Ps. 90.14 (the rhythm of days)

Satisfy us / each morning / with your loyal-love
and we will / sing out joyfully / every day.   

These lines are important as the psalmist now ‘descends’ into the substance of his request. And we need to note carefully what he is asking for and how he has arranged this petition. The first word, “satisfy” needs to be understood in light of what the psalmist is asking Yhwh to remedy, which is the ‘toil and trouble’ of verse 10. This is key to realize because there the problem was years of toil and trouble, whereas here the psalmist does not ask for ‘years’ of loyal-love, but only that Yhwh satisfy “us each morning”. (…give us this day our daily bread…). There is a marked contraction of time in this concluding section. Everything is about ‘days’, not ‘years’. This does not stand in contrast only to the second section, but very importantly, to the first section. There, Yhwh’s mastery is described as ‘ever-more’ than years; man’s time is only described in reference to ‘days’ (grass that shoots up in the morning but withers at night). Finally, we need to recall that this verse follows the call for Yhwh to grant us ‘wisdom’ to ‘number our days.’. So what are we to make of this? I think what we see is this: that man is a creature of Yhwh who lives ‘according to days’, and that a wise person is one who looks, every morning, to being ‘satisfied’ with Yhwh’s loyal-love for that day. His focus, as we see in this last section, is rooted in a daily rhythm with Yhwh. It is not measured in ‘years’; Yhwh’s satisfaction, rather, moves according to ‘days’. It is this ‘descent’ into days, that marks a wise man, one who has learned to ‘number his days’. From this ‘narrowing’ (or, contraction), there then emerges a similar ‘contraction’ in praise—“and we will sing out joyfully every day”. So while man’s entire life might be like ‘day-grass’, his ‘days’ can be filled with joy. Notice too how this, in a way, addresses the ‘hidden sins’ of section two. That section was focused on the ‘grand scale’ of man’s ‘life before God’. It looked to the impossible-to-grasp intensity of Yhwh’s perception of sin, and the overwhelming ‘years of toil and trouble’ that result from it. Here, the psalmist shifts his focus to the limited, to that which ‘span of time’ that he inhabits: days. Only the day is something that can be met. And, so it is only the ‘day’ where one will find Yhwh’s ‘loving-kindness’. Day-to-day, so to speak, can Yhwh ‘turn back’, away from his wrath, and toward his loving-kindness.