Ps. 89.25 (hands upon waters)

I will put his left hand / on the sea
and his right hand / on the rivers. 

These lines allude to verses 9 and 10: “You are ruler of the surging sea; when its waives rise up, you can still them. You crushed Rahab, she was like a corpse; you scattered your enemies with your powerful arm.” There, as we saw, Yhwh was portrayed as the Divine Warrior King who has complete mastery over the forces of the watery chaos. And, it is not simply ‘mastery’, but creative mastery—the ability to control the forces of chaos is the establishment of Yhwh’s realm, the establishment of right order (righteousness). Which is one reason why the immediately following verses 11 through 12 focus on the possession of heaven and earth and their liturgical establishment toward Yhwh. Here, an initial insight is what it does not say. In line with all of the preceding (and following) words of Yhwh, this is what Yhwh swears he will do. “I will put…”. It does not say, “David will put his hands…”. The point is two-fold. One, it signals that David is not, in himself, a divine figure but a human one empowered by and through Yhwh; he enacts Yhwh’s divine power but only in so far as he is ‘in Yhwh’ (or, Yhwh works ‘in him’). Second, and more importantly perhaps, these are the oath-words of the covenant and, as such, they are Yhwh’s covenant obligation to David. These are Yhwh’s ‘swear-words’ to David. The psalmist in the first portion of the psalm was praising Yhwh’s action over the chaos—here, Yhwh is (being remembered as) swearing this power to David. It is, as such, more in the character of a sacrament: Yhwh’s sworn oath will accomplish what it alleges. We need to again not underestimate the fact that these words were spoken by Yhwh. This is not, here, portrayed as a ‘gift’ of power to David. Rather, it is Yhwh himself who will, through David, enact his “Rahab-power” in placing David’s hands ‘on the waters’. David will rule ‘in Yhwh’ and ‘through Yhwh’ and ‘by Yhwh’. We might say this: that the first portion of the psalm relates a type of heavenly (almost mythic) recounting of Yhwh’s power; the second portion recounts how that heavenly reality covenants with David to be enacted in history. As such, we now ‘see Yhwh’s hands’ in the reign of David, not simply in the heavenly/mythic manner of the first portion, but in history. There can be no graven image of Yhwh; however, in David we do come to see one who is a living image and likeness (this ‘adam’ of Yhwh).