Ps.34.7-8(the encampmen of Yhwh's angel)

“This poor man called / and Yhwh heard – and delivered him / from his troubles. – Yhwh’s angel / is encamped – around those / who fear him / to rescue them.”  One thing we will notice throughout the psalm is the steady disappearance of the “I”. Because this is a psalm of instruction and wisdom, the psalmist must universalize and make applicable his experience for others. As we have seen, though, this psalmist makes an interesting first move, though, by grounding his instruction in his own personal experience. The “I” is very prevalent in the opening verses and the psalm begins as many psalms of thanksgiving begin. It quickly shifts, though, as the psalmist attempts to show how his experience, his ‘boasting in Yhwh’, is something that anyone can achieve, so long as they adopt the proper posture—which he is now endeavoring to show. And here is the first step: he designates himself as “this poor man”. This has already been hinted at before when he said the “humble shall hear” his tale and shall rejoice in Yhwh. There, we saw that he was already indicating that the ‘low will be made high’. Here, he explicitly identifies himself with the ‘low’ and the ‘humble’. This will continue to sound throughout the psalm—specifically, this position of humility will be the absolutely crucial ‘first step’. The image will shift between the ‘humble’, the ‘poor man’ and the ‘child’. What we see in all of them, though, and this will become more apparent as we reflect on the ‘fear of Yhwh’, is that this ‘first step’ must always be one of total openness, of having one’s ear’s open and ready; one must, in a sense, be potentiality, a fertile ground waiting for the seed. It is from this place of self-opening that the cry must emerge because it is only from this place that it will be heard. This has an interesting implication for what we have taken to be the guiding theme of the psalm: how one comes to bless and praise Yhwh “at all times”. Clearly, the praise of Yhwh, in this psalm, is rooted in Yhwh’s deliverance and not, as we have stressed, in non-worldly spiritual state of resignation. And yet, the firs step toward this very rich understanding of ‘blessing’ is one of total poverty. Later in the psalm those who “do not lack anything” will be contrasted with “young lions” who can’t find food. But, immediately following this will be the assertion that these people who ‘lack nothing’ are, in fact, children themselves (precisely those who ‘lack’ everything and must be provided for). How can one possibly hold these three aspects together at one time: that blessing comes about due to Yhwh’s real deliverance, that the beginning and remaining stance of the individual is one of ‘poverty’, and that this constitutes the praise “at all times”? The temptation seems to be to always abandon one of these qualities in favor of the other two. Meaning, to either assert that Yhwh’s deliverance is only ‘in heaven’, or that poverty may be the first step but it certainly cannot be one that remains, or that praise is mixed in with periods of deep silence. Furthermore, and perhaps the greatest temptation, is to resolve this on a higher more abstract level. For example to say this: that creation is (meaning, rich), only in so far as it stands open (meaning, poor) to Yhwh. Now, this is certainly true and gets very close to what I think the psalmist is getting at. However, it looses a crucial element of this psalm—that Yhwh’s deliverance is one that is real and bodily. It is, in short, one that must be experienced in time and not ‘spiritually’ in a type of abstract and philosophical resolution. That is the way of stoicism. And it will not be able to account for perhaps the most important verse in the psalm: “He watches over all his bones, not one of them will be broken.” I think this is the ‘difficult’ of the psalmist: how can he possibly convey this, grounding it all in his experience, and make it something applicable to others at the same without it becoming merely a ‘principle’? As we have seen, hope (or, perhaps more accurately, assurance) is the guiding thread in all of this. The ‘shining face’ is one that, when it looks upon Yhwh, is assured of the fact that he will act for the one looking at him. This is the ‘bridge’ that is built for the ‘lowly’. We might call it: patient assurance (I hesitate to use the word ‘hope’ because that seems to imply ‘optimism’, which is not at all what I see at work here). Here, as parallel to the ‘shining face’ verse is ‘Yhwh’s angel’, a term probably borrowed from more militaristic stories of Yhwh’s fighting for Israel (as, for example, at Jericho) but now applied to the defense of the righteous man himself. Whatever the source of the image, here it seems to imply that a battle is, in fact, being waged (as can clearly be seen by the ‘lowly’) and that in the midst of that battle is Yhwh’s angel fighting for the ‘humble’. This is Yhwh’s ‘hearing’ of the cry of the humble man—he sends his angel to defend and protect him. So long as the first step is made (of humble poverty), then the dramatic and real battle lines are actually drawn up. The angel is not, moreover, simply ‘sent by Yhwh’. Rather, it is ‘encamped’ and stationed around the lowly (one wonders, conversely, how effective the angels are when those they are sent to protect keep inviting the enemy into its own camp). I believe we are to hear too another reason for the ‘continuous’ praise—the fact that the angel is not merely ‘sent’ but is as ‘encamped’ as the praise is continuous. This sets the context of this ‘praise’ as an entirely dramatic endeavor and not as a state of being that can be ‘obtained’. This continuous praise is not something that could be captured in a ‘snapshot’ and made eternal—it is continuous only by the continuous step-by-step movement of assured patience that Yhwh will deliver. (Can one help but think here of the ‘angel’ that comes to minister to Jesus in the Garden? Can one help but think here of the fact that John sees in Jesus’ lack of ‘broken bones’ the fulfillment of this psalm and yet, that that is achieved precisely in his death? That it was his ‘poverty’ that ‘raised up the lowly’, not in a ‘state of being’ but in his dramatic enactment of this psalm? It seems that we are to see here the fact that Jesus dramatically fulfilled (or, better, enacted) this psalm to its conclusion and, thereby, inaugurated the ‘new covenant’. But that gets ahead of us…).