Ps. 6:1 (sickness as Yhwh's abandonment)

Ps. 6.1

Diag.

O Lord  /  do not  /  rebuke me  /  in your  /  anger

And do not  /   chastise me  /  in your  /  wrath.

This is, I believe, the first time we have encountered words like this. Prayer’s for deliverance and protection have been the common theme since Ps. 3 (at least), and this psalm is certainly one for that. However, we have never seen this before: the sense on the part of the character that he is the object of Yhwh’s anger and wrath. Indeed, following on the heels of Ps. 5, where wrath, anger and loathing were so prevalent, and aimed so forcefully at the wicked, we can be more than a little shocked at these opening words. It may be good to review here who have been the objects of Yhwh’s wrath:

Ps. 2: the nations that have come to wage war on Yhwh and his anointed. Although one senses that these men’s sins consist, in part, of hubris, they are not condemned for anything except their attempted rebellion.

Ps. 3: again, men who rebel against Yhwh’s anointed. These men are described as “wicked”.

Ps. 4: here there are several: 1) those who attempt to destroy the reputation of a righteous man; 2) those who “love vanity”; 3) those who “seek falsehood”

Ps. 5: the catalogue is extensive: 1) wickedness; 2) evil; 3) boasters (idol worshippers?); 4) workers of iniquity; 5) bloodthirsty and deceitful men; 6) what is probably a metaphor for the entire lot—those whose mouths are “open graves”.

In this context, then, if we have been given any indication thus far regarding what moves Yhwh to wrath and hatred, it is unsettling to hear this man to claim to be the object of that anger and wrath. What has caused this?

We find, tentatively, the answer in the next verse. This man is suffering from a terrible sickness.

Be gracious  /  to me  /  O Lord  /  for I have grown  /  feeble.

Heal me  /  for my bones  /  have become  /  disturbed.

There are two ways of interpreting these opening lines: 1) this man sees his sickness as the wrath/anger of Yhwh; 2) this man implores the Lord not to be angry with him for making a request for healing (meaning, the sickness is not itself the wrath of God but the psalmist’s sense that the request itself may cause the Lord to be angry with him). I do not see how to determine which is correct. However, although this may be the case I only want to pursue the first option.

Sickness as the wrath/anger of Yhwh. If we look at these opening lines this way, then we will probably hear in the back of our minds something along these lines: the Jews (and man in antiquity) thought that sickness was intimately related to sin and, therefore, a man who was sick was seen as being punished for his (or his parents’) sinfulness; Jesus came to show that that is not the case. This is often said with a type of enlightened sense of how naïve one would have to be to make such a direct correlation between sickness, sin and the anger of the gods; for we “know” that that is not the case because innocent and guilty get sick indiscriminately.

There are several things that need to be said in reply to this: 1) as we will see, it is not at all clear what Yhwh’s anger means in this Psalm as it relates to sickness; 2) sickness, like death, is the working out the effect of sin; most Christians would not disagree that death is the punishment of sin, but they do not say that sickness is.

Sickness and the Anger of Yhwh

As we have seen, especially in our analysis of Ps. 5, how Yhwh’s judgment is enacted is often a very difficult thing to pinpoint. In Ps. 5, at least, there was this duality between Yhwh punishing the wicked by simply letting them fall into the pit they were teetering over; it did not appear that He had to do anything but do nothing—the wicked men’s judgment was falling on their own heads. And yet, there was definitely a sense that Yhwh was in ‘control’ of that judgment. The psalmist implored him to not act, which implied that whatever judgment fell on these men, at root, it was one within Yhwh’s governance. Likewise, in Ps. 2, the judgment of Yhwh was to empower his anointed “with a rod of iron” to destroy the nations. The point is that too often we read these active verbs (destroy, punish, etc…) as implying a type of supernatural intervention, when, in fact, there is an ambiguity regarding whether Yhwh is actively doing anything, or whether his ‘activity’ is an empowerment of others. When, in Isaiah, does it mean when Yhwh whistles to Babylon to come and destroy Jerusalem? Is this simply Isaiah, convinced of Yhwh’s astonishing power over the world, seeing Bablyon’s destruction as necessitating a prior call by Yhwh but not one that Babylon was at all aware of? It would certainly seem so. But, if that is the case, this active “whistling” must be seen in a very ambiguous light.

This is not the place (nor do I have the ability) to go into much detail on these matters. The point is to highlight the fact that interpreting active verbs is not easy. And this is important for our Psalm for this reason—In verse 5 we read this:

Return  /  O Lord.  /  Save my soul!

Deliver me  /  because  /  of your  /  lovingkindness.

This man’s sickness is not the result of Yhwh’s active attacking him but of His absence from him. The implications of this are far reaching and, to some extent, make us dive into one of Israel’s most profound realizations. I am not certain, but it would seem logical that for any other polytheistic thought, the sickness of an individual would be interpreted as the active attack of a god; Apollo was, for example, seen as both the god of light and of sickness. His arrows are ones of plague. However, for Israel, these other active gods were given no purchase. There was only one God: Yhwh. There was, therefore, only one source of life. There was, likewise, only one source of death, but here “death” must be radically (and utterly) reinterpreted. Israel never identified Yhwh as this god of death; many other religions did give death a face and a name. Yhwh, however, is the god of the living. If one “sinks into Sheol”, one is not entering the realm of another deity, like Hades in Greek thought. One is simply entering a shadow-world. It is not divine but is marked, simply, by the absence of the divine.

Now, Yhwh could pronounce a curse of death, as he does in Genesis, but the curse is the expelling from Eden, the exile from where they “walked with God”. Because Yhwhw is Life, death is not a divine characteristic but, oddly, merely the absence of the divine. It is, in a way, a dissolution, a “return to dust”. It is, in this way, the most banal form of existence, endowed with absolutely nothing that is sacred, unlike in almost every other religious system. Although death is a “horror” to the man of the OT it is not a horror because it represents a competing deity with Yhwh. It is a horror because it represents the complete absence of Yhwh. Unlike in many (if not most or all) other religious thought patterns: death is not, at all, endowed with anything of the divine (it is, in a manner of speaking, absolute secularity).

Likewise, sickness was but a falling away from this source of Life. It was a ‘withering’; it was (in the images of the prophets) a losing of capacity for “fruitfulness”. When one became sick one was, quite literally, abandoned by Yhwh. In this regard, life was conceived along a spectrum rather than a participation within different divine influences; again, Sheol was not governed by a god and, likewise, sickness was not the manifestation of a god’s face but the manifestation of Yhwh’s absence. This would lead to a strange use of language, as we see here: anger and wrath as the absence of Yhwh. There emerged an inability to adequately formulate this experience. All of our categories of thought are, in a way, geared to understanding life along the mode of polytheism (meaning, everything is given a divine source, including sickness and death). For Israel, though, this was not an option. Once the divine name took up its residence in their midst, it became profoundly difficult to describe exactly how or what this meant. The only way they could do this was through combining forms of thought that, generally, are held apart. The reader gets the sense of being lulled into certainty only to have the author immediately retreat or introduce a mode of thought that challenges one’s sense of stability (the opening of Ezekiel is one of the more dizzying literary constructs I’ve ever encountered).

To abandon this conviction—that sickness is the beginning of Yhwh’s abandonment—is to surrender the very name of Yhwh; this conviction is not naivety but one that flows forth from the divine name. And, to make matters even more difficult, and this is not something to go into now—it is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah that, in his abandonment (he is described as embodying the curses of Yhwh) becomes the emblem of the new Temple. One senses here the beginnings of the idea that Yhwh can/will reveal himself in his abandonment from himself…