did. He does.

For his steadfast love endures forever.