Ps. 95.10-11 (entering the Rest)

For forty years I detested / that generation
and I said
“They are a people / who have wayward hearts
and they do not want / to know my ways.”
So I swore / in my anger
they will never come / to my resting place. 

Forty years. Time has been a central concern in this psalm. As we have seen, the ‘today’ of Yhwh, that is currently open to the pilgrims, is not simply a ‘day of the week’, but a sacred day that is ‘time in Yhwh’s presence’. It is, in this sense, a (potentially) perpetual day. That ‘perpetuity’, however, is contingent; it depends on the hearts of Yhwh’s people. To the extent that their hearts are hard to Yhwh, the “Today” is withdrawn. It then becomes “that day” (vs. 8) and, here, a forty year wandering in exile. More important still is the fact that the ‘perpetuity’ of the “Today” is transformed into its opposite—a ‘never’, a perpetual ‘no’. This perpetuity is confirmed by a divine oath sworn in Yhwh’s anger: “they will never come to my resting place”. Time and Presence are here utterly severed, and without the Presence, there is no ‘Today’. It is here where the ‘forty years’ takes on a profound significance. Rather than living within a ‘single day’, the fathers are consigned to years of absence and wandering. In fact, that ‘time’ becomes total—it will consume the entire generation. 

My ways, my resting place. We saw in the opening section how the image of ‘ownership’ deepened from creation to covenant. There, the Yhwh was portrayed as the fashioner, and owner, of all of creation. However, within the covenant, Yhwh become ‘owned’, in the sense of becoming a kin to Israel (“…; I will be your God”). Within this covenantal dynamic there emerged Yhwh’s obligation of shepherding protection and concern. Here, that dynamic is taken up again, but the focus is on Yhwh. Even though they have been shepherded by Yhwh, they have do not want to know “my ways”. In a sense, like some prodigal son, they want the ‘blessings’ of the covenant without its stipulations. But they are not the Lord of the Covenant; Yhwh is. In effect, they have shown not that they do not want to obey Yhwh but that they do not want Yhwh. They have divided want can’t be: Yhwh’s blessing is his presence, and his presence is his blessing. And, by doing so, they become themselves divided—exiled in frustration and torment and forever sworn from the Presence. In a sense, through the ‘wrath-oath’, they become the error of their ways. In this punishment Yhwh reveals that he is One, while they are double, which is the logic of every curse and of Yhwh’s wrath (hell is a type of perpetual division of what should be united). “My ways” cannot be separated from “my rest”. The fathers have recapitulated the fault of Adam and suffered the identical fate (‘reaching out’ for the blessing, without adhering to ‘my ways’ and, consequently, being exiled from both). 

My resting place: Land and Temple. There is a hidden level of meaning to this psalm that is not immediately apparent. Yhwh’s curse on the fathers precluded them from entering the Land; here, they are precluded from “entering my rest”. The listeners of the psalm, however, as pilgrims in the Temple, are not only in the Land, but have entered the Temple itself. They now stand “in Yhwh’s rest”. This needs some unpacking: in creation the Sabbath is the completion of creation and the completion of the Temple. In the ancient world, when a temple was completed the god then came to dwell in it, coming “into his rest”. In Genesis, then, the entire cosmos is understood as ‘cosmic temple’. The Temple itself that would later be constructed in Jerusalem, mirrored the creation story (or, the creation story mirrored the Temple…). It became the ‘navel of the world’, the source of all cosmic blessing because it was Yhwh’s home, his ‘resting place’. It was, in other words, a ‘physical Sabbath’. The Temple and Creation are, in some profoundly mysterious fashion, wed to each other. Now, in this psalm, we find the Land and the Temple mergining together within the pilgrims. Unlike their fathers, they live within a deepened reality of living in the Land and journeying to the Temple. For them, the Temple was the, in a sense, beginning of the Land, and the Land was, in turn, a type of beginning of the Cosmic Temple. Eden was flowing from Zion and the Land. As glorious as this sounds, the psalm ends in warning—for the pilgrims, who now stand “in Yhwh’s rest” in the Temple, they are faced with a warning whose intensity is perhaps more than what their father’s faced. In other words, their fathers were only in the dessert and ‘tested Yhwh’; now, they stand in the Temple-Rest itself. To harden your heart there could lead to a more profound exile than a forty year one. It could lead to one that would persist for hundreds of years, until a new exodus occurred, when someone would come along and, in forty days, reverse the ‘wandering of the fathers’ by refusing to ‘harden his heart’ in the face of temptation.Who would an end to the sworn wrath-oath and inaugurate a new Temple, and a new Rest.