Ps. 49.7-9 (wealth above ground)

“Surely / a man cannot / redeem himself – and / pay to God / his ransom; - For / the redemption of his life / is costly; - he should leave it alone forever. – for then / he should continue / to live forever – and would not see / the pit!” There are two approaches to wealth and how it relates to death that the psalmist is concerned with destroying: 1) that wealth can provide a ‘forever’ life; 2) that wealth can provide honor within the grave. For one, the concern revolves around wealth’s operation in life, in the other, wealth’s operation in death. For the psalmist, wealth provides no support in either realm as it relates to death. More pointedly--it is not an object of trust in either realm. In this section, he focuses on the first—wealth’s (non)ability to provide a ‘forever’ life. The psalmist begins his deconstruction in the same way as above in his question—by way of a statement that seems obvious, and therefore relativizes what follows. It is an important move, as the immediately preceding line ended with “riches” and this line now proceeds with questions related to “redemption”, an economic term. The first thing to focus on here is the concept not only of ‘redemption’ but of ‘redemption from death’; in the following line it is described as a ‘ransom’, as if his life has been held prisoner by God. By linking these two ideas (redemption/ransom and life/death), we are not introduced to the motivating force of the psalm: death. We now realize that the wicked man’s boasting and trust in wealth is rooted, here, in a false attempt to ‘redeem’ or ‘barter’ their lives. In some manner, the psalmist sees in their boasting a foolish attempt to gain “everlasting” life, a sense that ‘trusting in wealth’ will afford them protection against death. There is a hint, however, in why they may have made this error. Later, the psalmist describes wealth as, after death, “left for others”. I think what we see is that wealth has a sense of permanence to it, and so trusting in it to avoid the ‘impermanence’ of death is not such a strange thing. Furthermore, a term we did not look at was that the wicked’s boast in his wealth was in its ‘magnitude’. It would seem that this term carries with it the sense of ‘imposing honor’, a sense of ‘gravitas’ and authority. Not only, then, does wealth seem to remain but it has, within it, something almost divine, in the sense that it expresses a sense of power and authority (it has, on other words, the force of glory). These realities to wealth are apparent; the psalmist doesn’t question them. However, there is an equally, if not more obvious, reality—death. If wealth had the ability to actually communicate this ‘force of glory’ to the wealthy would not die; they could ‘ransom’ or ‘redeem’ their lives from God. The fact of the matter is that death is indiscriminate; it crushes and devours the person (wealthy or not), thereby revealing that, as much as things on earth can remain in their glory, man cannot. There is, in other words, a gulf between man and his wealth. The wicked do not perceive it; the wise do. Death divides man from himself and, appropriately, robs him of his glory. When it comes to death, wealth is non-transferrable—something, again, which seems at odds with every other movement of wealth and why it is not wholly unreasonable for the wicked to trust. Wealth is ‘ransom’. Wealth is ‘barter’. However, life is God’s. In this statement we find something profound: life, as being ‘surely’ not subject to ‘ransom’, must transcend all of human wealth. As being a unique possession of God, life ‘resides’ in God and is not subject to transaction. Here we come to an initial clue as to the enigma of the psalm: due to the fact that death is not thwarted by wealth, death reveals that life, as uniquely possessed by God, surpasses in value all of human wealth.