Ps. 34.9 (tasting Yhwh's goodness)

“Taste / and see / how good / Yhwh is – blessed is the man / who seeks refuge / in him.” From these positions of patient assurance we now arrive at the oddest verse is the psalm (and one of the oddest we have encountered). How are we to account for the ‘tasting’ of Yhwh? There are, I think, two ways of approaching this. First, we have seen throughout that the psalmist is attempting to ‘usher’ the poor into his experience of deliverance. In a very concrete sense he sees his experience as not private but a place that can be inhabited by others (and, hence, can be taught as all wisdom can be passed down). It is a ‘public’ sphere into which others can stand if they are will to be taught by the psalmist. His first directive to his listeners involved their ‘looking at Yhwh and being radiant.’ As we saw, those who were called to looked were the ‘ashamed’, the lowly and the persecuted (those who inhabited the same sphere that the psalmist inhabited prior to his deliverance). The psalmist, however, directs them to be radiant in the present, that even from their position as ‘lowly’ they can, right now, have a radiant face and can see Yhwh. In effect, the psalmist is saying that Yhwh is as fully present to these lowly as, in a way, Moses was to Yhwh (with his radiant face). This was then followed by the revelation that around those who ‘fear Yhwh’ is ‘encamped’ Yhwh’s angel. He is not merely ‘sent’, but rather he is steadfastly ‘encamped’ around them. There is, then, a ‘present’ that the lowly do not perceive; there is an ‘already’ that is occurring.  From these urgings, the present verse makes a good deal more sense. Now, the second directive is issued: “Taste and see how good Yhwh is…”. The psalmist is driving the point home all the way to the point not only of sensory touch, but of actual tasting, perhaps the most intimate sense available. Yhwh’s ‘goodness’—his ability to deliver and redeem—is so real that it can, even more than a ‘shining face’, and even more than his own angel, be ‘tasted’. It is, importantly—food. It can nourish, sustain and be the ‘bread’ of the ashamed. In context this means that Yhwh’s deliverance, his saving power, is something that is so assured to happen than it can, in the present, be tasted. Again, this does not mean that the psalmist is teaching his ‘children’ how to ignore actual deliverance in favor of simply a ‘love of Yhwh’. Rather, he is saying that the concrete deliverance of Yhwh, in the future, is something that can be tasted (and seen) in the present. It will happen. This leads to our second point: how one accomplishes ‘continuous praise’ (v. 1). The image of tasting involves the mouth. As we have seen the mouth has been important since the first verse where the psalmist said he would bless Yhwh “at all times, his praise shall constantly be in my mouth”. We noted that odd phrasing of “in” my mouth. Here, we see its resolution.  The psalmist is urging the ‘lowly’ to have ‘in their mouths’ the goodness of Yhwh in the same manner as Yhwh’s praise will constantly be “in” his mouth. Both of them point to Yhwh’s real presence, in the present, as the assurance of his deliverance in the future. To constantly ‘praise’ Yhwh then is tied to this sense of ‘tasting’ Yhwh’s goodness, now. One final thing to note is the fact that the psalmist ties this ‘tasting’ with ‘seeing’. To taste something is to have an intimate knowledge of the thing. However, without the sense of sight the ‘thing’ remains very inchoate, very difficult to adequately understand. By aligning these two powers, however, the psalmist places Yhwh’s ‘goodness’ both ‘within’ the lowly and allows them to perceive it, to ‘see it’. The eyes have been important (more important, even, than the mouth). They ‘see’ Yhwh and, in turn, their face is made radiant (a visual image). The point, then, seems to be that Yhwh’s goodness is so real that it can be consumed and made a part of the lowly, by eating, and perceived and relied upon through the use of sight.