“The young lions / are in need / and are hungry – but they / who seek Yhwh / shall not lack / any good thing. – Come / children / listen to me – I will teach you / the fear of Yhwh.” At first I separated these two lines but now realize they serve as contrasting images and therefore must be read together. The “young lions” who are “hungry” are juxtaposed with the “children” who, through learning of the “fear of Yhwh”, will “lack no good thing”. As we said yesterday, in this psalm the “fear of Yhwh” is closely associated with the ‘seeking of Yhwh’ (for refuge and protection). The first thing to reflect upon is the imagery of the ‘young lions’. In every previous psalm we have looked at, the ‘lion’ was matched with the wicked in their pursuit of the righteous. The idea is of such overpowering strength that the only one who can save the righteous is Yhwh. Far from being ‘in need’, it is the righteous, in those psalms, who are ‘in need and hungry’. Here, the roles are completely reversed. Now, the lions are suffering the privation and presumably the fear of death and hunger. And, most importantly, these are ‘young’ lions. It seems as if we are to ask where the lion’s parents are. Are they hungry because they have no one to provide food for them? This would make sense based on the next lines where the psalmist says, “Come, children, listen to me…” Traditionally, wisdom is passed down from a ‘father’ to a son; it is very much a household chore and duty of parents to teach their children. What we see, then, is the fact that the ‘young lions’ have no ‘father’ while those who ‘seek Yhwh’ have, in the psalmist, a father and teacher of wisdom. The “young lions”, then, are those who are full of the potential power, strength and virility of the animal kingdom and yet, due to fact that they have no parent, will never reach their assigned stature. Like abandoned children they are “in need” and they are hungry. As a metaphor for wisdom, this is particularly poignant and even troubling: to be a child without a wise parent is to be like these young lions dying of starvation. They have not been taught to ‘fear Yhwh’ or to ‘seek him’. One pictures these young lions wandering aimlessly and growing ever-weaker. It works on both levels: the natural and the metaphor and needs to be interpreted along both lines. On the ‘natural’ level, we see here the fact that ‘seeking Yhwh’ brings one into the ‘redemptive sphere’ that the psalmist has been attempting to convey to his listeners (his ‘children’). They will be brought out of this state of ‘need and hunger’ and into the realm of ‘good things’. On the metaphoric level, this will be accomplished because a ‘father’ will be given to them in order to teach them the wisdom necessary to enter this ‘sphere of blessing’. The image shifts with the word “but”: “but they who seek Yhwh shall not lack any good thing.” The ‘answer’ to their seeking of Yhwh is the psalmist himself—“Come, children, listen to me…” This is very important—for those who seek Yhwh, what is provided is a ‘father’, a ‘teacher of wisdom’. We will come back to how important this is in a moment. As we have said already, the psalmist is a teacher because he has, himself, already gone through this redemptive experience. In him, this sphere of redemptive wisdom has opened up and therefore become capable of being ‘handed down’ (‘tradition’). His ‘tradition’ he is passing down is his invitation to enter into the realm of Yhwh’s goodness. And yet, the next line will be the final time the psalmist uses the word “I”. From this point on the psalmist will speak as a ‘wisdom teacher’ and not ‘personally’. This comes back to our original thought: although a ‘father’ is provided who can teach wisdom based on his own experience, it is not a ‘private experience’ but, rather, something that discloses a type of ‘science’, or ‘reason’ and, therefore, something that can be taught. Essentially, it is something that can be ‘traditioned’ (handed down). This, of course, does not mean that if one adheres to this ‘method’ then Yhwh will, by necessity, redeem the ‘child’. The beginning of this wisdom—the very first step—is an acknowledgment of the divine freedom (“fear Yhwh…”). However, it does mean that there is a ‘wisdom’ to Yhwh, there is a way of speaking and teaching that does pass down through the generations what ‘delights’ Yhwh. One final thought (and something we will pick up on in our final reflection on the entire psalm): when Jesus says to allow the ‘children to come to him’ and that ‘unless you have faith like a child’ you cannot inherit the ‘kingdom of god’—are we to understand not that Jesus is interested in ‘toddlers’ but that he is making himself the master, the ‘father’ and true ‘teacher of wisdom’? Is he, as he does with so much else, focusing all of the wisdom tradition on himself and away from any other source? In essence, is he saying that unless you become ‘his child’, you will not come to the ‘good things’ promised in this psalm?
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