Ps. 7 (superscription)

Ps. 7

The title to this psalm identifies it with a song David sang to the Lord “concerning the words of Cush, a Benjamite.” There is no reference in the OT to these “words”,although the psalm will go on to provide a great deal of information about the content of what was spoken. Regardless, we see here, again, an emphasis on the spoken “words”. There has been nothing more prevalent in our psalms as a call for deliverance than from these vocal utterances of an enemy. Even in Ps. 2, where war is about to be waged against the anointed, David, the entire psalm is a dialogue. And in Ps. 3 the most devastating blow to David, even perhaps more so than the fact that his son was seeking his life, were the words spoken behind his back to effect that Yhwh had abandoned him. Likewise, in Ps. 4, they are the accusations of the ‘sons of man’ and their attempt to destroy the righteous man’s reputation that initiate the prayer for deliverance. Ps. 5 reserves the most devastating imagery for those who ‘speak falsely’. In Ps. 6 the only ground to the sick man’s appeal was that praise would not be offered to Yhwh if he descended to Sheol. This only points to the deeper and underlying fact that the OT is overwhelmingly concerned with the power of the tongue. The wisdom literature (especially Proverbs) is almost single-mindedly concerned with how one guards one’s words. The book of Judges can be read as the evil of lose tongues and how the further one spirals away from Yhwh the loser one’s tongue becomes. It is apparent that, in the OT, words were much more of a “thing”or “reality” than we conceive of them. If one spoke a blessing, one could not take it back. It accomplished what it said. This is carried over, in the most emphatic way, to Yhwh’s ‘words’. As Genesis shows, they actually do create; his words are, literally, active. The prophets, inspired by the spirit, when they spoke saying, “Thus says the Lord…” were delivering to Israel this same creative word and, thereby, fashioning a reality in much the same was as the earth ‘sprang into being’.

Much of this points, I think, to a fundamentally different orientation in the OT (and the Scriptures, and the entire world of antiquity) than one we have today. Many have described this as the difference between a ‘guilt’ culture and a ‘shame’ culture, the Scriptures decidedly on the “shame” side. An overly brief description of this difference is as follows: modern, western culture tends to be a ‘guilt’ culture, in that it focuses almost entirely upon the individual response to his own responsibilities; it is not communal but the focus is on how one individually apprises oneself and not how one is viewed by the community/family/clan/church. In ‘shame’ cultures, the opposite is the case: who one “is” is how one is viewed. In these cultures one behaves because of the way one’s behavior reflects upon the whole of one’s community (family/clan/nation/church). One way of stating this difference is that in “guilt” cultures conscience exists in the individual; in “shame” cultures, it exists in the community. In shame cultures, honor, prestige and the like are heavily prized possessions and objects of desire because they are communal objects. In guilt cultures, these are perceived as shallow and only sought after by the ‘insecure’. One’s ‘worth’ comes from ‘inside’; one’s “outer”appearance is not (or should not) “matter”.

When reoriented in this way, the importance placed on spoken words becomes much more obvious. In shame cultures the ‘spoken’ word is the expression of the conscience of the community; it is much more of a “thing” or “reality-creating” than in a guilt culture. Likewise, it is absolutely essential in this regard to ‘guard one’s tongue’. And, most importantly for the purposes of our psalm, in ‘shame’ cultures a covenant will mean something very different than in a ‘guilt’ culture. In a guilt culture a covenant will appear more like a contract, a meeting between two parties. In a shame culture, a covenant will be the binding of two parties into one ‘family’ or ‘community’. Therefore, to break a covenant will be remove oneself from this source of identity. In a guilt culture, to be removed from this group is (probably) not desirable, but because one’s conscience is rooted in the self, the ‘punishment’ is not in being ostracized, but in the internal feeling of ‘guilt’.

In a way we could say that those in ‘shame’cultures live much “closer to the surface” of things because their ‘face’ is intimately bound up with the ‘face’ of the community. And it is along the surface of these things that the ‘prizes’ of life are won: honor, respect, fame…To be falsely accused in this culture, then, takes on much larger importance because it potentially robs the person of their ‘face’ (as is not the case in ‘guilt’cultures where one’s ‘face’ is deeply internal).