Ps. 44.20-22 (god pitted against himself)

“But / you crushed us / in a place / of jackals – and covered us / with deathly darkness. – If we had forgotten / our God’s name – and spread our hands / in prayer / to a foreign god – would not / God discover this? – For / he knows / the heart’s secrets. – Yet / on account of you / we have been slain / all day long – we have been reckoned / as sheep for slaughter.” These are perhaps some the darkest lines of the psalm as the psalmist recounts God’s ‘crushing’ and ‘covering with deathly darkness’. His imagery of their place of destruction, “a place of jackals”, is reminiscent of the Isaiah’s description of Babylon after its fall. The reversal of fortune between the ‘father’s’ experience of God and their ‘son’s’ is absolute and tremendous. Whereas the fathers were taken and freed from the nations in order to be ‘planted’ by God, their gardener-protector, here the sons are wantonly destroyed. More troubling still is the image of the slaughter of the sheep. No longer are these sheep merely subject to the predations of lions—rather, they are being led to their deaths. Their shepherd (their ‘King’), has not only abandoned them—he has led them to their destruction. And yet, this does not capture the full weight of what is going on in these verses. As we saw in our previous reflection, the curses of Deuteronomy are planning a large role in this section of the psalm. Here, the psalmist concedes the appropriateness of those curses, yet argues that, in their situation, they are entirely unwarranted. Deut. 28 recounts several reasons and effects of the curses: unfaithfulness, forgetting of the name, wavering and the worshipping of foreign gods (among others). Here, the psalmist displays his knowledge of those reasons and recounts them back to God as a question. The way the question is framed, however. The psalmist acknowledges that God would know if they had forgotten his name or if they had ‘spread their hands to a foreign god’. Importantly, he recounts on the most emblematic modes of God’s knowledge, one that seems reserved largely to him: “he knows the heart’s secrets.” The psalmist is accomplishing several things with this question, all of which are aimed at a single goal. First, he shows he is familiar with God’s instruction (he recounts the curses back to him and their causes). Second, he gives a type of glory to God in acknowledging that they would not be able to hide their unfaithfulness from him (thereby showing, again, the he has not forgotten God). Underneath this ‘blanket of death’ Israel and the king still formulate, in some odd way, glory to God. It is almost as if God has pitted himself against himself by delivering to Israel this covenantal assurance of his presence and then acting in a contrary way. Third, the king is asserting his, and Israel’s innocence. All of these are put forward in order to appeal to God’s covenantal fidelity and, thereby, to ignite in him the appropriate responses to the king’s and Israel’s fidelity: covenantal blessing (here, his presence in their midst during battle). We cannot stress this enough though (because it has become such a revelation to me): all of these rhetorical devices, these complex layerings and these incredibly stark pronouncements are not being offered as “pure description” or abstract formulations—they begin and end in the desire to ignite in God his covenantal blessing toward Israel. We might say it this way: one must be very careful in transposing the language of prayer into the language of ‘theology’ (for example, what one would/could understand about ‘causality’ in this psalm). As we have seen throughout, every word of this psalm has been uttered in order to produce an effect. It has a goal in mind and that goal is what must be understood to be the formal principal of the language. In other words, as much as the sons feel themselves removed from their father’s experience of God, their entire goal is to reclaim that reality for themselves.