Ps. 30.5-6

“Sing praise / to Yhwh / O you saints / of his – and praise / his holy name.” With  his personal introduction out of the way we now come to see that the psalmist’s praise is contained within a communal act of thanksgiving. Yhwh’s ‘saints’ have come (to the Temple?) to join with the psalmist as he hymns Yhwh’s glory for his ‘drawing up’ from Sheol. The praise is oriented to Yhwh and “his holy name”. As we have commented on before the presence of ‘the name’ is important in that it is in the name of Yhwh that his power is effected; it may be that here we see that his healing came about by a pronouncement over him of ‘the name’. His healing, therefore, would have been an ascension in and through and by the name of Yhwh; it would have enveloped him, warded off his ‘enemies’, and restored (re-created) him according to Yhwh’s purpose. In this way, the psalmist would have become something like a sacramental presence within the community; he would have been a walking emblem of Yhwh’s covenantal power, care and deliverance. For those who are Yhwh’s saints, the psalmist would have then become an object of delight and joy, a physical showing of their covenantal partners desire to heal his own; and this is not a joy at simply a ‘healing’, for in his ‘drawing up’ the psalmist would have been restored to the condition ‘of creation’, of ‘goodness’ as Genesis says. This is why they would be called upon (and be joyous to) to praise Yhwh with the psalmist. It is also for this reason why these are not, necessarily, (just) the psalmist’s ‘family and friends’. The possessor is Yhwh, not the psalmist. And if the psalmist healing is something objectively an object of praise, then those who would be drawn to participate in praise to Yhwh are Yhwh’s own, which is much more expansive than some intimate community of the psalmist. Perhaps too we see here an ‘expansion’ of the psalmist himself beyond his “I” as outlined in the intro; here, the psalmist has been, through Yhwh’s healing, placed within a more objective realm of Yhwh’s authority and power (precisely in his being cast down and humiliated). In other words the “I” has become objective precisely in its (re)orientation to Yhwh and Yhwh’s saints and not in its isolation. And so, while the introduction is purely personal, here we see the psalmist himself engaged in the communal act of praise, injecting (and having been injected by Yhwh) himself into this larger liturgy.

It is from this more objective stance that he continues, giving voice in a proverbial way to Yhwh’s covenantal boundaries: “For / in his anger / is death – but / in his favor / is life; - weeping / may tarry / in the evening; - but joy / comes / at dawn.” The starkness of this verse is not unusual as it embodies the effect of covenantal relationship with Yhwh. As the Torah makes clear: those who follow Yhwh’s commandments will live long in the land, but those who do not will suffer death (expulsion). Likewise, prior to entering the promised land, Moses says he put before them “life and death; choose life so you may live long in the land.” Yhwh, as the creator, is the gravitational center of all creation. Likewise, this Yhwh is the covenant maker. When these two are aligned, ‘life’ and ‘covenant’ become synonymous. To stand ‘in the covenant’ is, in a real sense, to ‘stand in creation’; to stand in rebellion to the covenant is, therefore, to stand outside creation (meaning, to exist in chaos and death). At the center of this covenant stands Yhwh, whose ‘anger’ and ‘favor’ provide the contours to the covenant itself. All of this is to say that Yhwh’s ‘favor’ is life, which is ‘covenantal obedience’; in this is ‘joy’ and the ‘rising morning’/dawn. Yhwh’s anger, then, is ‘death’ from which flows weeping and darkness of night. Through this interplay of Yhwh as creator and covenant creator we come to see how dangerous it was for the psalmist to have said, “I will never be moved”. In saying such arrogance he was placing himself outside the blessing of the covenant and began to enter the realm of darkness and death. It is at this point that we can start to chart the images of the psalm. Anger-weeping-death-the pit-sheol-night-dismay-failure-wailingàandàfavor-joy-life-‘drawing up’/ascension-morning-standing erect-dancing. (Side note: in almost every other mythological system at least around the Mediterranean, the gods of the created order are later defeated by a younger generation. This younger generation then takes precedence while the older gods seem to fade into the background. In this way we see how ‘creation’ becomes something that is 1) just ‘there’ and 2) not something intrinsically tied to the governing gods (creation is not the expression of governance, but something that is subject to governing). For Israel, by contrast, creation and Yhwh are aligned such that creation itself now becomes a vehicle and manifestation of Yhwh. In other words, the ‘distance’ between creation and the gods in other systems is closed, completely, in Israel. Why might this be important: in other systems the distance of creation creates a space between cult and morality, meaning cultic observations can be performed on behalf of the gods without morality being absolutely wed to such observations. However, in Israel,  due to Yhwh’s being Creator and King, creation becomes the manifestation of Yhwh just as his ‘Law’ will be. The point is that ‘life’ and ‘death’ can become synonymous with Yhwh’s ‘pleasure’ and ‘anger’ in a way not possible in other systems due to their gap between creation and governance, cult and morality. This is not to say this verse could not have been uttered in another religious system; but it is to say that its meaning (or, its implications) would have been different. It seems to me that I still very much have this other mythological conception of the created order.)