Ps. 94.16-17 (the Lazarus event)

Who will rise up / for me / against wrongdoers?
who will take a stand / for me / against evildoers?
Unless Yhwh had been a help / for me
I would soon / have dwelt / in the silence of death. 

At this point the psalm recapitulates, beginning again, as it were, at the beginning but in a different key. The first portion of the psalm was epic in scope. It surveyed the entire scope of being from the creation of the individual, to the power of the nations, to the existence of knowledge and wisdom. It did contemplate victims, but they were objects of contemplation. In this way the first half feels more contemplative, broad in scope, macrocosmic. The ‘speaker’ stands in a position largely outside of the events and looks down on them. This is the position of ‘wisdom’, we might say. By contrast, the focus moves inward, into the life of a victim. We now look out, instead of down onto. We feel this shift in this verse’s question when it is compared to the opening question. There, the question was ‘how long will the wicked celebrate…’. The focus is on the wicked. Here, the question emerges from the victim himself, “Who will rise up for me against the wicked?” The wicked are not the object of the question, the victim is. Every single line will speak from the vantage point of this more personal “I”. 

This change in perspective has important thematic consequences. We can approach this through the use of phrase of “rise up”. In the opening, the psalmist declared to Yhwh to “Rise up O Judge of the earth!”. By contrast, here, the phrase is set within a question, “Who will rise up?” With the narrowing down into the personal “I” we find a narrowing down of vision as well. Whereas in the opening, the psalmist is not only confident of who will rise up, but he is confident that Yhwh will rise up. Here, the psalmist expresses uncertainty about both.  This is the realm of lament. We could say that the first half is the realm of ‘wisdom’ (perhaps). But there is a deeper, more important connection between the two sections. This section of the psalm is set in the past: “Unless Yhwh had…I would have….”. The first section is clearly in the present. So the psalm itself moves backwards, as it were. 

But why? I think the reason is this: the opening, with its more expansive, ‘wisdom’ perspective shows the result of his personal experience in the second half. In other words, what he went through in the past (in this section) gave birth to the confident perspective in the first half. Importantly, then, his ‘personal’ experience of Yhwh’s saving help did not stay personal; rather he incorporated it (along with other convictions and stories about Yhwh) into an expansive, and totalizing, vision of Yhwh’s saving help (his ‘recompense’) for all the righteous. If Yhwh did ‘this for me’, then he will do the same for ‘all the righteous.’ Even more deeply—this personal experience of his became almost a type of ‘sacrament’ of the judgment that eventually would come upon all the wicked and the righteous. It was a type of ‘Lazarus event’, where he was ‘raised up’ in anticipation of the final ‘raising up’. In this way his personal experience is, in a sense, ‘embedded’ within a much larger, and total, experience of all of creation and humanity. This is why, we could even say, that the language mirrors itself. The personal experience ‘mirrors’ or reflects what will happen. The past reveals the future. His lament, back then, can be incorporated into, but dramatically changed, into the wisdom-like command of verse 2.