Ps. 71.15b-16 (man's works as foil)

Though I do not know / the scribal art
I would come / with an account / of your mighty deeds
O Lord Yhwh
I would commemorate / your righteousness / yours alone. 

God’s ‘mighty deeds’. Here, the psalmist gathers these and “comes with an account”. In God’s presence (presumably in the Temple) he would “commemorate your righteousness”. For the psalmist, the ‘mighty deeds’ of God—those astonishing displays of his powerful righteousness—are perpetual sources of liturgy. They delight him and he knows that God delights in their ‘commemoration’. He frames this ‘coming’ with a rather odd form of abasement: “Though I do not know the scribal art…”. This is odd in that the psalm is obviously well crafted. Indeed, the psalm itself is a type of ‘commemoration’ brought to God. The point, though, seems to be twofold: 1) he will not allow his perceived inability prevent him from offering praise in the Temple; and 2) it points to many stories of saints who attempt to ‘commemorate’ God and yet also have a very deep sense that all of their works are nothing in comparison to what they are contemplating. (One example: Augustine came upon a boy one time who was filling up thimbles of the ocean and pouring them on the sand.  An angel told him that the little boy would have poured out the ocean long before Augustine would have been able to tell what can be said about God. Another: the end of the gospel of John recounts how all the books of the world would not be able to fill everything about Jesus. All of these display these sense of relativizing one’s own work in order to cast a greater light upon what is the object of that work.) There is a sense here that what is praised can be comprehended but not comprehensively grasped. Every act of praise is, in this psalmist’s mind, already a failure—but in that failure it reveals the ever-greater object it praises. The lower his praise is, the brighter God’s righteousness shines. The point is not the nature of the psalmist and his ‘work’ as such, but rather how they operate as a foil to God’s ‘mighty works’.  In other words, the goal is not to denigrate the ‘works’ of man but to elevate the mighty works of God.