“O Yhwh / in your favor / you made me stand / more erect than the mountains of strength.” The contrast to the previous verse is almost total: there, the psalmist declared his strength, in a monologue of power (But I—I said…); here, the strength is found in dialogue (O Yhwh); there, the psalmist was his own strength (I said in my strength); here, the strength is in Yhwh’s favor (you made me stand). Through this contrast we see the psalmist as covenantal. As we said previously, due to this unique perception of Yhwh the psalmist understands strength to flow not from a mixture of divine governance and human striving. Rather, in Yhwh man has been placed in an entirely different category. In other modes of being a dialectic inevitably emerges due to the fact that the gods and man inhabit the same created realm. There is a tension between human striving and divine aid—this tension can result in either heroism or hubris (Gilgamesh/Heracles/Achilles embody both). However, in the perception of Yhwh as Creator and Covenant-maker, a new realm opens up in which man is released fully without his release being in competition with Yhwh. The more man obeys Yhwh (in covenant) the more man ‘returns to himself’ (as utterly contingent creature) as well. In the unique revelation of Yhwh there is nothing paradoxical about man’s servanthood. It is (oddly stated) completely ‘natural’. Outside of this realm man suffers an inevitable to-and-fro between these two dialectics (and arguably, one can see remnants of this within Scripture itself; it is something reminiscent of, in a type of purified ‘conclusion’, atheism and mysticism). This contrast is further carried out in how ‘strength’ is measured between the two verses. There, the measure of the psalmist’s strength was largely abstract (I will never moved); here, the psalmist finds a concrete measure (than the mountains of strength); there, the image was of ‘standing’; here, the image is of overwhelming strength (‘stand more erect than…’). There have been, in the psalms, other statements of confidence regarding “not being moved”. However, when that statement is placed in the present context and contrasted with his later assertion of identity within Yhwh (verse we are looking at), it falls completely flat. There is, in this verse, the sense that strength in Yhwh is not only more concrete but, simply, “more”. No matter how much strength one could muster from within one’s self, when it is contrasted with a statement of dialogue with Yhwh, it pales in comparison. There is another important point to this. In the first verse the strength was, in a sense, ‘guaranteed’ because it resulted from nothing other than the “I”. Here, by contrast, strength comes only by Yhwh’s “favor”. There is, then, a hiatus—a space between the psalmist and his true strength—and this is now, not in the psalmist’s “I” but in Yhwh’s “I”. Strength is not found in the dialectic of nature and grace, but in dialogue. Were one to call this ‘grace alone’ one could potentially be simply adopting the dialectic and siding with the realm of ‘mysticism’ and passivity. Rather, it seems to me, this ‘hiatus’ between calling out and answer is where we see man (and creation) emerge in a non-paradoxcial, non-dialectical, non-violent/competitive fashion.
This is only heightened by the following line: “You hid / your face / I was dismayed”. Here, everything contained in his original statement comes crashing down and the import of this verse is fully revealed. What we learn now is that the psalmist’s error of strength was, in fact, Yhwh’s ‘favor’ not his own solidity. This favor, in turn, was removed in a moment’s notice and the psalmist plunged into sickness. As he descended, he also descended beneath his erroneous statement and came to realize that he was held up by more than his own strength; it was as if he fell beneath the surface of the earth to see that creation is held up by Yhwh’s ‘foundations’. Below the surface of things he came to see himself as residing purely on Yhwh’s favor and disfavor; in other words, on Yhwh’s covenantal promises of ‘life and death’. This realization would have been rather blinding: he would have realized simultaneously, that he had, in fact, been even stronger than he thought, but it would have been based upon a realization of the fact that any strength is founded on a prior ‘poverty’ in the face of Yhwh (a poverty of obedience; this is a Noahic heroism in contrast to that of Gilgamesh).
One final point that might ground these reflections further: in the opening verses the psalmist said Yhwh “made me live”, referring to Yhwh’s ‘drawing him up’ from Sheol and the pit; here, the same wording is used, “you made me stand” and this in contrast to his previous erroneous statement of strength. Both refer to a ‘raising up’: in the first verse, to being ‘drawn up’, here to ‘being made erect’. It seems, then, that what we find is the psalmist identifying his erroneous statement as, in a sense, one emerging from the Pit: this is something someone in Sheol might say (where Yhwh’s name is not remembered; curiously enough, Yhwh’s name is ‘not present’ in his statement either). It is subtle, but it reveals the profound judgment he casts upon his error/sin: he aligns with all of the negative images of the psalm (the pit, weeping, anger, death, etc…).
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