Ps. 90.13 (turning Yhwh)

Turn back / O Yhwh how long?
change your mind / about your servants. 

At this point we may want to point out an interesting aspect to this psalm that has gone unremarked. The superscription to the psalm says that this is a “Moses-prayer”. And there are, in fact, a lot of resemblances in this psalm to Moses. For example, there are resemblances within the psalm to the ‘song of Moses’. For our purposes as it pertains to this verse, however, there is the interesting observation that only Moses ever tells Yhwh to change his mind. There are many situations where Yhwh does do so, or alludes to it changing, but only Moses actually directs him to do it. (Exodus 32.14). From the mind of wisdom the psalmist now turns to the ‘mind of Yhwh’. The turn is important. The psalmist has requested that Yhwh teach him how to number his days so that he can have a ‘mind of wisdom’. Here, with a type of confidence that is rather shocking, he does not simply request that Yhwh change his mind, but he directs him to do so. But before we proceed further, there is a more pronounced allusion going on here. In the opening section of the psalm Yhwh is described as ‘speaking-man’s-mortality’: “You turn human beings back to dust saying, “Turn back you mortals!”’ (vs. 3). The ‘turn’ there was from life to death. Here, the psalmist tells Yhwh to ‘turn back’ from wrath to blessing. 

One is tempted to say, ‘precisely the opposite’. That, however, is not the case and there is a crucial difference between the two turns. The first turn-toward-death, is not one that the psalmist is attempting to change; he is not asking Yhwh to turn away from man’s ‘ordered mortality’. Again, he is not asking Yhwh to change the quantity of life. Rather, he is asking Yhwh to turn from his ‘wrath’—he is asking Yhwh to change his mind as to the quality of life bestowed on his people.  And I think it is at this point that we can return to the observation regarding the ‘mind of wisdom’ and the ‘mind of Yhwh’. Man can, with fear of Yhwh, acquire (or, be taught) the ‘mind of wisdom. Man’s mind can, in other words, change. Likewise, Yhwh’s ‘mind of wrath’ can change to mercy. This strengthened by another observation: we recall that the source of Yhwh’s wrath is his “placing before his face” “our waywardness and hidden sins”. (vs. 8). Both of these involve ‘acts of the will’: Yhwh’s (he places them before himself) and man’s (his waywardness and sin). The point is that Yhwh can ‘turn from’ what he has put in front of his face, in a similar way that man can ‘learn wisdom’ and turn from folly. In this psalm, this is the ‘drama’, the ‘turning’ of Yhwh and man.