Ps. 39.9 (the curse of vanity)

“I have become silent / I will not / open my mouth – for you / have acted.” Something has changed in the psalmist. And it is not clear if he has altered his perspective or if we are simply getting the same psalm but recapitulated in a different key. What is clear is that the psalmist has once again fallen into silence. In the first three verses his silence originated with the presence of the wicked (“I will put a muzzle in my mouth as long as the wicked are before me”) and the brevity of his life. Here, by contrast, silence has muzzled the psalmist because Yhwh ‘has acted’. If the first half of the psalm seems like a meditation on Yhwh’s astonishing distance (or utter superiority) to creation, this section seems like a mediation on Yhwh’s oppressive proximity. Whereas before mankind seemed like vapor, here it seems like a special object of Yhwh attentive anger/discipline. Yhwh’s acting, in the next few verses, is understood to be his ‘strokes’, the ‘destruction of his hostility of his hand’, ‘reproofs’ and the ‘melting of all of man’s desires’. If our previous reflections were correct this could, in fact, be the psalmist looking at the world through his ‘other eye’, the one trained on Eden, except now, rather than seeing the vanity of the world as being a result of Yhwh’s almost indifference, it is due to the deadening curse that falls upon all of creation. And, what exactly are we to make of this alleged silence? For, in the very next verse he asks Yhwh to “turn…from me” (as he does in the final verse). The remaining portion of the psalm is a direct address to Yhwh. Perhaps what we find here is the fact that the psalmist is no longer going to ask Yhwh to “explain to him” his lot. No longer is he going to petition Yhwh for explanation but will simply call upon him to turn away his wrath from him. He will, in essence, only ask him to ‘stop the lashing’. This is probably correct, as it is the final concluding line of the psalm. We will explore, perhaps in the concluding verse, an important point being made here about man’s relationship with the created order and with Yhwh.